What I want to see at GOTO Copenhagen 2016

I have taken a look at the schedule of GOTO Copenhagen 2016, trying to figure out what I want to see.

On Monday the 3rd, there are a few interesting tracks for me.

First of all, the description of the Effective Delivery track sounds very intriguing:

Anyone with less than 15 years in IT has never known a time when there wasn’t Scrum or XP, or cross-functional teams or automated tests. They take these things for granted, but they also believe this is the state-of-the-art. Mainstream agile methods are around 20 years old now, and the world has moved on. Planning every 2 weeks makes sense if you have a 3 month release window, but what about if you are releasing every week, or even several times a day? Servers are now an inexpensive commodity, and cloud infrastructure means my expensive data center is now someone else’s pay-per-use model. How are modern practitioners taking advantage of this? What about challenges like large-scale delivery, regulated government departments, or heavyweight corporates? And how can you navigate a career when half the companies on your CV no longer exist? This track passes a critical eye over the current delivery landscape, and hopefully gives you some tools and techniques for navigating the modern world of Effective Delivery.

I like that the track takes for granted that we understand the basics of Agile development, as most of us have worked with it our whole career, and build upon this.

It is highly likely that I will spend most of the day at this track, and there are a couple of talks I definitely won't want to miss. One of these is Jez Humble's When DevOps Meets Regulation: Integrating 'Continuous' with 'Government'. As someone that works primarily with projects related to the public sector, this certainly sounds like something that I can use in my daily work. The same is probably true for Stephen Foreshew-Cain's talk Shepherding Government towards Effective Delivery, but there is no description of this talk yet.

If I am not at the Effective Delivery track, I'll probably be at the Deep Learning Analytics track, where there are several interesting talks, including Michael Hunger's How the Investigative Journalists of the ICIJ used modern Open Source Technologies to unearth the stories of the Panama Papers, where Neo4j will play a major part of the talk. Neo4j is a technology I have followed for years, and I would love to hear about how it was utilized by news organizations, so they could map the data.

On Tuesday the 4th, there is no doubt that I will be spending my day at the Tactics for better Teams track. The track is described thus:

Let's get practical. Often small simple changes have a huge positive effect on team performance and work-life satisfaction. This track presents a set of simple tactics that you can bring home to your team and start using today to make a better team. The track will present both technical ideas like software visualisation as well as more process oriented initiatives.  

The reason I'll be spending my day at this track, is partly that it is the track that is most related to my daily work, but mostly because of the speakers on the track. Of the speakers, the only one I don't know if I have seen before is Corey Haines. The rest of the speakers of the tracks are people that I don't only know I have seen before, but also know that I love - especially Linda Rising, who is a brilliant speaker.

Hadn't that been the case, I'd probably have spent some time on the Microservices track, trying to figure out what all the hype is about.