uncodebar 2: bigger, better, more absorbent
No sooner had last years uncodebar ended than all the codebar organisers and attendees declared in unison: let’s do it again!
After the phenomenal success of our little bootstrapped event last year, we decided to run uncodebar again and make it bigger, better and, well, more absorbent. We increased the number of attendees from last year in a bid to bring in more people from diverse backgrounds. We decided to invite students to participate who we thought might benefit from experiencing an open space format event. We reached out to the wider tech community to attract people who have never been to a codebar event before. But first and foremost, we wanted to capture the informal, open, community feel of the event last year and keep it geared primarily towards our coaches.
With that in mind, on a crisp October morning we gathered at Pivotal’s London office to share knowledge and catch up with members of the community.
The format of the event was the same as last year: an unconference style open space where everyone could pitch sessions with the schedule coming together on the day with talks, workshops and discussions from attendees filling the slots.
The breadth of topics was once again astounding: we had sessions ranging from an ‘Intro to Elm’ to ‘Typography for Developers’. We talked about ‘Building Inclusive Teams’ and ‘Apprenticeships and Software Craftsmanship’. We got an ‘Intro to Docker’ and saw a demonstration on how to build ‘IOT Puzzle Gadgets using LISP’. We discussed ‘How to ask about gender and sex in online forms’ and ‘How do we give feedback’.
Here are a few trends I personally have noticed after attending the sessions at uncodebar 2:
- functional programming is the next (current?) big thing — we had both an Intro to Elm and an Intro to Elixir session, with the latter taking up not one but two slots
- developers still struggle with how to talk about sex, gender and pronouns or how to ask for them in online forms (this is probably true for product type people as well, judging from the amount of bad examples out there)
- apprenticeships and software craftsmanship are still a hot topic
- as is Diversity in Tech — although we are making progress we are nowhere near cracking this topic
- lots of folks seemed eager to live code their entire session — hats off to them
We also had a round of lightning talks at the end where one of the attendees, Beverley, gave her very first talk at a conference. Moments like these is why we keep running codebar events in the first place.
On top of all that we had some delicious food in the form of breakfast rolls and Vietnamese banh mi and played what will most likely go down in history as the most competitive round of bingo. Oh, and some people discovered Pivotal’s ping pong tables.
Needless to say we are already planning next years’ event. Here are a few things we would like to do to improve upon the current format:
- run a workshop before the event to help students or inexperienced speakers prepare a talk, workshop or discussion
- create a beginner and more advanced track — invite more newbies to the conference
- have space for shorter and longer talks and maybe even a track for a one day workshop
Of course none of this would’ve been possible without the support of our sponsors. A huge thank you goes out to Pivotal, Shutl, Ustwo, DueDil, Saccade and Prodo for their generous support of uncodebar. We’d also like to thank the attendees who came and made the day what is was. To sum it all up:
