OMS at SXSW 2019
What is better for team building than packing up for two weeks and leaving for a conference? This year, our team of back-end developers at Oslo Market Solutions went to SXSW in Austin, Texas. SXSW, South by Southwest or South by as the locals say, is one of the world’s largest conferences of its kind. It contains a ton of keynotes and interactive sessions on a huge variety of different topics as well as a film festival, a music festival, a comedy festival and a gaming expo. The most relevant tracks for us were Coding & Development and Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, but we also had access to all the other tracks and events so we could attend whatever we fancied the most. Why not combine tech heavy classes for learning and inspiration during the day with concerts and beer during the night? 👨💻🎸🍻
Tech inspiration
Machine Learning
We went to two interactive sessions about machine learning. This subject was fairly new to all of us and we were excited to learn more about it.
The session Make Your First Android App with Machine Learning was all about image recognition. We used the JetBrains language Kotlin to create an Android application that could take a photo and recognize human faces. We used ML Kit for Firebase, Google’s machine learning platform for mobile developers, to do the image recognition. We went to this session to learn about machine learning, but it was a huge bonus that the implementation was done in Kotlin as we are thinking about moving from Java towards Kotlin in the future. Kotlin is one of the most loved languages by developers these days and turned out almost on top of this year’s StackOverflow list of loved languages.
Course material: https://github.com/googlecodelabs/android-androidme
The interactive session Let’s Prototype a Voice-Activated Interface turned out to be a highly relevant session. The goal of the session was to learn how to use voice control software to do speech to text and how to control an application with voice commands. The implementation was done in the front-end framework Vue.js, one of the largest competitors to the front-end framework we use at OMS, React. The library used for voice control is called Artyom.js, which can also be used with React. Although our team at SXSW are back-end developers at OMS, it was interesting to attend this session. The topic of voice control is definitely relevant these days as we get surrounded by smart home speakers like Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple HomePod. Would it not be cool if you could ask your smart home speaker about stock prices or to buy shares in a fund?
Course material: https://github.com/hagata/sxsw19
Blockchain
Blockchain is a hot topic in the FinTech industry these days and we definitely had to attend as much as possible related to this topic. The Featured Sessions Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Blockchain Beyond the Hype: The Ripple Effect varied a lot in quality. The first session felt more like a 45 minutes ad read about the Winklevoss brothers’ crypto exchange Gemini, and the second session was a highly interesting interview with the well reflected CTO of Ripple, David Schwartz. Schwartz is the original architect of the XRP network and has a lot of experience in the field of cryptocurrency. The interview touched on topics like cryptography, distributed ledger technology, use cases of blockchain and ethical questions around anonymized payments.
Blockchain is a topic that on conferences easily can become a buzzword party with no actual concrete examples. Lucky for us, this was not the case at SXSW. The interactive session The Arsenal of a Blockchain Developer was an excellent introduction on how blockchain actually works and we got to get our hands dirty with some code. During the session we learned how to set out development environments for the two blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum. We also learned how to run nodes in blockchain, and how to execute transactions. This knowledge is valuable if and when we are going to implement blockchain technology for our customers in the future.
Course material: https://github.com/unchained-capital/sxsw-arsenal
Towards the end of the conference we went to a session called Blockchain for Everyone! This was a more high-level talk about getting into blockchain from an investors point of view. The speaker John Hargrave is the CEO of Media Shower, who is behind the blockchain investor website Bitcoin Market Journal that reaches 100 000 blockchain investors monthly. Hargrave has also written a book about blockchain investment that he humbly calls “the forthcoming bestseller BLOCKCHAIN FOR EVERYONE”.
APIs
What we back-end developers spend a fair share of our time doing is creating APIs. APIs are super important for applications to be able to talk to each other, and for our front-end developers to be able to make use of all the data we have in our systems. That is why the interactive session Designing APIs for Growth immediately drew our attention. This session was about what to think about before designing an API and making the right technical choices based on the business case you have. The session touched on different API styles like RPC, REST and GraphQL. We are using REST at OMS today, but we have had and probably will have more discussions in the future on whether moving to something like GraphQL will be a good fit for our use cases.
Processing Big Data
Making Daily Song Plays Datasets For Music Labels probably does not sound like a relevant session for a FinTech company like OMS, but after reading the description about the content of the session, we understood that we should give it a try. This turned out to be a good decision. The session showed us how to to build a complex pipeline of batch jobs to collect sets of big data, and then how to process and analyze that data. This could be really interesting and useful for all of the financial data that we work with on a daily basis. We used Luigi for the data collection and Apache Spark for the processing.
Course material: https://github.com/bfemiano/song_plays_workshop_tutorial
The Exhibition Hall
After spending all day in an auditorium or a classroom it was nice to walk around the huge exhibition hall at the conference center and look at all of the different stands. There were many exhibitions during the conference.
Team building
It is always nice getting to know your colleagues outside of work. We usually have busy days at the office and the chats in coffee breaks almost always revolve around work. Going on trips is very valuable for teams because you get time to talk to your colleagues and to get to know them outside of work.
Music
The music scene in Austin is awesome and it explodes during SXSW. The music festival is kind of a show case festival, meaning that the bands playing are usually not big or famous, they are playing to showcase their music to the music industry and press. We went to concerts after the tech sessions almost every day, and we all agreed that the quality of the concerts were supreme.
Austin
Austin is a great place for a conference! As the fastest growing major city in the USA, there is always something happening in Austin. The city has a lot of culture to offer like music, street food, BBQ, street art and much more.
During the conference almost 75 000 attendees visited the conference. Hosting a conference this big does not come without its disadvantages though. This year there were especially two problems that were visible during the conference and also got coverage by the press.
The saddest problem is the growing homeless population in the city. There is a lot of homeless people in Austin and they feel that they are being squeezed out of the city and have no where to go during the festival.
The other obvious problem is one that we will probably be facing at home in Oslo pretty soon; electric scooters everywhere! There were a lot of accidents during the conference and you could see piles of scooters everywhere you went. We used the scooters ourselves as they were very convenient, but looking back, it is clear that it is becoming a problem.
Thank you, South by!
We are all super happy with the conference and we hope to go back sometime. The overall quality of the keynotes, interactive sessions, music and the city itself is super impressing! We learned a lot and returned inspired with fresh ideas for the future of OMS. See you!
