Day of /dev/winter

On the 23rd of January codebar attended /dev/winter, a one day conference in Cambridge covering a range of topics, including DevOps, Mobile, Web, Cloud and Functional Programming. With five tracks of talks, tutorials and workshops, the first challenge was deciding how to spend the day!

First steps: Load up on coffee and pastries, then listen to a Principal Engineer from Rackspace talk about how to upgrade massive openstack clouds. Running clouds at scale has taught them that, if a bug or race can happen, it will happen.

There was a great technical talk about web architecture and building a new API at The Times. The team found that having internal customers constantly using their API during development provided very helpful feedback.

In a day stacked with excellent talks, one of the highlights for me was ‘Anatomy of a catastrophic performance problem’, a highly amusing and educating tale of servers falling over, and the long journey to discover the cause.

Lunch was a great chance to meet and talk with other developers, or try to fly some nanodrones. /dev/winter also arranged a mass pairing session where everyone was encouraged to pick a language and pair with a stranger. A few brave codebar attendees attempted to solve the fizzbuzz problem in Clojure.

codebar were represented during the lightning talk session; Kimberley gave a great overview of our aims, statistics and supporters.

I would have loved to attend the sessions on Elm, Choosing the Right Database, Complete Code Craft and Running Internal Hackdays. For now, at least I can exchange notes with the other codebar attendees.

The good news is that there should be a second event in June! You can keep an eye out for the /dev/summer ticket release by following Dev Cycles on twitter: https://twitter.com/dev_cycles