MiXiT 2019 Conference in Lyon : Passion & Pancakes
This year Idean was present for the first time at the MiXit Conference. This was the perfect opportunity for me to discover this multifaceted event. MiXit is dedicated to IT and offers talks on design, development, and also on team building or agility. The variety of the subjects made me want to attend this conference. Well the pancakes too. But shhh nobody needs to know about that!
This year’s edition took place at the Université de Lyon 3 Jean Moulin, on the Manufacture des Tabacs campus.
With nearly a 100 talks over two days, I struggled to pick the ones I will attend. So much diversity and exciting speakers, everything looked great. At some point I had to make a choice so I naturally went for agility and technique oriented talks
So here is how my schedule went for those 2 days:
Thursday:
- Please Stand up
- VS code Collaborative mode active
- Great features implies great responsibilities
- Constraints and social games for dojos
- How to get hacked well and properly
Friday:
- How video games taught me agility
- Kouizz Aman
- Focusing is your best enemy
- Technical debt
- What happens to passwords after a data leak
One hell of a program! Right?
Detailing each one of them would be too long so I would focus on the ones that caught my attention because of content quality and speaker charisma.
Kouizz Aman : the Breton ‘Burger Quiz’
What better way to learn than by playing! This is the ‘Kouizz Aman’ promise. The game is presented by Cedric Bodin and challenges us on agility in a funny and offbeat way.
This remake of the original ‘Burger Quiz’ is very realistic: two teams, buzzers, tablecloths, the bigouden headdresses, the ‘miams’ counted on small screens. Everything is derived from the original show but with a Breton touch : “salted or semi-salted butter”, “l’addition”, the “crepe de la mort”.
Cedric asks us questions on agility, the agile manifesto, or sprints. This allows us to debate and exchange ideas together. Great moment spent playing about agility.
Constraints and social games for Dojos
Dojos… one of the most efficient and funniest learning methods. Unfortunately it’s not used enough. Johan Martinsson and Bastien David laid out their opinions on Dojos and their ideas to make it even more fun and entertaining.
The main purpose of Dojo is to code and learn together. The “togetherness” notion is fundamental here as sharing remains a key concept of Dojo. This whole course is given in an “egoless programming” environment.
Experimentation is one of the other advantages of Dojo. On a daily basis, it can be very difficult to experiment with a particular design pattern or to test new tools or frameworks. This is where dojo coding comes in as it is ideal for experimenting with all kinds of programming related topics.
Johan and Bastien also made a very interesting analogy with sports. Would you play a World Final Cup final without training? Athletes need training in order to improve and bring their A-game on the day of the competition. Programming is quite similar : we need training. Therefore, various upgrading methods exist : poc, personal project, kata and dojo of course.
Lastly, by adding constraints to the challenges we made Dojo even more fun. For example, during a challenge it was forbidden to use ‘else’ nor ‘if’. You could also put constraints on the size of the methods. Or disallow the use of the mouse. Perfect way to master your IDE shortcuts.
Great ideas from Johan and Bastien to entertain and practice Dojo in an effective and exciting way.
You can stream some of the other talks directly on the MiXit website.
This two day flew by very quickly! MiXiT 2019 was a huge success not only regarding the organization, but also in terms of content. A conference that brought together the whole IT ecosystem. This is what I came for and I wasn’t disappointed. The variety of subjects was incredible, and the pancakes were delicious. I can only recommend the 2020 edition.
