This post is a summary of Codemotion Amsterdam Conference 2018. I attended the conference together with colleagues from work. The post delivers information about the conference execution, content and pictures from the event.

Conference

The conference took place in Amsterdam, May 08-09, 2018[1]. This was a two-day event. We had an option of seven parallel tracks both days. Most of the sessions we attended were on a high level of delivery. We could also experience few not so fascinating presentations. The conference is called as a Tech Conference. Most of the topics addressed technology aspects. However, presentations were particularly focused on ideas, not on exact implementation details, APIs or live coding. There were also delivered inspirational talks considering topics about software architecture, software development process and IT business. The overall conference’s execution was solid and consistent. After every session there was at least 20-minute break. We had then an opportunity to have a coffee and eat a cookie. We could also talk to the companies at their conference stands. There were many jobs offers posters around the stands. It looked a bit like a job fair. I’ve not seen such an approach on other conferences before.

What’s Hot and What’s Not

Topics covered:

Game Dev
Big Data
DevOps
Front-end
IoT
Inspirational
AI/Machine Learning
Design/UX
Blockchain
Software Architectures
Cybersecurity
AR/MR/VR
Cloud/Serverless

All the topics from the list above were covered in the seven parallel tracks. Some of the presentations were quite similar in their description on the agenda and in the actual presentation content as well. Serverless had 14 occurrences in the agenda topics. It was the hottest topic. What about microservices? We can find only once microservices word in a session topic. We could find Cloud or Serverless instead. Microservices played important role during the talks about Cloud architectures.

I appreciate the approach of focusing on concepts and ideas rather than on low level technical aspects. We can go to the conclusion that technical sessions were technology agnostic when only possible. It attracts people regardless of exact programming languages preferences.

What we’ve learnt?

The conference was a great opportunity to get into the modern architectures based on microservices and lambda functions. We could listen to the believing that Scrum does not work in real life. There was also the advice that we should focus more on product instead of development process. My approach is to keep distance to all the suggestions and ideas, in particular to the most controversial. All in all, we had a great opportunity to get familiar with the all topics covered on the agenda. If you’re interested in trends and paradigms in technology then the conference is worth to consider.