Wroc# 2018- My Retrospective

On Friday I had a chance to attend .NET Developers Conference — Wroc#. I was really curious, as this was probably first conference that I participated in that had paid entrance. And first one that I attended as just an visitor, rather than someone organising it — which made me curious. After all, seeing as someone else is doing the similar event (with a rather bigger budget, but that’s just a detail in this case).

In the details you can find my remarks about the event — so if you’re interested — come on in! 🙂

Do you have a ticket?

First things first — without ticket you cannot attend the conference. Tickets were sold in two turns, and both were sold-out within first minutes, so I wasn’t able to buy any. Fortunately I was able to win permission to buy one during one of events organised by Wrocław .NET User Group. Still, it was really surprising that tickets were sold out so quickly. But as someone said to me — if it happened so fast, that means it is probably worth it.

Another thing is that all earnings from tickets were supposed to go to one of three charities. While buying ticket you could choose to which one you would like to send your money, and the same thing happened in my case — which I must say is a really nice PR move, as I felt rather good about myself knowing that my money would go to help some puppies.

Location & First Impression

Conference took place in Municipal Stadium, in their conference zone. As I sometimes participated in music shows in that place, I didn’t had any problem how to get there. You could also find the right entrance rather correctly by following the crowd. Still, I don’t recall any information on social media and any markers around the stadium to know to which entrance you should go. If I weren’t there before (and crowd wouldn’t be there as well) I would probably have some issues and had to do round around a stadium to find the correct entrance.

After receiving my entry-package I walked a little bit around a place. There was some kind of chill-out zone, with some sofas and floor pouf with AC sockets within the range of them, and some high-tables with table-top games. On the second floor, where the main stage was located, except for stage and chairs you could find typical set of coffee/hot water dispensers, some sweet rolls and stand with some free stickers from JetBrains. And hey, who don’t like free stickers?

As for the stage, there was one issue which is related strictly to this place — columns at the side wouldn’t allow you to always see the presentations, which were displayed on both sides of the stage. Of course there were also some screens located on those columns that would allow you to see something, but if you choose a place like the one in picture below — well, sucks to be you and get ready for some neck gymnastic.

I also really loved the floor stickers with WiFi passwords. Small thing, but was something that I would really love to see on some of other events that I participate in.

Gift pack

Everyone loves them. Inside I was able to find t-shirt, eco-friendly notepad, a survey about the lectures that were planned for the event, some Wroc# stickers and Wroc# socks. And this last thing is something that I totally didn’t expect — it took me by surprise, and I very much liked it!

And as for t-shirt I took a risk to take a smaller size (M in this case), as I am currently during the weight loss process and wanted to have it ready for the time I would reach my goal weight. Well, as it turned out it fits me already, so one more point for me! 🙂

Lectures

One thing that I would have to say at the beginning — even through lectures were awesome, only two out of six were directly (or at least that’s how I see it) related to .NET technologies. One as about a current trend about architecture, two more PM related and one about web security. From strict .NET there was a lecture mostly focused on Azure applications, and another one about Xamarin.

But that doesn’t mean rest of them weren’t good. Probably my favourite would be the one by Kim van Wilgen & Sander Hoogendoorn which in satirical way described all the things that went wrong with software development approaches (Agile, Waterfall etc.). This is a talk that I highly recommend anyone that has at least a minimum experience with software development projects — both on side of programming and management. It was simply great. And I also loved Mr. Hoogendoorn t-shirt, which was a simple purple one with Shirt<T> written on.

Also, as I was just after lecture of his book “This is Agile” it was a really nice experience to see some follow up to what he written there, while mostly telling about what went wrong.

The next one would be the one about Elastic Leadership by Roy Osherove. Topic is something that is currently in my scope of interest, so it was a very interesting talk from my perspective. And I also written down a name of one book that he recommended (Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerald M. Weinberg) that I started reading yesterday. Also the last part of his talk, with him playing “Every breath you take” with more programming related lyrics (“Every build you break”) was a really good laugh. As this is something that he did on some other events as well, you can check it on YouTube, for example here.

As for rest of them — the one about Xamarin and Modern Web Security were next in my personal ranking, as those subjects are almost directly related to my latest work and off-work projects.

Lectures about event-based serverless architecture and SaaS applications on Azure were probably my less favourite, but mostly because topics were not something that my work is related to. They were still really good presentations.

Discussion panel was very entertaining (those always are after all), but at some point questions started to be ignored in favor of some lecturers-driven topics. But it was still a well spent time.

Other remarks

In other news — food and beer was good, communication with organisers was good. It was funny to look at confusion of some people after at one point stickers pointing to toiler were replaces with the ones pointing at the other end of corridor.

I had some issues with live stream — I wanted to show that presentation about Flow to some of my friends, but link from Wroc# website only displayed link to the version on the streaming company website. There the whole recording were splitted into four parts with some random intervals, which made the search for the proper presentation rather hard. Fortunately it was at the beginning of the last video. Still I later found the same stream in full version on YouTube, so if anyone is interested — link’s here.

Also almost all (or all, I’m not quite sure) of lecturers were using MacBooks, which for me is rather funny, as we were meeting on Microsoft technology related conference. 🙂

I certainly will try to attend as well next year, and if you are interested if you should participate as well — probably you should.