Platform Conference 2022
We were thrilled to be able to host our annual Platform Conference in Malmö last month — for the 11th time in a row! The Boozt tech team has been growing, which meant this year we welcomed over 200 Boozt developers and engineers to the 2-day conference, packed with inspiring talks and workshops from both fellow Boozt colleagues and external partners.
The annual Platform Conference is an opportunity for our colleagues from the Boozt Platform department to connect with one another, share experiences, and gain insights into the latest technology. Not only does the conference offer time for reflection and outlook on the future, but it is also a fun social event.
“Luckily it’s difficult”
At Boozt we pride ourselves on the fact that we work with complex, difficult, and challenging tech. Why? Because if it’s difficult that means it will set us apart from our competitors. We also see that working with difficult tasks not only pushes us to innovate but also makes us better. Complexity and doing complicated things are part of our every day at Boozt. Rather than seeing that as something problematic, we see it as an asset. With this theme in mind, Boozt CTO, Jesper Brøndum, held a keynote speech to kick off the Platform Conference 2022.
External & internal deep dives into what goes on behind the scenes
The first day of the platform conference included talks from our external tech partners. We had visitors from Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Gitlab, Adyen, and Slack, who gave insights into their business. It is always great to see the support from the enterprise partners we are working with, and to have them recognize us as one of the big players in the Nordics and Europe.
We also have a strong culture of internal collaboration and knowledge sharing at Boozt, so the second day of the conference included workshops held by our colleagues, where developers and engineers got a chance to not only hear what other teams and branches within Platform are working on, but also get insights into topics like “work-life balance”.
Following two full days of inspirational talks and workshops, the conference ended with social events where everyone could bond and create fun memories together.
Biggest takeaways
To round things off, a few Boozt employees shared their favourite aspects from this year’s conference
Andrejs Muzikovs, Staff Engineer
One of the biggest learnings is that it doesn’t matter how much structure you put into an organisation or how big the organisation is, you should make sure to listen to every single person since you can never know who will come up with the next great idea. This was the case with Cloudflare. Although they have an R&D department where they even employ some people with PhD’s to work on problems, they still have their engineers suggest ideas for new products that later come to life.
This is similar to how we have it at Boozt — everyone is very welcome to come up with ideas and improvements. Being in the engineering branch of the Platform team, I really enjoyed the first day of the conference. It was inspirational to get an insight into the inner workings of the companies that are much bigger than Boozt, especially since we are using their services daily. There are a lot of problems and situations that you can prepare for by just self-learning, but it is very hard to prepare for growth. You often end up in a situation where you outgrow your current architecture and need to quickly find some solution for it, so it was nice to learn from the companies that have already gone through this.
Raymond Benc, Web Development Manager
One of the key learnings from the conference was Slack’s very open and in-depth talk about some of the struggles they had with MySQL and how they solved it using Vitess as it relates to many of the things we may face and at times face with our current tech stack. I enjoyed how they took us through their improvements over time and focused on automizing the overall process of creating and maintaining database shards. I also enjoy the social aspect of the Platform Conference. It’s a great group of friends and family that come together, talk about technology, and have a BBQ at the end of the day.
Mattia Ziulu, Senior Software Developer
The external talks were outstanding this time around. For me, the dual aspect of building software and architecture “in house” (as exemplified by Ayden) compared to building on top of existing. The key for me was that we at Boozt have always preferred the first one, and our success is often accredited to this, but we are also slowly moving towards being more open to rely on third party solutions to problems that we might not want to deal with, problems that come in when we grow. Insight into the two different perspectives was very interesting to me. I was also thrilled to get a chance to see what colleagues from other departments, that I’m not usually exposed to, are doing.
Jennie Rowe Jersling, Front-end Web Developer
My favorite thing about the conference is always the social aspect. We usually go out for dinner in the evening on one of the conference days. Now because we have grown so much, we had a BBQ instead. It’s fun to socialise in a different way than we do in the office and get to know other Platformers that you might not talk to otherwise.
Onur Degerli, Back-end Developer
It was a great opportunity to hear other developers’ opinions about solutions that we encounter in our daily work regardless of the team they work in. Besides that, we had a chance to see the kind of technologies that are being used for the different Boozt services.
I held a talk about Automated General Vehicles that we have been integrating into our warehouse operations. I got so many questions about it, and it gave me another perspective on the issues that we have been working on. Also, I find workshops incredibly useful due to the brainstorming . We come together to find solutions to our existing work-related problems and obstacles.
The two conference days passed in a flash, but the good memories will remain. We are already looking forward to the Platform Conference 2023.
