A round-up of my GOTO Aarhus experience

Let's pretend for a moment that it is not nearly two weeks since I got back from GOTO Aarhus, and thus this blogpost really should have been written at least a week ago. Let's instead say that I've let my thoughts mature, before writing this blogpost.

No, the truth is that I've been busy both at work and in my private life, so I haven't really had the time to sit down before now, and put my thoughts into a blogpost.

So, what can I say about this years GOTO Aarhus conference? Well, first of all, it was awesome. Great speakers, great people. Just generally great. GOTO Aarhus is definitely still one of my favorite conferences, and they manage to get some amazingly inspiring people to come and talk. Among the speakers at GOTO Aarhus I'd definitely recommend other people to listen to, if they have the chance, are Jez Humble, Dan North, Linda Rising, Michael Nygard, Scott Hanselman, and Martin Fowler. Each of them are not only very knowledgable, but are also great at speaking.

Overall, the tracks were well thought out, and it seemed like there had been some thought given to who was invited (though I think the conference could have benefitted from a bit more focus on diversity, if possible). One thing I did find problematic though, was that the level of the talks were a bit too diverse, even within the same conference track - some were obviously aimed at beginners while others were aimed at more trained people.

That is actually one major criticism I have of the conference: They were not very good at indicating the level of the talk. Often you went to something which seemed interesting, and found out that the level was too basic for you to get anything out of it. This is something that the organizers should aim at improving.

Another point where the conference might be improved would be the agile track. The speakers there were generally great, and the subjects interesting, yet I couldn't help feeling that they were generally covering ground that had been convered many times before. Maybe it is time for an advanced agile track for those of us who have worked with agile for a while? I can't imagine that I am the only one who feels this way.

This was actually something they aimed at with the dev-ops track, and it seemed to me that this was a good approach.

So, what was the highlights for me?

The absolute highly must have been Dirk Duellmann's keynote about Distributed Data and Storage Management for the Large Hadron Collider. It was a facinating insight into problems the rest of us never faces (who else have to take the moon's orbit or the amount of rainfall into account when analyzing data? huge, huge amounts of data).

Other than that, a few other things stood out:

• The Ada Aarhus meeting, where Linda Rising gave a great talk, and Martin Fowler argued that quotas might be the only way to get more women into IT (he finds quotas problematic, but empirical evidence points towards them being the only options).
• Talking with the vendors. A lot of people going to conferences don't speak with vendors, and they are really cheating themselves.
• Listening to Dave Thomas explaining something about the problems he work with to Jim Webber.
• Catching up with friends and former colleagues and meeting new people.
• The noSQL panel, where bloated claims by noSQL vendors were talked about. Panels can be either dead boring or brilliant. Any panel which have both Jim Webber and Martin Fowler on it, is bound to be the latter.

As can probably be gleamed, I had a great time, and I am definitely looking forward to going there again. Still, as I said, I would love for better markings of the levels of the talks, and also for there to be an advanced agile track.

Going to the GOTO Aarhus conference

It turns out that I will be going to the GOTO conference in Aarhus this year in my capacity as a blogger. The kind people arranging the GOTO conference have invited me and some other bloggers to come along, and blog about the conference. I obviously thought this was a great idea, and thankfully my employers at NineConsult thought it was a great idea as well.

Since I am a great believer in full disclosure, I thought I'd better be upfront about this potential bias.

This will be the 3rd time I'm going to the GOTO conference - or rather, the second, as I've been once to GOTO and once to JAOO, which was the old name for the conference.

I can easily say that GOTO is my favorite conference - it has the right mix of talks about methods, technologies, frameworks, and broader developer-related subjects for it to appeal to me. It also has the advantage of not being wed to one specific technology - neither in talks nor in vendors. Another great thing about GOTO, is that the speakers are immensely approachable (to be fair, the same was the case at QCon London).

My blogging from the conference will probably be focused on two things:

1) Diversity,  or rather, how we get more diversity in our field, at our conferences etc. GOTO has been great in trying to increase the diversity both among speakers and among participants, and many of the people helping with GOTO are involved in great groups such as Ada Århus, which is a networking group for women in IT in Århus.
Those posts will probably be crossposted at my other blog, since this is a subject I discuss alot on that blog.

2) The talks. If there are some great or thought-provoking talks, I'll be sure to write about them. I've noticed that there is usually some kind of theme going through the talks (e.g. in QCon London in March, it was the concept of knowing your tradeoffs when making decisions), and I'll certainly make sure to write about any such at GOTO.
If any of the talks relate to error-driven development or how to end it, I'll of course also write something.