Stepstone @ Web Summit Lisbon

Web Summit in Lisbon was the largest tech event I've attended after the pandemic — it was finally back in real life, and we could forget about the past two years of covid. A group of engineers from Stepstone made their way to Lisbon in early November to see what is new and hot in tech.

As many as seventy thousand technology enthusiasts were finally able to meet in person and exchange experiences about what they're passionate about — the future of web technologies.

The scale of this conference is unlike anything I have seen before. It is best to compare it to a big multi-day music festival in size. There were over 70,000 participants, exhibitors, and speakers. People from all over the world came to listen to talks, look for contractors, show and sell their products, establish new partnerships and contacts, and much more.

The festival consisted of 5 pavilions, each with at least two large stages, one lounge area (each pavilion had space dedicated to a different group of interests), and many smaller spaces for lectures and exhibitors' stands. There were talks and workshops on all stages every 15–25 minutes throughout the day.

I was surprised by the scale of the Web Summit, when I saw signs for airport registration immediately on coming out of baggage reclaim, I knew something was up. They were even selling a special public transport ticket designed for summit attendees. — Tim B.

The main stage, a stadium-sized meeting centre, had 45-minute master classes. A dedicated mobile phone app made it easy to manage our visit. It had a map, schedule and networking functionality. Without it, I would have gotten lost more than once. The entrance on the first day took us about 1.5 hours (oh, those queues!), but I think it was worth it!

The event wasn't limited to the daytime only. In the evenings, drinks and music were organised at different venues in town, an excellent opportunity to reflect on the day's schedule and network.

Below we will outline some of the key learnings we gained from attending the Web Summit.

Women entrepreneurs in tech: What are we fighting?

LEADERSHIP, POLITICS, SOCIETY

Female technology leaders from Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Nigeria shared their stories and goals during this meeting. They shared their remarks on combining family life with a career and building women's awareness of technology.
Nevertheless, their advice is straightforward: take a nap, take care of yourself, build your community or help others.
But most of all: don't just think "women are pretty", but "women are smart and talented".

Why empathy is the most important tech tool in today's economy

ETHICS, LEADERSHIP, SOCIETY

I wrote down a few "golden thoughts" on how I/we can foster empathy within the team and meetings, here are the ones that stuck in my head the most:

• Be more informal.
• Live chat during Townhall (to 'see' people on the other side of the internet)
• Increase the opportunity for casual conversation by changing the order of meetings
• Get to know people better, not only on a professional level but on a personal level as well.
• Informal meetings (de-formalisation of meetings) — they do not have to be "so rigid".
• It is worth asking and looking for feedback from end users, getting to know their experiences with the product.
• Setting your own and common boundaries and inviting your peers to maintain them together (it shouldn't be an individual effort, but a joint effort). For example, by not organising meetings during lunchtime.
• Take care of yourself, and make time for your emotional and physical well-being. Feel empowered to take a 15-minute meditation break.

Is your tech stack killing your productivity?

AI AND MACHINE LEARNING, LEADERSHIP

Since the pandemic started and we changed to work-from-home and hybrid models— employees have received many different tools for their daily work. Switching between applications such as Slack, Jira, Outlook, Figma, docs,(…) takes more and more time and reduces productivity. The problem of what to do with "multitasking" was also considered, where you can even see how people perform tasks completely unrelated to the meeting in online meetings.
Most of the conversation, however, was about drawing attention to the problem rather than providing ready-made solutions.
One of the conclusions was that the hybrid work model is hard-to-maintain but necessary and that it is worth considering which tools are essential and which you can give up.

Extreme transparency or corporate security responsibility?

AI AND MACHINE LEARNING, BACK-END DEVELOPMENT, PRIVACY AND SECURITY

Alex Rice, CTO HackerOne, and Will Farrell, head of security at TikTok US, talked about transparency, security, and trust.
They said that discussing security is quite difficult these days, while not talking about it leads to many risks. Being transparent and talking about security leads to "inconvenient" questions, bug reports, and vulnerabilities — having such reports requires some response to them. That is why many people fear being transparent — "no report, no problem".
However, customers generally expect high security from the products they use, and it usually hurts interests to hide vulnerabilities.
In this speech, the approach to security metrics was discussed. The speakers tried to disenchant the topic, to show that a large number of security reports is not a bad thing, which is good because it shows how many elements can be reacted much earlier. When they are not listed, it does not mean that they do not exist, but each mention causes fear — as an exceptional situation.
They pointed out that there are security issues around us and we should not be afraid of them. For example, libraries that developers use — in order to use them, developers trust that the people who created the component did it in good faith and safely and securely. Transparency in showing vulnerability helps everyone around you feel more confident and not worry about where the dangers lurk.

The main message of this meeting was to present the sense of trust and honesty that are associated with transparency in the context of security. At the end of the interview, we heard an appeal not to demonise security aspects and focus on them in our daily work — when setting passwords, programming functionalities, and for "normal" tasks. To make it part of our mindset.

There was also advice for all those who want to open up to extreme transparency — don't be afraid of it. However, it is worth doing it step by step (in small steps). Initially, the number of uncomfortable questions and reports that suddenly start pouring in can be overwhelming ;-) Speakers strongly recommended having a contingency plan for dealing with upcoming tasks and the number of (often new) decisions to be made. But they say it's worth the move.

Biases in AI

The closing talk of The web summit was co-hosted by Noam Chomsky, who -at his advanced age- joined virtually on the big screen. After all the hype regarding AI during this conference, Chomsky made the bold statement that AI's progress was non-significant to the advancement of science.

Even if we would agree with his point of view, we can’t deny that AI has an increasing influence on our lives. Siemens organised a talk about biases in AI originating from training data. There were a set of recommendations on how to avoid these biases in AI models.

• Make sure the team is as diverse as possible because their culture, experience, and biases will influence the final model the team is building.
• Try to use your own training data for your AI models.
• If you don’t have enough data to train your models, instead of using data from unknown sources, create synthetic data.
• When using external training data, make sure you know the source and the way the data were collected. Avoid inherently biased data.
• In general — try to build your own training data as much as possible and consciously remove the factors that can bring biases.

Key Takeaways

It was amazing to spend a week with our UK and Polish colleagues and hear the opinions from tech and business leaders in fields such as Web3, AI, cloud- and SaaS businesses. Web Summit, hope to see you again.

Many thanks to Urszula Rzechula for contributing to this article.

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