Written by a few codebar attendees who had the pleasure of attending /dev/summer
On 25 June 2016, one of the best events of the year so far took place in Cambridge. I’m talking about the dev summer.
Many of us Londoners woke up very early to take a train to the historical city for a day full of fun and learning, surrounded by smiles and a lot of nice people and great speakers.
The sessions
We had great sessions and speakers, and it was very difficult to choose which talk to see next, since there were four in parallel for every time slot. The topics were very diverse and covered everything from DevOps, Mobile, Web, NoSQL, Cloud, Functional Programming, Startups and much more, all of which were well-presented, engaging and of high quality.
We learnt how to scale our projects, what are the characteristics of a good designed API, how to program a chat bot with Clojure, programming languages like APL (named after the book A Programming Language) which has been with us since the 60’s, and much more.
Many of them included a bit of coding which was fun, because we could then practice what we had just learnt. Even if there was not enough time to finish some of them, the sessions sparked our interest, and we all felt inspired to finish the challenges at home.
The mass pairing session was a great opportunity to mingle with the rest of the participants and meet new like-minded souls, as well as the workshops, who allowed us to explore how others think. It was interesting to see the ideas that others can come up with. I would say that the participants were half the reason that this event was so cool. The speakers had the audience they deserved: engaged and motivated to play and learn.
The venue
We gathered at the Møller Centre, in Cambridge, an amazing place with enormous green fields that made for a great lunch view, as well as post-lunch nap place… wink wink! (please, don’t judge us! we woke up very early!). It was a very sunny and nice day, and we could all do our photosynthesis in the centre’s terrace, except during the 15 minutes when it suddenly started raining peanut-sized hail!
After the talks we had all bonded, and went together on an adventure to see the city. Our idea was initially to rent a boat and maybe go below “The bridge of Sighs” just because the name is so metal. But due to time constraints we ended up in the best restaurant in Cambridge, having the best dinner ever.
Cambridge is seen as a very intellectual place, with a history of academic and research achievement that seems to permeate the walls of the many historic buildings of this university town. Despite that, it felt very comfy, warm and welcoming to visitors.
The food
The food was delicious, we had cold snacks as well as warm and delicious soups and meet. There was also coffee, tea, water and drinks available through out the whole day.
The sponsors
This wouldn’t be possible without amazing sponsors like:
Some of them were present to offer some delicious chocolate and to share a good conversation about what they do, which was very cool.
The organisers
Thanks as well to Software Acumen, the sparkling organisers who generously supported codebar with some free tickets. We are looking forward to their next conference in December, so keep your eyes and ears open.
In summary
To wrap up: great venue and food, nice people, amazing talks about very diverse topics, lovely audience, and we went back home with lots of new ideas and insights! We’ll be looking forward to next edition!
