Polymoments, volume no. 2

5 min readJul 7, 2016

So after two years, I am back with the summary of how I spent three days in the very beautiful Poznań.

Yes you are guessing right, I am back to write down my experience from this years' Polyconf. And men it was a ride. How did it started actually? I picked up my good friend Michal Valášek in my hometown, and we went for the road. We talked about work, the state of the world and the polish highways. I really think, that it is a good part of the conference for me, as you can touch many things in 5+ hours of car drive. After the accommodation in the hostel, we went for a little chit chat on the first warm-up party. We've met some people and were talking some programmers stuff. You probably know the drill.

First day of the conference has started with one of the first worlds' worst problems: I have lost my wallet with almost no money, ID, drivers license and payment cards at the Kebab. Or in the moment, I still had hope, that I just parted with it for a short time.

But without big hesitation, we went to a venue and started our thing. For me it was organization of the workshop. I will not go into details, but I guess it was good and inspiring for the folks, who gathered in the morning of the first day.

Selected talks of the first day (in order of interest for me):

Becoming a Polyglot — APIs in 4 Languages by Kirsten Hunter

Mature talk about mature languages by mature woman. Great style and points about all 4 languages by someone, who really understands API. Delight.

Introducing clojure.spec by Arne Brasseur

Clojure.spec is young and hot in Clojure world, and I am trying to know as much as possible about it. Arne did great intro into it and have some good points, I did not considered before.

Elm for JavaScript Developers by Jack Franklin

I have seen Jack talking two years ago on Polyconf about JS. It was good, but about something I did not appreciated that much. Not this year, I have Elm in my spotlight for quite a long time, and Jack had his say, which I understood and liked. And great style and fun.

Dynamics of change: why reactivity matters by Andre Staltz

I have seen Andre talking for the first time, but I heard a lot about it before. And was not disappointed, through many cycles we got to the conclusion: Cycle.js ;). Again great style.

The soccer party after first day was fun, crowdy and sad at the end.

Selected talks of the second days (same order):

The Seif Project by Douglas Crockford

This is The Talk of the conference for me. Not only, that it was done by The Legend:

We use the JSON for communication, well because I like it

Not only it was funny as hell:

At the beginning computers security was provided by soldiers.

Not only it was on point:

JavaScript was designed in ten days, and it turned out that many mistakes can be done in ten days.
Crappy Style Sheets.

But it was about one of the biggest issues today's web have: security. And Douglas showed, that not only he can see the threats, but he has solutions for them. I do not want to spoil the conclusion, go and watch the talk, after it becomes available.

Why System Programming is for Everyone by Julia Evans

The second best talk of the conference. And for sure the most dynamic, beautiful and convincing. Great, wizard inspired story, backend by superb demos. Julia also showed great reaction at the end of the talk I will describe next.

The Linguistic Relativity of Programming Languages by Jenna Zeigen

This is the kind of talks I like the most on the Polyconf, philosophical deep thoughts not necessarily only about programming. Little bit of nervosity have not overshadowed the appearance. Kudos!

Pick Your Battles by Zef Hemel

Talk about early adopting, and how bad it can be for your startup. I am actually on the other side of the barricade on this issue, but fun and experience is always convincing for me.

OOP -> FP by Julia Gao

Super 101 on FP, highly recomended.

The bowling party was great again, even though I do not play it ;). What I like is meeting new smart people and those are galore on Polyconf.

Selected talks of the third day (same order):

It must be said, that we had to leave at 3pm, and have not seen last four talks.

Exploring The Universal Library by Szymon Kaliski

Similar to Jenna's, this talk was less about the programming and more about the space, we are living in. And I really like creative people.

Language-agnostic static analysis with abstract ASTs by Marcin Wyszyński

Really teoretically deep talk with this dry sense of humour, only programmers can understand:

I won't be making cheap jokes about PHP, it will be like flapping dead horse. Well it seems I just made cheap joke.

And I recognized Swift ;).

Datomic in production, 1 year in by Hans Hübner

I dreamed about using Datomic for my project for as long as I started with Clojure programming. And this talk was what gets your feets back on the ground. Thank you Hans.