FullStack 2017 in London: details
On July 12-14, the Skills Matter FullStack conference was held in London , which I traveled with my Avito colleagues. This was definitely one of the coolest konfache I visited, but I will not describe my enthusiasm here, but will go through the details that are interesting in my opinion. Perhaps it will be useful to get acquainted with those who organize conferences of this type. If you are interested in how the FullStack guests themselves participate in the distribution of the speakers in the halls, what their breakfast, lunch and dinner look like, what reports I and my colleagues liked the most, and who won the ticket for FullStack 2018, then you are under the cut.
Photo: flickr.com, skillsmatter
The conference was held in London, at CodeNode . You can read about my impressions of the city itself and see the pictures in my blog on Medium .
Organization Features
The stream of reports was divided into two categories: general reports for everyone - at the beginning and at the end of each of the three days of the conference and reports that go to different audiences at the same time - usually 4 pieces.
The first keynote from Douglas Crockford (don't ask about the deuce)
CodeNode has very different rooms. They have the names of keyboard keys: Control (the largest - 300 people), Enter, Alt (doubles with Tab), Shift, Commands, Backspace and Kapslok. But what about the gap, you ask? A space is dedicated ...
It should be noted that even the largest hall could not accommodate all those who came to key reports, so one of the small halls was used at that time for broadcasting. Incidentally, it was also filled to capacity in the end, so some people, like in the main hall, listened to the report while standing, more than 80 people gathered there. This is not surprising, since 450 participants attended the conference:
My guess: most of the participants attended all three days of the conference
How to understand how the reports should be distributed in the halls so that the larger hall is not half empty and the smallest is not an obstacle for everyone to visit the report? To do this, before each session of reports (and there are two of them - before the lunch break and after) there is such a board and after a short time it becomes clear that many people are going to listen to this report, but this one - maybe a couple of dozen. A little more time passes and the voices are erased, and instead they write the name of the hall in which this report is destined to happen:
Voting for reports
As elsewhere, all sorts of recruiting forces are present at the conference, this company even placed a board so that you would paste a vacancy of your company on it:
British recruiting company eSynergy Solutions
Content
As for the content itself, I really liked all the key reports and the presentation of Amy Daniella Dansby , a very interesting girl who is engaged in the creation of all kinds of robots, modeling, printing on a 3D printer and directly programming. On the last day, I went to her workshop, where we tried to make a gizmo in the form of a Twitter bird, in the middle of which was a screen on which tweets from a specific account would be displayed using such a network card.
Amie DD for her favorite job
Unfortunately, this did not work out, because there were too many of us and they didn’t understand the problem of simultaneously connecting a large number of people, but of course this interest in these designers woke me up.
In addition, I really liked the report on the generation of music from Thero Parvianen. I chose some reports like this: google his name and if I saw that he is on youtube, I searched for the following and thus tried to go to a report that may not yet be on the network.
And here are the reports that my colleague Alexander Amosov noted :
Understanding blockchain
What is blockchain and how can technology be applied in projects other than cryptocurrency.
Life of a pixel
How is the rendering in the browser, what is done in order to render the simplest pixel, and how can this process be optimized.
Once Upon a Time on the Web
Stories about where technology could go if things had gone a little different in the past. How some standards were adopted, and what ideas and technologies did not see the light of day.
It is important that immediately after the conference, anyone can see the recordings of reports, for this you just need to register on the Skills Matter, and even without an e-mail confirmation. This is a very nice feature of FullStack.
Food
At FullStack they were very pleasantly fed: breakfast and lunch. There were also evening beers and cider. When we arrived, we were handed a “starter pack”, which, among other useful things and souvenirs, included three cardboard cards that could be exchanged for alcohol in the Spacebar. Which, however, did not stop my colleague and I from having breakfast once, as ordinary Londoners or just tourists can do it sometimes.
Breakfast at Jimmy and the Bee, 135 Goswell Rd
If breakfast looked like picking up a plate of your favorite rolls or fruit from the Spacebar counter, then the dinners were packed and lay in huge heaps on the tables behind it and could ultimately look like this:
Typical breakfast and lunch at FullStack 2017
An unusual point here is that CodeNode does not have a separate dining room.
At the end of the conference, all sorts of cool things were played out and my colleague Vadim Arkadov , who shared the morning meal with me on Thursday, won the trip to FullStack 2018! With which I congratulate him very, very much, because the conference is cool, I don’t know if you understood this from the above details.
Alexander Amosov and I at the presentation of prizes. Photo: flickr.com, skillsmatter
Maybe I will also visit here again, it was cool! I suggest in the comments to this post to discuss the features of specialized conferences that you remember, as well as how to do it.