Transform Yourself by Community
In 2016 I was a lucky winner of a GOTO ticket to attend the conference’s three days of high-quality content. It persistently changed my worldview. Back then I was mainly involved in frontend development. I learned what Progressive Web Applications are and I am ever since convinced that this is the future of mobile apps. I recognized the importance of having your own styles over relying on a frontend framework for your production apps. And I also got familiar with microservices for the first time, when I watched people juggling with Docker containers and serverless applications. This is just to name a few things and not to mention the great people whom I met. Namely, because the GOTO conference is "from developers for developers", which is an amazing way to organize a developer conference!
Since then it was my goal to attend another great conference. The topics of GOTO 2018 are just perfect for that endeavor, with my favorite tracks being Applied AI & ML, Effective DevOps / Serverless, Languages for the Future and the other 7 super exciting topic domains…
And the best thing is that the GOTO meet-ups, which take place in between the yearly conferences, also come with quite some transformation potential. Last year I was to a meet-up, that took place at the Berlin Congress Center at Alexanderplatz and starred no one less than Chad Fowler, a superstar developer.
It was a very motivational talk and shaped my understanding of the software development industry. Chad’s story is quite inspirational. It is impressive how he transformed from a “Doom” playing musician to an engineer who is into meetings with Bill Gates.
My recent visit to a GOTO meet-up was as great as my experiences before. I met new people in a nice atmosphere of open-mindedness. Some acquittances from other get-togethers where there as well. And another mind-transforming talk awaited us. It was not very technical but Simon Bostock raised an important question. I believe this question is important for ~everyone~. Basically, it was the following:
Should we persist in perfecting the current state of the art or should we move on and raise awareness about the next significant topic?
This question is so essential because literally everyone, from a junior developer to a senior manager, is a sort of consultant. A junior developer, shapes his future, whether he tries to raise awareness of a new technology or relies on the established standards. A senior manager pushes the next big thing to bring the enterprise to a new level or he goes with the old ways to keep things under control.
However, Simon’s talk was more specific and directed towards Agile and DevOps. According to him, these terms were important buzzwords years ago but are now getting more and more mainstream to the point of being common sense. No one talks about whether they should do something the agile way but most are concerned about how to get it right. Having reached that point, we can move on to push the next exciting topics. For example, not too long ago it was difficult to explain to companies the need and importance of DevOps. Today it is widely accepted, but the pain comes now from momentous subjects, like “continuous control”.
ATTENTION: This, apparently, is such a hot 🔥🔥🔥 buzzword-combination, that there is no Wikipedia page on that one right now. If you wish to dig deeper, here seems to be an interesting place to start: Smoothing the Continuous Delivery Path: Monitoring and Responding | Equal Experts. In a nutshell, it is all about metrics and logging; What and how much do we log?; How do we control and supervise our (distributed | | microservice) systems?
These are great insights into the industry and into current trends if you ask me. So, my final word: Just GOTO amazing, high-quality conferences as well as meet-ups.
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