#Oredev 2014

In case you don’t know it - Oredev is a development conference held each year in Malmö, Sweden. The conference covers pretty much all topics within development - there is java, .net, processes and tools (and more).

oredev 2014 logo

Every year Oredev has an overarching theme. This year the theme was “Love man, love machine”. And by the way this year was also the ten years anniversary for Oredev. The theme logo that you can see on the top of the page - Dan North’s interpretation of the theme logo was as follows: “the people on the left will think I’m into ‘man love’ and the people on the right will think I’m a ‘love machine’.

This brings me to one of the things I really like about Oredev - the team has not been afraid of experimenting. Every year there has been really excellent and interesting keynotes, but also one unpleasant, weird or poorly presented keynote. But this I believe is most likely what you have to accept when you take some risk.

Talks

I’m not going to go too much into the talks. There are just so many. I will how ever tell you about three talks that I found special. Off course there are many more good talks than these 3, but I’ve decided that this post should not be to long hence only a few talks.

The Inspiring

Dan North talked about the moments in our life where a person impacts us in a way that change our perspective on something - often unknowingly - for the rest of our life.

Warning: this talk is not technical at all - it’s about human interaction. But then again as Gerald Weinberg said “It’s always a people problem.”

Watch it - the stories are great and the enthusiasm in Dan’s body language is contagious.

The Interesting

I was really fascinated by Brian Christian’s talk titled “the most human human”. I could say that the talk is about AI (artificial intelligence), but really it is about what it is that makes us appear human (or not) in digital communication.

This talk is funny and it really put words on things I had not before thought about explicitly.

The Funny

James Mickens gave a talk called “Life is Terrible: Let’s Talk About the Web” This talk I didn’t even see myself at the conference. But it was recommended by several people I know who saw it. So since it was already online I watched it and had a good laugh.

Enjoy:

This Years News

This year the sessions were shortened to 40 minutes (previous 50 minutes) which I personally think is a really good idea, because it avoids the brain of middle aged people (like me) bursting into flaming before the last session and it also allows for more mingling since the break were also extended to 20 minutes. However the ‘lunch’ break was just the standard break 20 minutes.I still would prefer that there was a longer break (30 minutes) around noon, but all in all the shorter sessions worked out really well in my opinion.

The previous years I have attended it was often a problem to find a place to sit and eat. As mentioned there was no official lunch break. In stead lunch was served from 12.00 to 14.00 - which stretched over 2 breaks (and 2 sessions). The new way made the queues at the buffet slightly shorter than previous years.

Talks from previous years are online and the time from presentation to internet was amazing. I believe all the talks a already online now (2 days after the conference). That is pretty good.

Me, myself and I

A conference is to me a great to meet fellow developers. It’s not often you will have a better chance of knowing what other developers actually do. If you can I recommend that you go to conference the day before to meet with other ‘preconference attendees’ and hang out.

My conference started already on Tuesday evening (the day before the conference). I met with Rafal, Michal and Michael Tiberg at the ‘Green Lion’. Rafal and Michal seem to be at all the conferences that I attend in Sweden which is quite amazing considering that they are from Lodz. And they also organise the DevDay conference in Krakow. Michael Tiberg is the founder of Foo Cafe.

Later a bunch of the speakers showed up and there was talking and laughing.

During the conference I also met many interesting and nice people - some I already knew - and some I didn’t. For instance John Magnusson whom I have had conversations with on twitter, but never actually met. And John is also a fellow anti-region-legion member.

So what is the anti-region-legion you may ask?! It’s a web site created to help people who get rashes from c# #regions.

I created the website during oredev 2013 so conference friday was actually the 1 year birthday of the anti-region-legion!

Conclusion

All in all Oredev 2014 was a really a good conference. It has great speakers, lots of choices and the magic Oredev atmosphere.