ngVikings: My Favorite Conference! ️⭐️
By: Juan Herrera
This year I had the privilege of speaking at ngVikings:️ The greatest Angular conference in the Nordics! ❄️ The following journey represents nothing else than my own perception of this magnificent event.
1. All the way from Colombia 🛫
My trip to Finland lasted 24 hours 😅. Yes, a bummer, but on the other hand, the farther you go, the more cultural differences you find!
And yes, I found A LOT of differences. I learned that:
- 🚶 Finnish people really appreciate their personal space (don’t you dare kissing in the chick, trust me).
- 🤓 They are tremendously good at speaking other languages (majority speak Finnish, Swedish and English, but they can go even further).
- 💶 They have to pay a lot of taxes. Taxes which are indeed used for their excellent education, transportation and health system.
2. A short walk to the hotel 😀
I arrived to Finland safe and sound. I took the metro from the Airport to the Railway Central Station (center of Helsinki), which turned out to be a 5-minute walk to the hotel! 💪 (great choice from the organizers!).
Since it was just a 5 minute walk, what could possibly go wrong? 😀
3 minutes later…
💀 I froze to death 💀
Holy moly! It was -12° outside, and it felt like -18°. In Medellín, the average is 24° and I wasn’t wearing any winter real clothes. 🤦
3. A lovely speaker dinner 🥗
The organizing team prepared a dinner before the conference for speakers to feel welcome. It was the best vegan food I’ve ever tried! 🎉 (Thanks Sherry and the team!).
At some point, I started to recognize a lot of people from Twitter and I just said: “Hi? Nice to meet you!”.
Everyone turned out to be really nice and charming. I felt comfortable right away. I couldn’t believe it. It was like being with friends, my Angular friends. 😊
4. Let’s get started! ⭐️
The conference starts with a real viking presentation. These are (some of) the organizers ready to inaugurate the conference.
Here is when you start to see a difference. Every organizer (although I didn’t get to meet them all) come from different backgrounds or countries: Poland (Emilia), Iran (Sherry), Russia (Mikhail), etc.
The diversity of a team is directly proportional to the diversity of their outcome
For example, I wasn’t the only Colombian there 😲. There were two more!
After a while, I got more confident and I started to make some friends here and there:
In general, the conference had great vibe. From organizers to speakers and attendees, everyone was very kind and supportive.
5. Time for the talk! 🕺
After being in such friendly and safe environment it’s much easier to give a talk. To my fortune it was Simona Cotin the person who was introducing the speakers, so right before I got to the podium she really gave me a lot of courage.
I got a lot of positive feedback from the audience and it seems like they really enjoyed it! 😄 In general, I learned 3 things about this kind of conferences:
- Developers definitely want to see advanced topics. Basic or intermediate ones can be found pretty easily on internet with a quick Google search.
- Advanced does not mean more complex presentations. In fact, all presentations should be simple.
The difference between simple and complex is the number of variables involved
3. Therefore, the responsibility of the speaker is to present really advanced topics in increasingly simple ways.
Here is when I’d like to feature the speakers that, in my opinion, achieved a perfect balance: Ward Bell, Maxim (NgWizard) and Wassim
6. Party Time 🎉
Finally, ngVikings has a very nice ending when we decide to head to a Karaoke bar. You can image how excited we were about it!
These are just some of the reasons why I found ngVikings my favorite conference.
