Our recap of Pozitive Technologies 2019
Pozitive technologies is a new initiative co-organized by more than 10 IT companies from Poznań in cooperation with the city of Poznań. It does not focus on any specific branch of knowledge or industry. Instead, it offers a variety of topics, a high-level look at what best Poznań has to offer in terms of information technology. It’s a showcase of Poznań’s high-tech ecosystem and a step towards creating a future platform for exchanging knowledge and best practices. Poznań has all the ingredients and appeals to compete with the biggest cities in Poland and beyond to attract the best talents in IT.
The conference was the first stage of a long-term plan, and we’re taking a look back on it to revisit and review it. So if you hadn’t had a chance to participate in it or just want to refresh your memories–read on.
Hello World!
The conference took place in the Poznan Congress Center, located at MTP Poznań Expo. I had an opportunity to visit this venue before on the occasion of another conference and a wonderful Epic Game Music concert, which took place in the great Earth Hall just above the mentioned conference center. So I’ve already had a good idea of what to expect from this place, and it’s nothing less than the highest standard of conference venues.
After the registration, which was surprisingly fast and efficient, I had my first “aww” moment. Organizers decided to do something new and different, and instead of presenting participants with a t-shirt or a bag, they gave everybody… a pair of super colorful socks. And that was awesome.
The design of the main hall made a very good impression on me. It was spacious but still seemed very cozy. There were many acoustic screens in various forms and colors. It was both practical (less noise/echo/reverb, which can be tiresome after 8 hours) and esthetical. It all felt autumnal and corresponded with the season and the weather outside. I don’t know if it was deliberate, but it caught my eye.
If you needed to find some even more quiet place, there were standalone phone booths, which I wish to see at every event of this type and size.
Worth to mention–the coffee break. It wasn’t overwhelmed by sweets, which are tempting in the morning but make you sleepy in the middle of the second presentation. Instead, it was filled with sandwiches. I’ve seen it at a few other conferences already, and I must say it’s a very good trend. It seems to me that many organizers have finally realized that the participants need some actual fuel to keep their minds absorbent for 8 hours straight. Cause if they don’t, they simply miss a lot of content. Speaking of which, let’s get to the point. I asked a few of my colleagues to share their impressions about some of the presentations we attended. Without further ado, here they are.
Performance as quality
Jarosław Pałka, Performance Engineer at Neo4j
During his keynote on performance, Jarek first talked about ignorance in the IT industry. We tolerate the fact that our solutions could be 10, 100, or even 1000 times faster or consuming fewer resources… and nobody cares. We’re used to hearing that the developer’s time is expensive and hardware is cheap, so we can always add more hardware. Again… nobody cares. How many times do you hear „premature optimization is the root of all evil”? It’s one of the most common excuses to not think about performance. And granted, optimization should be covered after creating a good code design, even as the last thing you do. But it should be done.
In the second part of the speech, Jarek gave some advice on how to deal with performance. We should prepare performance metrics (remember the Pareto principle–80% of requests are served by only 20% of code–focus on what matters) and check them regularly, making performance improvements where it makes sense (the biggest return on investment). But there is one more challenge to achieve it: you need the right people to cover that subject (according to Jarek: a mix of DevOps, Developer, and Tester). Jarek gave us a few more specific instructions on how to deal with performance–I recommend you check the presentation on YouTube (EN).
Identifying Hate, Abuse and Misinformation Online
Katharine Jarmul, Privacy Advocate
Katharine Jarmul gave a keynote speech about hate, abuse, and misinformation online. She has depicted a sour landscape in which technologies play mostly the villain part, although she also offered insights about the role technologies can play to solve, at least partially, some issues. Katharine has provided a great overview of the current state of the world with regard to fake news and biased models, assuming almost no former knowledge about these topics. I have found her talk fantastically well structured, prepared and delivered: the effort she put in picking examples from Poland was very well-received by the audience. My only slight regret is that she didn’t go into more technical details about existing solutions to these important problems. Overall, I have enjoyed her talk and I recommend watching it on Youtube (EN).
Let’s play!
Adam Dudczak, Search Team Manager at Allegro
Adam showed us how to build, evaluate and improve machine learning models, based on the example of a simple game. Adam also emphasized the importance of picking the right metrics for the task. I really liked how he showed, step by step, what to do in order to get a better model. After each step, I wondered what the next thing should be. The pace of the presentation was adjusted to understand everything but not to get bored. I was thrilled to hear about every next model: will it be better than the former one, or will it even be able to outperform Adam? I liked how he presented his reasoning after each iteration of the model. I think it was a great lecture, both for people with hands-on experience with machine learning and for beginners alike. You can watch it here (PL)
Application security survival kit
Marek Puchalski, Senior Managing Software Architect at Capgemini
Marek Puchalski touched on a difficult, yet very important subject, which is application security. The presentation was divided into two parts: a non-technical one, during which Marek presented a very interesting take on risk management in projects, but also in our personal life. The second part was more technical and concentrated on easy-to-use tools that can have a positive impact on app security. Marek encouraged the audience to ask their co-workers about what security is to them — I think every opportunity is good to talk about security, instead of pretending that the issue does not affect us. In my opinion, it was a great presentation for anyone who’s creating apps, testing them or managing their development, because security is crucial for users, as well as businesses. You can watch it here (PL)
The last word
Nowadays, knowledge is more available than ever before, but the challenge is to find out what is worth learning, and the best way to do it is to recycle the experience of others. That is why we all need to create a learning environment, starting from schools, communities, companies, and taking this idea even to the city strategy level. What does it mean? By sharing what we have learned, we influence the progress that we are able to make–as an industry, society, or even as the whole world. That is why events like pozitive technologies are the best sign that we are able to unite our efforts and share our achievements, knowledge and good practices, to build a platform thanks to which we all win. This goal united employers and employees from the IT industry in Poznań for the first time, and I trust not the last one. See you in 2020 :-)
Written by:
Piotr Maliński
Radomir Wojtera
Krzysztof Kędziorski
Willy Picard
Wojtek Mikołajczyk
Natalia Grams
Anita Falenska
