For the second year now I’ve went to Budapest in order to attend CraftConf. Just like last year I wasn’t alone, though: In total we were 8 friends who had worked together on one project or another, all with different interests and specialities. That’s a perfect fit for the mix of topics Craft provides every year to its nearly 2,000 attendees!
The whole event took place inside a railway museum.
While last year the major topics were Docker and micro-services, this year felt a bit more focused on social and psychological issues people in the industry are facing right now. Two keynotes and tons of talks covered things like psychological safety, intra- and inter-team relations, and how to handle and give feedback. The latter was discussed in a talk by Erika Carlson and was probably my favourite talk alongside Damian Conway’s keynote about dead languages and what you can and should learn from them. Here a run-down (in no particular order) of the talks I enjoyed the most:
- Damian Conway on “Fun With Dead Languages”
- Erika Carlson about fearlessly giving and receiving feedback
- Diogo Monica presented a way how you can manage secrets within Docker Swarm
- Jasmine Zahno and Joseph Pelrine gave an introduction to psychological safety and team intelligence
- Dan North about decisions and trade-offs
- Woody Zuill presented mob programming and how he uses it with his team and has seen it being used at other companies
- Daniel Stenberg about HTTP/2 and QUIC
- Anjuan Simmons about lending privileges
Luckily, all of them should be available on online within a couple of days (ideally starting with Monday), so if you haven’t been there, I’d highly recommend watching these talks!
The conference was once again located inside an old railway museum with its own private train in the morning and evening to get there and home again 😊 While last year had seen some acoustical issues due to two tracks being on two old railway repair-bays close to each other, this year one of them had been remodelled as a catering area and the sound-issues were gone. Also and once again, the catering was excellent, but people still are not able to work buffets efficiently. I will never understand why some people seem to ignore queues. IMHO PyCon handles that better, but also has lots more space at its disposal. What PyCon doesn’t have, though, is chimney bread 😉 Serving that to everyone who wanted one must not have been an easy task!
On a more personal note, the event was really loud. From shouting session chairs to loud music blasting from huge boxes it was not an easy time for me. Luckily, there is enough green area around the main venue, to relax. Eventually, I might write about my current health issues but just so much: I will travel to Portland in a couple of days for WriteTheDocs and PyCon and I will adjust my plans for both events according to what I’ve learnt about myself during the last two days in Budapest: Avoiding loud music, sitting close to the exit to get to a quiet area ASAP etc. I might even get some ear-plugs or run around with noise-cancelling earphones during the events. If you see me like that and would like to talk with me, please don’t be offended. I really want to talk with you, just please give me some minutes to collect some positive energy 😊
That being said, I really enjoyed my time (except for the dark hours, obviously) in Budapest again! The conference was nearly perfectly organised (once again). Thanks to Stefan I didn’t have to worry about anything travel-related excepted for getting a train ticket 😊 Will I go there again next year? You bet!
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