Leetspeak 2014

Leetspeak is a really nice one-day, one-track saturday conference arranged by tretton37. 2014 was the 3rd year it was held (with public access anyway). This year’s conference was in Göteborg - the second largest city in Sweden.

I attended the two first years, so I thought it would be natural to attend again even though the location meant that I would either be late or had to sleep in Göteborg the night before the conference. Luckily I decided to go there on Friday, but more on that later.

The two previous years I didn’t notice any drama and this year was no different, except for a little before and unluckily a bit more after the conference.

The drama before was really not much to talk about but it did affect one of the speakers - Barry Dorrans. His plane was initially delayed and later cancelled.

But he did arrive and all was good(-ish).

Preconference

I mentioned earlier that I decided to go the day before the conference started. A good bunch of the attendees/organisers/speakers met up the afternoon mingled. That was a very pleasant experience and I met a bunch of really nice people. It was fun and such a good experience to meet with other passionate devs - even though I was very tired and crashed early.

Talks

There were six talk, which I think is the absolute maximum a conference should allow. Making sure that there is room for breaks and mingling is very important in my opinion. Even though the schedule was tight I think it worked well.

Intro

Martin Mazur from Tretton37 made a short introduction to the conference and talked about learning and why it’s particularly important developers.

Going beyond OWASP

The first speaker was Barry Dorrans who works at Microsoft’s asp.net team on security. Barry’s talk was very entertaining, but still full of very usefull information - even for developers outside the .net stack.

The talk assumed a fair bit of security knowledge on .net, but in turn many interesting topics very covered in hour Barry was on the stage.

Barry showed these three security bulletins:

And several other demos. One of the showed why using partial trust is no longer recommended (see the presentation 1:09).

A couple of tweets related to this talk:

Links:

Testing the essential with Autofixture

Enrico Campidoglio is a good presenter (I know from previous talks I have seen with him) and this is what the attendees said about it:

I missed this talk because I chose to set up my coffee measuring device and followed the “hallway track”.

Making Games with Unity in C#

Adam Buckner did a polished and solid tutorial/product presentation of the Unity game creation tools.

Although the talk technically was good there is an inherent problem with product presentations. The problem is that the main purpose of such a talk is marketing.

In my opinion product talks are best if they lean towards case studies. A product presentation will most likely interest me far less than a talk about how a specific project (game) was created with that product (praticularly if it also shows some limitations of the product).

Building backend services at Spotify

Spotify’s approach development and operation is really interesting. Not only because Niklas Gustavsson) presented really well, but mainly bacause Spotify use techiniques that most companies can learn from.

The talk contained:

A very good talk definately worth seeing. Compliments Fred George microservices talk for last years Oredev.

What is DevOps and how can it help my business succeed?

Paul Stack delivered a very polished talk on devops. If you haven’t heard much about the topic this talk is one to watch.

One point that about a really nice automatic deployment deployment pipeline was summarized by @MrowcaKasia :

The art of destroying software

This talk was not the classical conference talk. Greg Young held a 45 minutes monolog with a clear points (and a few rethorical questions to prove the points).

The ideas were fairly simple

In a conversation after the conference one person mentioned that the reason for optimizing for deletion was fairly clear, but not how.

I quite liked the monolog format, but the above leads me to believe that the talk could be improved, but having the dialog for 1/2 hour and then another 1/2 hour or so on examples of code where ‘deletability’ and composability was achieved.

The crowd said:

My own micro contribution to Leetspeak

In addition to attending I also brought a silly little gadget that was build using the presents from previous Leetspeak conferences - a cup and a raspberry pi - lego and a few electronic components.

I presented this in the breaks and it was a lot of fun. I was happy that so many student came and talked to me. Several of them told me that they used arduinos in their studies.

I’ll probably make a post on the gadget at some point, but here’s a picture of it:

Postconference

After the conference everybody was invited to mingle at a pub. Good idea and I went for a while until I had to leave to catch the train home - tired and happy about what I had learned.

Everybody seemed to have a good time after I left- here one example:

The day after I saw this tweet:

Ouch… That made me angry on Anders’s behalf. And as you may have guessed this was the after conference drama I talked about. I don’t think Anders got his laptop back.

This was my only experience related to the conference that was not good.

All-in-all

Leetspeak is a really good conference that I would highly recommend to anyone developing on the .net stack. The team at Tretton37 does a great job arranging - a big thanks to all of them.

If you couldn’t go or if you would like to see the talks again they are all available here: http://vimeo.com/user14410096/videos (including talks from previous years).

See you next time for Leetspeak 2015!