The very first internal conference of Gofore – titled, of course, Gonference – was held on Ascension Day (10th of May). In this blog post, I’ll introduce how the Dev track of the conference looked along with the videos of some of the talks. I had the pleasure to curate and host the Dev track. If you want to read more about the Gonference in general, you can read what one of the main organizers, Jarkko Koistinaho, had to say about it here.
Dev track scope
One of the hardest parts of organizing the Gonference was the selection of track themes and scoping the presentations. The organizing committee received so many excellent topics within a wide range of areas that division was not an easy task. After a lot of pondering the results were tracks named Design & Leadership, DevOps and Dev. The split between Dev and DevOps was still a little obscure but the organizing committee drew an arbitrary line between the tracks. Based on the feedback the line seemed to work quite well.
Presentations
Even though the idea was initially not to publish any presentations outside of Gofore, it was soon clear that the quality of talks was way too high to be kept within the company. Thus, after the Gonference we decided to publish some appetizers for you to enjoy.
Presentation slots were a 20-minute presentation followed by 5 minutes of questions and discussion. Though, two presentations on this track were a little bit more in-depth so they were given double the time for both sections. In total there were four shorter and two longer presentations. Out of the six presentations we have the pleasure to share three with you.
The very first talk of the Gonference’s dev track was given by one of Gofore’s top software architects, Jari Timonen. Knowing the person it was not surprising that the topic was related to the Java EE world with the title being ”Taming a dinosaur: Introduction to Jakarta EE (formerly Java EE)”. Especially for us young hipster programmers, Jari’s presentations around the topic are really eye-opening and educational. You can see the presentation below.
One of the more in-depth presentations was given by Teemu Erkkola on a topic we’ve heard discussed so many times within the company – Rust. Titled ”A tour of Rust”. The presentation gives an excellent, hands-on introduction to what Rust looks like and why it is such a compelling choice nowadays for multiple purposes. It also features an enormous amount of live coding for those who especially enjoy that. Check it out below!
While many of the talks were quite heavy on technical details, Arno’s presentation on ”Exploring the possibilities of virtual environments” gave a nice balance on the day by talking about the possibilities of Virtual Reality while demonstrating what we have already done on the field. The presentation also contains a live demo on how to get started with some VR stuff without prior knowledge. Here it is.
Conclusions
In general, the Gonference was a great success and the feedback gathered was really positive. There were also many great improvement ideas for the next time. And the next time will most probably be happening. This kind of event is an excellent way to balance the ratio of project work and personal development by providing high-quality speeches extremely related to the topics we all at Gofore wrestle in our day to day work.
All our videos published on our YouTube channel can be found here
