SpreadIT Talks #1 – Ten o rozwoju doświadczonych programistów i planowaniu kariery

 

#SpreadITTalks to podcast w którym omawiane są tematy poruszane w trakcie konferencji SpreadIT związane z Software Architecture oraz Software Craftsmanship, ale nie tylko. Każdy odcinek porusza jeden główny wątek i ma przede wszystkim na celu wyczerpać temat. Zapraszamy Was do wysłuchania pierwszej części.

Moimi pierwzymi goścmi byli Jarosław Pałka oraz Jakub Marchwicki z którymi rozmawiałem o rozwoju i ciągłej nauce w kontekście osób już doświadczonych w branży IT. Jest to temat, który wielokrotnie pojawia się w dyskusjach, temat na czasie. Jeśli zatem interesuje Cię jak planować swoją ścieżkę kariery, kiedy znajdywać czas na rozwój, jak wybierać kolejne etapy swojego rozwoju i jakich narzędzi używać- to ten podcast jest dla Ciebie.

Główne tematy, które poruszyliśmy:

  1. Doświadczenie w prowadzeniu szkoleń Symentis, a aktualny rynek potrzeb- zarówno od strony firm, jak i od strony uczestników. Czy są jakieś części wspólne?
  2. Organiczny rozwój vs rozwój planowany. Czy warto, a jeśli tak to jak planować swój rozwój, czy może wystarczy mądrze wybierać projekty?
  3. Narzędzia. Jak organizować wiedzę, tips&trics, jak ją zbierać, jak przygotowywać i określać cel,
  4. Czy warto mówić nie projektom / zadaniom? “Tego nie zrobię, nie jestem frontendowcem, nie piszę w typescript, nie jestem od infrastruktury” – czy może jednak próbować. Albo kiedy próbować a kiedy zdecydowanie nie?
  5. Co motywuje moich gości i jakie są rodzaje motywacji popychające nas do rozwoju. Czy kasa może być motywatorem?
  6. Hype driven development vs zbalansowana / naturalna ścieżka rozwoju programisty. Zawsze nowe, czy legacy. Stare, istniejące, rozwijane, czy nowe – ale bez klienta. Jak ułożyć ścieżkę własnej kariery?
  7. SegFault i CoreDump, jak te konferencje mają się do tego wszystkiego? Czy SegFault i CoreDump, które reklamujecie jako konferencje dla doświadczonych są pewną formą wpisania się w ten problem i jedną z technik?
  8. Na sam koniec- jaki aktualnie kierunek obrali moi goście.
SpreadIT Talks #1 – Ten o rozwoju doświadczonych programistów i planowaniu kariery

SpreadIT 2016 – behind the scenes

SpreadIT 2016 is over! I would like to use this occasion to share my thoughts and show how much effort is needed to create free of charge, technical conference with more than 500 attendees. As some people can find parts of this article offending, please note that this is only my point of view.

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A little bit of current situation

First of all, we are not connected to any company and never were. SpreadIT is totally community-based event. For sure, we are very grateful to our sponsors, because without them we would not be able to do this. What we do every year is to create an offer and send it to companies. Every year we have a bit more confidence that we will have enough money. If we’ve possibility to save some extra money – we use it for next year edition (In fact, we need to leave some money as we must print some posters etc. before we receive first money for the next edition).

At the moment conference “management” is just group of 7 people. And these people meet each other regularly on some online meetings. Besides, we have direct communication with each other on slack channel. Everyone of us is 100% responsible for some part of conference which means that it lies on your shoulders to deliver that part of event in time. Everyone can create own “team” to gain some help of course. But… there is not too many people out there who wants to use their free time to write emails, Facebook posts, tweets, do some coding, graphics etc. We are extremely happy when someone new join us (THANK YOU GUYS!).

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365 days of preparations

I wrote above that everyone is responsible for some particular tasks. Let’s look at them more deeply:

  • Program – preparation include asking some well-known trainers with a lot of conference experience. We do this because we want new faces every edition. Then there is C4P – we need to look at them, often there is need to discuss particular topics if they (and creators) meet our requirements. Also we give possibility to do C4P by gold and platinum sponsors. But they also have to meet all requirements, and sometimes it could be somehow challenging- in one hand they are our sponsors, they give us money, in other hand – our priority is to establish best possible conference schedule. You can’t invite too much people, you can’t have less than some reasonable number,
  • Sponsors/Finances – we need money. Also we want to do some networking between our attendees and companies. Every company have some specific “culture”, sometimes there are specific requirements, sometimes there is a lot of questions. Imagine that you have to write a lot of emails to some official company mailing addresses (with a lot of redirections) to get sponsors. This part also include “keeping hand on money”, because at the same time rest of SpreadIT team ask you for money for their targets. That’s on daily basis for head of finance 🙂
  • Promotion – Facebook, Twitter, Media patrons, writing news, checking grammar, trying to post something concrete and interesting from time to time… Then preparing posters, advertisements, graphics, ids, folders, stickers etc.
  • IT – We have our webpage (which is all the time “under development” :)) – sometimes there are problems, we also have new ideas, requirements, needs…
  •  Logistic – Someone have to find place for conference, prepare coffee breaks, check audio, mics, adapters for macs or specific ports, order pizzas (find pizzeria which will do 100 pizzas in reasonable time :)), find places for sponsors on conference day, do “shopping”,
  • Strategic contacts – (new role which was introduced first time this year). Mostly discussions with particular contacts, but we found out that this role takes some responsibility which I described under logistics. Also help with charity action which we do this year
  • General coordinator – during preparation phase coordinator is responsible for conflict solving and scheduling meetings, but most important coordinator remove all roadblocks, so everyone can do “their job”. It seems like the most easy role, but in fact this is very serious, because responsibility that coordinator takes is quite big.

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“Far side” of the conference

There are some behaviors that makes me sad:

In first 3 editions there were some people who just register to receive “free t-shirt”. They come in on registration, get their starter pack and then go back to home. Fortunately this year because of charity action we didn’t have this problem anymore. However, there were two or three comments like “we don’t like SpreadIT anymore because we didn’t receive free t-shirt”. I don’t want that kind of people on SpreadIT. Seriously.

A lot of criticism. I understand comments about cold pizza, about technical problems, about topic which didn’t meet participant requirements. I just don’t understand pure hate because we can’t afford something or we didn’t do something in particular way. Unfortunately we have small budget and this is always choice how to spent money. Don’t understand me wrong- We want all kinds of suggestions- we need to make a lot of hard decisions and its often about spending money this way or another. I just don’t get why some people have such hate for everything which is not “their way”. Live and let live. Really.

Registered people who don’t show up. It’s quite interesting, about 30% of registered people just didn’t show up on conference day. It’s fine if someone have to change their plans, many things can happen, but 150 people? Please understand that we have to prepare every single starter-pack, registration points, order pizza and many more. I know that you don’t pay for it so “just in case I will register”. Please have some empathy. 150 people is about 2hrs of additional work the day before conference for 10 people.

Bright side of the conference

There are still many reasons why we organize SpreadIT. For me it’s about some networking, about challenges, about growing up and, to be honest, about making my dreams come true. It’s a hard work, but on that day when I can stand in front of these 500+ people and say “we did it!”-it’s priceless. Especially if we did it good.

Call4Proposals and Call4Orgs 🙂

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If you would like to speak at SpreadIT 2017 you can either wait for our regular Call4Proposals or contact me at daniel.pokusa(at)spreadit.pl 🙂

If you want to join us, meet cool people and make something great, do not hesitate and contact me or any other of SpreadIT committee member (mails here)!

 See you next year!

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SpreadIT 2016 – behind the scenes

SpreadIT 2016 – What’s new at the 4th edition?

Unfortunately I don’t have too much time recently to write new posts. One of the reasons:  SpreadIT 2016.

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As I’m part of this great community event I want to share some more info about this year edition:

  1. We decided to give up workshops
  2. Finally we change “Soft talks” path name to “Business and Personal Development”
  3. We want SpreadIT 2016 to follow simple rule: bigger, better, louder 🙂
  4. Our Team changed – we’ve got new people on board
  5. We will have more than 20 presentations (5 rooms parallel – look here)
  6. There will be more than 20 great professional speakers (Look here)
  7. We decided that we will no longer include t-shirts within starterpack. We can’t afford t-shirt for every attendee, and don’t want to (as in previous editions) give them only for “first X registered attendees”. So this year if one want to get SpreadIT custom and limited t-shirt then will need to help sick kids. We choose “Mam Marzenie” charity foundation as beneficent of special charity auction (done by “Allegro Charytatywni”). Every penny spend on our auctions goes directly to foundation and will help to make a sick kid dream come true! You can find these auctions here. Its just 15 PLN for each t-shirt (Of course you can be more generous!)
  8. We want to start one new “culture thing” related to SpreadIT. But for now it is a secret 🙂

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Last year there was 500+ attendees, we served more than 70 pizzas (something about 560 large slices :)) and what is important – we are just a bunch of passionate people who want to do something good for local community. SpreadIT is not directly created by any company (of course we are very grateful to our sponsors!).

SpreadIT will be held on Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice on 19.11.2016. For more info visit our site: https://spreadit.pl/en. Remember that our event is totally free. Just go to our site and register for the event (And remember about our cool t-shirts!)

See you there!

SpreadIT 2016 – What’s new at the 4th edition?