Conference

I heard of the Lead Dev conference series some time at the end of the last year. There are not many conferences that focus on engineering leaders, most of the technology conferences are focused on specific technologies, methodologies or the business side. It was too late for the Berlin 2019 conference, so I set my eyes on either the London or Berlin 2020 conference. In the end I decided against London, because I wanted to avoid short plane trips as much as possible and staying longer in London also wasn’t an option. Then the COVID-19 thing happened and Lead Dev organisers decided to cancel or postpone some of the 2020 conferences and also offer an online conference: Lead Dev Live 2020. It was a two day conference on April 7 and 8, 2020. Not only was it streamed live, but also completely free. Each day had a single track happening in the afternoon and evening CEST. Streaming was via one long YouTube stream for each day, which was well produced except for some technical issues that were quickly resolved. In parallel to this everybody had access to a Slack community for general chat, topic specific channels and networking. In the end I didn’t watch all of the talks, but most of them. I am just going to list the ones I recommend to watch if you get the chance. Overall I enjoyed the experience, they had some great speakers and some topics I can directly relate to. I noticed that I found the panels more difficult to follow, you get a lot of whitespace between the speakers and there is no consistent story. This makes it easy to lose concentration, check your messages or fetch a new cup of tea. A normal talk with a story and possibly slides can really grab your attention and take you on a journey. One thing that didn’t work at all for me were the Slack channels running in parallel to the talks. The main #leaddev-live channel was very noisy and just flooded with people just saying hello. Any announcements flew past so fast that it was pretty much unusable. Something like a channel only for announcements would have been more useful. You also run very quickly into the usual Slack problem of having too many channels and then too many notifications. I definitely would join another conference by Lead Dev. I might even pay for it. Would I go to a real Lead Dev conference? Yes, but only if it is close to me. I wouldn’t spend the time and money required to travel further than maybe a two hour flight. Day 1 The first day was focused on the effects of COVID-19 on management and remote work. YouTube stream day 1 Leading teams through times of uncertainty and upheaval [Panel] Camille Fournier, Lara Hogan, Rachana Kumar and Christian McCarrick https://youtu.be/yxiDblyYkrI Good insight into how different companies and engineering approach the crisis with some well known guests. Minimum Viable Business Continuity Management Meri Williams https://youtu.be/TCu0gJ_hLq8 Talking about all kinds of aspects of continuity management. From risk assessment, testing, planning and communication. Avoiding the pitfalls of rebuilding software [Panel] Dan Berry, Jai Chakrabarti, Bryan Liles and Erica Stanley https://youtu.be/lsgbGRkysJE Rebuild or refactor in many words. Day 2 The second day was more of a mix of different topics. YouTube stream day 2 Tradeoffs on the road to Observability Liz Fong-Jones https://youtu.be/wkXKbC1GWIM Keep SRE and observability boring. Use the tools that you can easily obtain instead of reinventing the wheel. Designing effective OKRs [Panel] Aniela Crisan, Whitney O'Banner, Antonio Verardi and Heidi Waterhouse https://youtu.be/tBchi7FzRFU Panel about OKRs in general and in tech teams. I really enjoyed Whitney’s take on this. Her talk from 2019 “Setting Objectives and Key Results in your team” is also worth a watch. Another related talk watching from 2018, which was also played during one of the technical glitches in this conference is “Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers” by Melinda Seckington. Apps, stacks, and frameworks: avoiding “Shiny Object” syndrome Angel Rivera https://youtu.be/Zk9Rg0Hswu0 This talk was quite random, but still interesting. He talked about his experience of using a new shiny technology (MongoDB) without having any expertise in this himself or in the team. Risky business: taking risks in production Matthew Hawthorne and Leemay Nassery https://youtu.be/Np8NFmjLn4Q How to manage risk by using a/b tests, metrics, testing, … Building and conveying vision [Panel] Neha Batra, Lawrence Bruhmuller, Kevin Goldsmith and Maria Gutierrez https://youtu.be/I9-_4WYUEhE How to create and convey a message to your team.

This year I managed for the first time to attend Fosdem in Brussels. Since I started to be involved in open source software I always wanted to go, but somehow something else always came up. This time I made an early effort to book my vacation days, hotel and flight. I stayed at the Bedford Hotel & Congress Center, which was the worst part of the whole trip. Just avoid it. I never been to Brussels and for some reason thought it would be a bit of a dump with an European Government ghetto attached. But it is quite the opposite, a very charming town with lots of things to do. I checked out the Atomium, House of European History, Veloseum and the Natural History Museum. There are many statues, parks and gratifies spread around the city to keep you busy. Most of the time I spend walking around the city and checking out the old buildings and cobblestone streets. I obviously also had fries and waffles. Fosdem is a pretty big conference with many parallel tracks. Because it was my first time I took the easiest path and just stayed in the main room where all the keynotes were happening. Some were more attended than others, but the room was always pretty full. Here is a list of the talks I followed, with a link to the official website, some have the videos already attached. FLOSS, the Internet and the Future https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/floss_internet_future/ Blockchain: The Ethical Considerations https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/blockchain_ethics/ Very much a high level talk, but presented very well and entertaining. Mattermost’s Approach to Layered Extensibility in Open Source https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/mattermost_layered_extensibility/ Mostly a commercial for Mattermost, not much about layering. Matrix in the French State What happens when a government adopts open source & open standards for all its internal communication? https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/matrix_french_state/ I never heard of matrix before, it looks like a very interesting project and it is cool to see it adapted by the French government. I tried it out myself, but it is still pretty buggy - at least the registration process. Solid: taking back the Web through decentralization App development as we know it will radically change https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/solid_web_decentralization/ I read about this on lwn.net . To make this useful in any way it has to be widely adopted, which seems unlikely. Like the semantic web it is a developers dream, that always seems to be in the near future. The Current and Future Tor Project Updates from the Tor Project https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/tor_project/ Very cool to see how Tor is moving and adapting to allow more people to enjoy privacy. Certainly got me to install the Tor Browser on my mobile and thinking about running a Tor node. Algorithmic Sovereignty and the state of community-driven open source development Is there a radical interface pedagogy for algorithmic governementality? https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/algorithmic_sovereignty/ Open Source at DuckDuckGo Raising the Standard of Trust Online https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/duckduckgo_open_source/ For me it still has to go a long way before it can replace Google in my daily life. But it is the default in the Tor Browser, so I’ll see how it goes. They also have some additional tools to help with privacy, which looked pretty useful. Crostini: A Linux Desktop on ChromeOS https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/crostini/ An infomercial from Google. Open Source C#, .NET, and Blazor - everywhere PLUS WebAssembly https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/open_source_microsoft/ I planned to use this slot to get some food, but I am glad I didn’t. Very entertaining talk about the portability of C# code all demoed live with use cases in CLI, Web, micro computer and micro controller. I just still have a deep seated mistrust in Microsoft, so I am not ready to look into C#. The Cloud is Just Another Sun https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/ I am worried myself of using cloud services like AWS where I am locked in to some software, but some of the services are just so convenient and cheap that it makes sense for a business. 2019 - Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty_years_unix/ Maddog giving a very long talk about the history of Unix, it made me feel old and young at the same time.

Today I gave a talk at WeLovePHP, which is a quarterly talk and workshop series organized by Softonic in Barcelona. They also do one about JavaScript. I can highly recommend them if you are interested in PHP, JavaScript or related topics. I talked about the processes and tools we are using at Splendia. There are no pictures in the slides … sorry.

I planned to post this a lot earlier, but I wanted to do the presentation at Softonic first and I am also very lazy. My employer was so nice to send a colleague and me to the International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition in Berlin this year. It was a three day conference. There also was one day of workshops, which we skipped. We also skipped most of the keynotes, because most of them were in German and didn’t seem very useful. I concentrated on the topics that interest me most: agile, unit testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment and Symfony/Doctrine. So here goes a quick summary of the stuff I think was good. DevOps fuer PHP by Johann-Peter Hartmann slides A very good introduction on DevOps, mostly introducing lots of tools and how they are used at Mayflower GmbH. I found especially the bits about self service virtual machines and clouds for developers interesting. They are using a combination of puppet, vagrant, fog and eucalytus for this. He also emphasized how important the culture in a company is to make this possible. All of this enables faster development and deployment. I plan to have a separate post about this soonish. 3*PHPUnit by Sebastian Bergmann This could have easily fitted into one talk. And if you have seen any of his talks before you could have skipped most of this too. I liked the quote about removing the release cycle and making it much more fluent, reference to the etsy blog (which is brilliant) and latent code patterns. None of this is new stuff though. MySQL, PHP - The current State by Johannes Schlueter Oracle man. Improvements in MySQL 5.5 and 5.6. memcached interface, which is currently in labs. Some examples of the asynchronous mysqli interface, which sounds really interesting for some use cases. Also information about mysqlnd plugins, especially the mysqlnd_uh one which allows writing these in PHP. All of this is not so useful if you like your ORMs though. Large-Scale Data Processing with Hadoop and PHP by David Zülke slides Highly recommended if you can see this at any conference. Very good presentation, starting with the use cases of sites which are producing lots of data and need to use map reduce to mine it. It continued with a live demo on a laptop, first tuning it until the speed increased by using map reduce and later connecting two laptops to show how well it scales. Next Generation API Documentation by Arne Blankerts I didn’t expect much of this last talk, but it turned out to be pretty good. As PHPDocumentor seems to be pretty dead, there is a need for a new system. CI systems usually also generate the API documentation, so it is important that this is also fast. phpdox seems to solve this, but it is still in an alpha stage so we have to wait and see. Miscellaneous I also saw a lot of other talks, but most of them were either introductions to things like node.js, nginx, JavaScript QA, Doctrine NoSQL and Symfony CMF. None of these contained any new information for me. Sometimes I wonder I should stop reading blogs and twitter two months before a conference, just to make them morei nteresting. You can find more summaries and links to the slides if available here: http://joind.in/event/view/681