Once again, I had the luxury of attending Øredev, the big Dev Conference. The one where one gets inspired, informed and entertained. I attended many fantastic sessions, but I will only write about the 3 sessions that really amazed me.
I had a great time, met awesome people and spent most of the conference together with good friends.
1 – It’s always time for tea. By Allan Kelly.
Allan Kelly‘s opening keynote speech was mind blowing. Allan is a gifted performer, a person who knows how to draw your attention and how to transmit his thoughts and ideas to the crowds. In this particular session, Allan shared his insights about how Dev-Teams should organize and co-ordinate their workload so that maximum productivity is achieved while keeping a sense of belonging and control in the team.
“It’s always time for tea” is a citat taken from the beloved book Alice in Wonderland and the connection to the IT community is made by reminding us how it’s always time to build new features, and never time to clear the technical debt.
Allan concluded his talk, leaving us with some great tips:
- Deadlines over estimates. As humans are much better at delivering before a deadline, than at estimating how much time something takes.
- Purpose over plans. As a purpose is something everyone can relate to, while the plan is something someone else decided.
- Small over big. Self-explanatory.
- Simplicity over complexity. Self-explanatory.
2 – From zero to hero in 6 months. By Kjetil Klaussen.
Kjetil is Kontali‘s CTO and he shared with us insights from their leading project, Edge which is a platform that systemizes the world of aquaculture and fisheries, a truly amazing project!
According to Kjetil, the team consisting of himself, developers, data scientists and others was summoned in a short period but was built on a strong ground. They did manage in the end to launch long before the deadline! But how did they do it?
Well, first they had to select their tech-stack, but before doing that, they created exit strategies, ways to replace each platform if it didn’t suit their needs. Thus, they never got stuck with something that helped their purpose.
Secondly, they established a team culture that was blamed on the following core values:
- Always learn, or you will be obsolete.
- Experiment, to learn.
- Praise each other.
- Never blame others.
- Everyone owns the code and everybody can change it.
- Zero tolerance for racism or similar stupidities. Breach of this will get you fired!
This strong cultured alongside with high skills, helped Kontali create thriving software.
3 – Life of Data Scientist. By Jeanine Schoonemann.
A truly inspiring and full of insights talk! Jeanine Schoonemann, Principant Consultant and Data Scientist, explained what a Data Scientist does which apparently is quite different than what most people would expect.
Shortly, a Data Scientist:
- Collects, studies, cleans and creates presentations of the available data.
- Discusses with the client whether the image they get is relatable with the client’s gut instinct. A negative response might indicate that the Data Scientist needs to re-assess.
- Creates the model that would be used to predict the output of similar input.
- Runs and evaluates the model.
- Deploys and monitors the model.
I did find this session very interesting as I myself have been studying Data Science and AI/ML for a while.
Bonus
Jonas Hansson’s (Axis’ CIO) talk about how a cyberattack can be tackled without damaging client’s trust was thrilling. Jessica Andersson explained how their team made their life much easier by replacing some time-consuming tasks with frameworks that guaranted automation. Efthymios Sarmpanis’ Flutter session, gave me ideas for a new hobby project. Last but not least, I am so happy I had the chance to get 2 signed copies of Iris Classon‘s book “The unlikely success of a Copy-Paste Developer”. Both of them will be available to all my colleagues in Malmö & Gotheburg. Yay!!