berlin_#scaladays && the psychopath_test :)

About the conference

Few months ago I got a tip about another volunteer opportunity, that sounded nice so I opened a new tab and started type #scaladays dot org => I found the official website and fell in love. Of course I registered immediately, because the organizers provided limited amount of volunteer tickets with these conditions:

“All Crew Volunteers will be required to work on Wednesday June 15th from 12:00 PM — 6:30 PM as well as another shift of four hours on Thursday June 16th or Friday June 17th. In return for helping with the conference, Crew Volunteers will have free access to the conference and all social events.”

Okey, offer is fair enough, I was excited and started to prep for the journey to Berlin. I have never been there, so wrote some friends there and some new ones to set up meetings as well as office visits. Even though I am not really familiar with the Scala world, I thought that this conference will be a good start. Line-up looks great with four different tracks, separated by experiences, beginner, intermediate and advanced. After I booked my flights, accommodation, insurances I started to get ready for the talks, because I always want to maximize the conferences as much I can. Sit in the first rows, take notes and photos, collecting swags, use social media and follow up speakers after the events.

I spent five days in Berlin, and met several guys, they shared their stories and experiences about the local life in terms of the job opportunities or any other aspects of Berlin. Also, I had some self organized sightseeing tours even though the rainy weather. After my first two days conference was launched with the formal check-in and a special round table conversations. On Thursday we start with the four different tracks and finished on the Friday in the early evening. I attended talks like:

• Introducing the Scala Center by Heather Miller
• Monitoring Reactive Applications by Henrik Engström & Duncan DeVore
• Machine Learning with Scala on Spark by Jose Quesada
• Using Actors for the Internet of (Lego) Trains by Johan Janssen & Mark van Cuijk
• Beyond the Buzzword: A Reactive Web Application in Practice by Manuel Bernhardt
• Being Creative with Genetic Algorithms and Typeclasses by Noel Markham
• Postcapitalism by Jamie Dobson
• Beyond Shuffling: Scaling Apache Spark by Holden Karau
• ……and you find the official photo gallery here :)

I learnt a lot in general, about Scala, frameworks (Play, Akka, Lagom), differences between OOP & FP & reactive programming principles. Also participated some talks regarding Spark, ML, culture as well as a few deeper technical presentations. Be a volunteer and support teams is awesome because you can travel, meet with new guys and learn a lot. So feel free to attend and enjoy this kind of adventures. Special thanks for Dajana, she is the main organizer and I hope we meet soon :)

About my “Like a psychopath” challenge

My friend sent me this article a few weeks ago, and I tried to jump all of the challenges in Berlin like:

• The first challenge, was to high five a stranger

Achieve this goal was hard, because I am a so called introvert guy, but I recorded two attempts, with strange results, but I am happy to did it.

• The second challenge, watch to the UEFA Euro 2016 match and have a dinner

Now, European football championship is rocking so I checked the schedule, found a table somewhere and watched the game even though I am not a football fan. Indeed, this was the easiest exercise with some constraints, like stop checking my notifications on my phone, or reading Twitter…

• The third challenge, go to a museum

When I was a child, I saw the Jurassic Park and probably watching it in the TV every year at least once per a year. So, I went to Museum für Naturkunde and took some pictures about some dinosaurs and checked the T-Rex, Tristan as well.

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