JeffConf Milan 2017 — Announcing final location, date, speakers, and agenda!
When? September 29th 2017
Where? Grand Visconti Palace
Who? 20+ speakers
What? See agenda
Why? Pretty long answer below!
Early-adopters, pioneers, and experts will gather in Milan to discuss Serverless technologies and share real-world experiences, use cases, lessons learned, side projects, and much more!
In a way, serverless is the newest niche of a larger niche of IT called Cloud Computing. While for some it represents the future of software development, many have a more critical or skeptical point of view. Of course, constructive criticism is always well accepted, but such critics often come from non-tecnical concerns or obsolete beliefs. This is objectively true especially in those geographical areas where “the Cloud” is not well understood/accepted yet, despite the marketing and i18n efforts of most cloud players. Indeed we may easily argue for hours about local regulations, privacy concerns, anxious lawyers, ignorance, confusing lexicon, etc.
To remove such barriers — which are often more cultural than technological — JeffConf Milan will gather international speakers and attendees while still focusing on the local Italian community.
Diversity and inclusiveness are the main pillars of JeffConf. And not just financial inclusiveness, which still matters, but also cultural, moral, and ethnical. To ensure that language won’t be a barrier for anyone, we are keeping at least 50% of the talks in Italian, and we will make recordings and subtitles available later on.
But who’s Jeff?
Jeff is Serverless [cit.]
Source: “Serverless” is just a name. We could have called it “Jeff”
And no, Jeff is not Jeff Barr! Jeff is not even a male reference, I’d say. How about Jexx instead? Imho, Jeff is just a distraction from the word “Serverless”, so that we can all focus on the value and advantages it provides.
Ant Stanley announced JeffConf London 13 weeks ago, as the result of a very productive Slack chat with Paul Johnston and James Thomas.
Less than a month later, the first JeffConf gathered a great crowd of 120+ attendees, including serverless enthusiasts, pioneers, newcomers, and students. Probably the most diverse and passionate audience I’ve ever witnessed at a tech conference. Especially at a Cloud conference.
You can also find my recap of JeffConf London, including a series of interviews from some of the speakers and community members.
Why Milan?
Simply put, Milan is pretty easy to reach, either via local transportation or flying from abroad. Furthermore, Milan is the de facto Italian “tech center”, and it already hosts the only one Italian Serverless Meetup (so far!).
JeffConf Milan will be held at Grand Visconti Palace, a 4-star luxury hotel that somehow combines tradition and modernity in the city center of Milan. The many symbolic urban elements surrounding the hotel once were and still represent bastions of resistance and places to meet and spread cultural ideas. And we have plenty of serverless ideas to share :)
You can find more info and directions here.
Agenda, Speakers & CFP
20+ international and local speakers will join JeffConf Milan from Italy, Germany, UK, and US.
The agenda is pretty packed already, but a couple of slots are still available, including lightning talks, open space sessions, and panels. Stay tuned for new announcements in the next couple of weeks!
Also, you can still apply to be a speaker!
Here are some of the speakers you’ll meet at JeffConf Milan (full list here):
Diversity Tickets & Partnerships
We want to make JeffConf an inclusive conference and welcome people from diverse backgrounds. To reach our goal, we allow people who are part of an underrepresented group in tech to obtain a free Diversity Ticket. Furthermore, attendees can even buy a Diversity Ticket that we’ll gift to Diversity Scholars for free.
Our Diversity Partners already deserve a big thank you. Not only because they are helping us make JeffConf happen, but also for their continuous efforts and involvement with the local communities of makers, coders, and students.
Who is making JeffConf Milan happen?
Finally, an immense thank you to the sponsors that believe in serverless technologies and supported us from the very beginning.
