What sounds interesting at GOTO Copenhagen 2015?

The GOTO Copenhagen conference is still a couple of months away, but I have taken a look at the talks, and spotted a few that I think will be interesting.

Generally speaking, I don't go for technology specific talks - by which I mean that I tend to go for talks about processes (e.g. Agile), concepts (e.g. Big Data) or general architecture, rather than talks about specific languages, or even worse aspects of languages, or about specific programs (e.g. a specific NoSQL database). I don't mind examples at a talk being language specific, but I prefer to be able to apply the concepts from the talk broadly.

Having said that, I am as prone to follow hype as everybody else, so if something new and exciting is presented, I might very well go there, even if it breaks my general preferences for talks.

When you see my list, you'll notice that I haven't filled my schedule. This is quite common for me - I rarely know what I want to see at a conference when I begin my day. Instead I like to hear the talks getting presented in the morning, and then decide what to go to.

If you tend to skip those talk presentations, I think you're really missing out. Some of the most exciting talks I've listened to was not remotely on my schedule until I heard them presented at the start of the day.

So... onwards to my list.

The first talk I noticed was Richard Lander's How to train your corporation to prefer open source.
Microsoft has gone through an incredible change in regards to their stance on Open Source in the last few years, to the degree where now they have Open Sourced most of the .NET platform. This is hardly something one would have guessed a few years ago (even though Microsoft has never been as anti-OS as some people think it has), so I definitely want to hear how this happened.

I don't usually go to IOS-related talks, but I might just go to Jorge D. Ortiz Fuentes' Test Driven Development (by controlling dependencies).
There is no description of the talk, but I am always interested in seeing how people handle dependencies, as I think this is an overlooked problem-area in my software development Projects. Given it is in the IOS and Swift track though, there is a high likelihood of me giving the talk a pass.

Other than the mentioned talks, I will probably spend the rest of the first day listening to talks in either the Game Changing Methods and Practices track or the Fast and Continous Delivery track.

On the second, and final, day of the conference, there are four tracks that all sounds interesting - Reactive Architectures, The State of Data, Front-end: The Bleeding Edge, and Security, Safety and Privacy.

In the first track, Reactive Architectures, I am probably going to Jonas Bonér's The Sadness at the End of the Happy Path and Dave Farley's Reactive Systems: 21st Architecture for 21st Century Systems.
Building resilient and high-performance systems is hard to do, and any ideas on how to do it better, are definitely welcome.

If I am not going to Dave Farley's talk, I will certainly be going to Dave Thomas' The State of Data 3.
I have seen Dave Thomas talk a number of times, and his talks are often quite amusing, but also, more importantly, highly informative. Big data is his field, so I expect the talk to be as great as always.

A talk that sounds interesting, is Phil Winder's Modern Fraud Prevention using Deep Learning, which is at the same time slot as  Andreas Halberg's Secure Coding Patterns - another talk that sounds useful for when developing systems.

As always, when at multi-track conferences, there are often several talks I find interesting at the same time, and which I won't choose between until the last minute. Again, much depends on how the talks are presented, and whether I have heard the speaker before. Usually there are a few speakers that are "must-go-to" for me at the GOTO conferences, but this doesn't seem to be the case at this conference. This is not a bad thing - it gives me the opportunity to get to know new great speakers.

Disclaimer: As a blogger who blogs from the conference, I get a free ticket (like I have done for the last couple of years). The deal comes with no strings attached, except for an agreement on me writing a certain number of blogposts about the conference. The conference has no say over the content of the blogpost.