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Programistok 2016

October 14, 2016
Programistok 2016

Programistok was a small and short but very pleasure-providing conference. Giving a few words about it and some pictures taken.

So what happened on 01/10/2016 in Białystok?

a programmer’s basement

a programmer’s basement

Event Promotion

For english readers - the word “Programistok” is some combination of Programmer and Białystok (name of the city).

To get the idea of conference’s shape of humour you need to see this promotion video:

It speaks for itself but I’ll add some notes.

The music should not be representational in any way. However there are some tech-releated words in the song which besides what you see make you smile because of what you hear too (words in polish, sorry).

What’s more, I believe guys are just fighting stereotypes about programmers in our country by showing them. You know, this type of thing:

It might be not easy to get what presentation of onions everywhere is for. I don’t know an official statement about it. However, let’s just say programmers can earn a lot of money and onion is really cheap so one can buy lots of it - probably much more than a mere mortal.

.party::before

Lots of beer, few tens of people in nice new place called Hacklag somewhere near the centre of Białystok. Some people had a remote day work there.

Evening, to make it all funny from the beginning, the Family Feud (Familiada) was introduced. Speakers vs attendees.

Lots of jokes from the Family Feud host on the picture. Made me laughing whole the time.

Family Feud

Family Feud

Questions were tech-related but enriched by some fine-grained dose of humour. Look for yourself:

Some answers to Family Feud were requested on Twitter:

And guess what was the prize in the pool for the winning team (hint: some regional food):

Main Event

Main event was placed in the building of Bialystok University of Technology.

There were six talks. Various topics, mostly interesting. Slides can be downloaded from here:

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To me, most interesting talk was from Łukasz Szydło talking about replacing Git Flow with Continuous Delivery with sophisticated online feature switcher. The idea is to not merge conflicts all the time but instead pushing onto the master (well, I believe it’s not that strict) and remotely turning on/off features on various servers - depends on test servers, staging and production - depends on your setup.

Lightning talks

8 slots for talks each 5 minutes long. Spontaneously, I took my chance:

Guess who’s the 8th one?

Guess who’s the 8th one?

And spontaneously - I mean it. During other lightning talks I was connecting to Wi-Fi, cloning GitHub repoistory, compiling it, then launched, quickly tested and made some examples to show it’s purpose:

GitHub Star Tagger - a small weekend project of mine:

.party::after

In the end of day conference organisers say thanks for coming. In the front speaks Maciej Aniserowicz:

Organizers and speakers

Organizers and speakers

And boom, who’s got more hours to spend that night, would come into a club which was prepared to introduce conference attendees with those items:

What would you expect to see in a club? Of course some old book about ASP.NET.

What would you expect to see in a club? Of course some old book about ASP.NET.

That’s me in the TV!

That’s me in the TV!

Breakpoint?

Breakpoint?

An interesting part was was a contest on recognizing music from games. I even won once %_%

You can see more of After Party here:

Pushing positively!

In polglish it’s “Pushujemy pozytywnie”.

Attendees were motivated to find other people who had their cards matching others and taking photos together. I was took on one but don’t have a photo ;(

Pushing positively

My thought on this slogan: not everybody is perfect and code is always the least perfect thing so take it easy and push forward, push together!

Summary

Topics of talks were not my thing. But organization and people were totally worth driving 8 hours to be there.

To know more, I recommend you reading report on conference written by one of organisers Maciej Aniserowicz on his blog devstyle.pl.

And see an official video made after the event:

References

conferences, events, programistok
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