We went to Commit Conf 2018!!
By Irene Diaz-Valenzuela & Rafael Bartolome
On November 23rd and 24th, the first edition of the Commit Conf was held. For those of you who don’t know what Commit Conf is, it’s an event for Spanish developers where people with different backgrounds get the chance to meet each other and exchange ideas. Here at Tuenti, we’re always eager to keep learning and we love going to these events where we get the chance to stay on top of what’s happening in technology. Because we’re a highly diverse company with people that have very different backgrounds, we’d like to talk about the experience from two different perspectives. The first is that of a newbie to dev conferences and the second is of someone who’s already been to several.
Someone new
As a newbie to developers conferences, but with some experience with academic ones, I was really surprised by the atmosphere. It was my first conference where there were more attendees than speakers, which made for an awesome sense of community. However, the thing that surprised me the most were the tracks themselves. I was expecting really technical or even obscure stuff that only someone already really well versed in the topic would understand, but at Commit Conf that’s far from the truth. Whatever your level is, you can find a talk that suits you. There were also some really awesome speakers who are really passionate and make you eager to keep learning. Last but not least were the sponsors, including us, Tuenti, who were recruiting new people for their teams with games, quizzes and even popcorn. I left the conference wishing I’d attended an event like this before and eager to go to another one in the future, maybe even as a speaker, who knows?
Someone not so new
I’ve been going to conferences like this for the last 5 years. I use them as a way of getting out of my comfort zone and try to see talks about new technologies or topics not related with the work I do every day. I’m a mobile developer and this year I went to several tracks about backend. Now, things like containers, service mesh and Kubernetes no longer sound quite so mysterious to me.
Like previous conferences, with so many talks you’ll find some that are great and some that are not, so you have choose carefully. On average, though, the talks were really good. One thing I noticed this year was that the conference was quite diverse in terms of both speakers and attendees; more so than in previous years. However, we still need to keep improving diversity to enrich the IT sector.
Tuenti talks
Here at Tuenti we love what we do and we love to share it with the community. This year we gave 7 talks and 2 open spaces:
- Testing: Tips & Tricks Joaquin Engelmo Moriche Unconference, open space
- Service Mesh for your Service Mess Ferdi Llaca
- Mixing Swift Frameworks and Dependency Injection Víctor Pimentel
- When Clean Architecture met Kotlin: A love story Nicolás Patarino
- Git internals: Why trees are a developer’s best friend Salvador Perez Martin
- Going async with Kotlin Jose María Muñoz
- The Pre-talk Josefina Perez, Andrés Viedma
- Motivating teams Josefina Perez Unconference, open space
- The road to WebAssembly is paved with Rust Jose Roberto Vidal
Other talks
In addition to our colleagues’ great talks, we also enjoyed a number of talks about different topics. Here is a short list of some of the talks we liked:
- Introducción a la programación cuántica: Juan Lupión. Juan gave us a very interesting introduction to quantum programming, what is real, what is not and what we can expect from it.
- Cuando los tests conocieron a Puppeteer…: José Manuel García. In this talk, we learned how to test websites using Puppeteer in a very practical and entertaining way.
- UX/UI para desarrolladores: Javier Abadía. With a very colourful presentation, Javier told us how developers can also get involved in UX and he gave a few tricks for how to do it.
- Kafka en la Playa: Isabel Cazorla, Alicia Ropero. Great presentation exposing a very complicated real world problem and a working solution.
Conclusions
With 2000 attendees and 150 talks in two days, Commit is one of the biggest IT events in Spain. We’re looking forward to the next edition!
