I went to QCon 2019. Qcon is a conference that’s organised by InfoQ, an informative tech blog with amazing technologists working to progress software engineering.
“We aim to spot emerging trends in software development that we believe have broad applicability and make our audience aware of them early.”
There were so many conferences to attend to - there were 18 editorial tracks across 3 days and had over 140 practitioner speakers - but I feel confident that I selected those that meant most to me.
The talks I enjoyed most because I either learnt something new or it was delivered particularly well (the full list is further down):
In particular, I felt that Functional Composition by Chris Ford stood out. His presentation was live coding using Clojure. It’s unusual for live coding to be exciting, but he made it seem like a Jazz performance, where each different instrument layers another tune on top, building music.
It was informative: I learnt that music is math. But more than that, it was motivational. Drawing parallels, linking the dots, and applying found rules, you can create something that’s so much more than a program.
The talk is actually something that Chris Ford has been doing for years and it’s on Youtube! Go watch it:
I’ve also taken some notes around the presentation, which are in the slides.
Here are some of the talks I attended: