Codemotion Berlin 2016 - Day 2

Keynote ★★★★★

Costs of the Cult of Expertise by Jessica Rose was a great Keynote. Great talk about skill, expertieese, hiring, firing, self perception and how awfull everything is. If you just watch one video from this conference, watch this.

Talks

“Microservices Minus the Hype: How to Build and Why” by Mark Heckler ★★☆☆☆

As the title says, no hype and also felt a bit like without passion and a bit booring, catched my self watching more into imgur than actually listening to the talk

What did AlphaGo do to beat the strongest human Go player? ★★★★☆

An entertaining talk about topics like neural networks, monte carlo method, multi armed bandits and Go. Perfect mix of interesting stuf and horrible formulas.

“10 misconceptions you should know about to take better decisions” by Lea Böhm ★★★☆☆

A short talk about all the problems you need to be aware of to escape your filter buble and see you ideas/projects with a critical view.

She talked about things like cognitive dissonance, authority bias, halo effect and the hedonic treadmil.

“Navigating All the Knowledge” by James Weaver ★★★☆☆

A talk that, in my oppinion, started a bit slow but got pretty interesting when he came to the demo part of his app to display all the relations of Wikipedia witht he help of Wikidata and a graph database.

“Embedded Rust on IoT devices” by Lars Gregori ★☆☆☆☆

This talk hit me hard, and not in a good way. I already was a bit sleepy and the slow talking with a lot of pauses where not making it better. I was interested in the topic itself, but the presentation was killing it.

Felt unstructured and as it would be the first time presented.

“Programming Pearls of Go - How to write fast, beautiful Go code” by Aaron Schlesinger ★★★☆☆

After the rust talk i was not r eally able tofollow this talk completely and i think this is also i am more of a Go newbie but the presented patterns looked interesting.

“Developing apps for developing countries” by Natalie Pistunovich ★★★★☆

Really interesting talk about how the internet and app market in developing countries, mostly afrika, work. Lots of information you need to know if you want to create apps for this area. Maybe obvious things like, data is expensiv or with iOS you may only target western people that live there, but also things like the official language of a country may not be the language you need to port your app to, and speaking of languages that there are about 2000 spoken languages on the african continent.

The end

It was a bit sad that most of the sponsors where already tearing down while there where still 2 sessions and where already gone after the last talk, no real “get to gether” after the last session. It also felt already very empty at the last talk. Maybe everyone needed to get their flight but this wasnt really helping the conference feeling.

What do i think about Codemotion Berlin 2016?!

A nice conference, that felt small even though there where 4 tracks, i think i will go again next year.