Friday, May 17, 2013

Atmosphere 2013

Earlier this week  I had a great pleasure to participate in the first edition of Atmosphere - an e-commerce industry conference. I must admit I went there full of doubts. Can the  first edition of such an anonymous event be a success, especially that it was a payed conference? Fortunately it can! When I arrived I saw the whole place  buzzing with people talking about all the cool stuff. 
It all started with refreshing keynote from Brian McCallister. It was interesting to listen that all startups travel the same evolutionary path. The refreshing part was hearing that "this is OK". That those technical debts we make at the start of a project are caused by good intentions and important reasons. How to mix this general truth with rules of software craftsmanship is yet to be discovered for me. 
"There are two types of startups. Those successful and a little ashamed of their code and those who're out of business"
Continuing tale of the startups Paul Hammond spoke about choices you can make to not run out of money during the first months of the project. That was a really great talk divided into few simple lessons.
My colleagues from Toruń working on Allegro Charity Platform (running for example wosp.allegro.pl) gave a great talk about technology and architecture they've used to handle the traffic of latest WOSP final. 
Talking about handling Allegro traffic our Poznań division did a great job sharing some of our experiences in that field fallowed by lecture of both: technologies and methodologies we use to handle such a high traffic with good site responsiveness.
There were plenty more interesting presentations there but those above are my personal favorites. I'm really looking forward to publication of the videos to watch the ones I missed from other tracks.
Personally I had an honor to give a speech about choosing the programming language for a project covering JAVA, PHP, Erlang and Perl as main characters. I would like to thank all the attendees for being there and I hope you had a good time taking part in this trip through magical lands of programming languages.
The conference was a blast. On top of great speakers, delicious food and wild party; all of the attendees left with their own raspberry pi  as a gadget. I have some plans how to use mine and I will share it with you if I succeed.
I'm looking forward for next years edition. Hope to meet you there too!

Photos courtesy of Atmosphere Facebook page.

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