Posts about Conferences, User Group Events, and other gatherings.
Last Saturday Mr Stephen Chin came to Sevilla on his crazy European tour to show us Lego and Robots. This was our largest turnout yet for a Java User Group event in Sevilla, which surprised me as it was on a weekend, and the weekend before the spectacle that is Semana Santa in Sevilla.
Last night the Sevilla MUG had our March Madness event. This was our largest event yet, with 36 people signed up. Although the aim of March Madness is to have a MongoDB Engineer at all the user groups this month, that’s not such a big deal for us as I live here, so this was … Read more
Wow. My 4th QCon London. That’s not bad. And every time, it’s a different experience (if you must, see my blogs for 2013, 2012, and even 2007 (part 1 & part 2 – how cute was I? "agile seems like a jolly good idea; automated testing appears to be important")). I can’t even tell you … Read more
I’m on a plane (there’s a surprise) on my way back from The Joy of Coding. It’s the title that attracted me to this conference, and it was a great little one day event with awesome people like Dan North, Erik Meijer and Dick Wall presenting. What I liked about the themes is they were broadly technology agnostic, pulling back to a level which made me remember why I’m a developer. It inspired me to do more research and more thinking, and less panicking and trying to write code. That might seem odd, as someone who goes to as many conferences as I do should get loads more research and thinking time than most developers living under the whip, but I seem to spend so much time bouncing from thing to thing I don’t get space to just sit and think, or to read things in any depth.
So, FOSDEM.
I've heard great things about this conference, so I was pretty exited to go
Now I know people talk about impostor syndrome whenever they mention the woeful lack of diversity at tech conferences. Interestingly, I felt like an impostor at FOSDEM - not because I'm a woman (there were quite a few techy women around at FOSDEM, more than I expected) but because I'm not an open source person.
Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Sevilla MongoDN User Group. An event organised with just over 48 hours notice, in a city where I don't speak the language and where even my best-connected contacts aren't sure they're fully plugged in to the tech scene.
December disappeared in a rush of vacation and a fleeting tour of Australia. It's hard to believe that it's the eve of Christmas Eve already, it's almost impossible to feel Christmassy when you're getting sunburnt on a boat and seeing people in swim-suits wearing santa hats. A mid-winter festival (complete with trees and fake snow) just feels very odd in summer.
Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting the very first session for vJUG, a new virtual Java User Group that allows us to span geographies when sharing talks and stories. I'm really interested in the vJUG idea, especially now I'm not in London - if we can find good ways to share knowledge without having to travel, that will help us reach people who don't normally go to conferences or don't have a local user group to go to. Not to mention cutting travel costs and saving the environment.
