I Take Unconference 2018 Highlights

June 07, 2018

I Take Unconference is a great community event organised in Bucharest by MosaicWorks, that brings together international speakers, experienced developers and other software professionals to share knowledge around subjects which usually go beyond coding and programming languages - it usually covers systems integration, devops and software architecture and design.

All speakers were absolutely great, the atmosphere is exactly the one of a professional community, the organizers do a great job at creating space and context for knowledge sharing - see the Open Space, the Kata Lounge or Code with a Stranger. We got to meet peers from other companies, but also spend time after keynotes with the speakers.

Here are some of my highlights - happy to see summaries of other participants as well.

Day one was opened by famous Michael Feathers. It is the second time when the author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code was present at this conference. He was also speaker in the first edition, in 2012. Michael's key note was on Eliminating errors as Design driver . We went through code exampled where we explored the idea on how to expand the domain so that you don't need to write your code with testing all possible edge cases. The idea was also explored as one of the topics in the Open Space - we tried to code TicTacToe so that it is less error prone as possible.

We further explored some GIT Anti-patterns- explained by LEMI ORHAN ERGIN. Concepts such as don't push every single commit, don't merge late, don't be a button maniac - as in try to use git commands as much as possible and not rely on the IDE. This was pretty useful for developers in order to ensure some concepts that make their life easier, as well as for team leads or architects in order to ensure a basic checklist when managing a larger team. Lemi proved to be very knowledgeable in terms of GIT technicalities, and his presentation made me also remember Kenneth Truyers keynote at Voxxed Days 2018 on How to Use GIT as a NoSQL database.

For me it was interesting to hear his view on using MonoRepos and the fact that Google and Facebook use one single monolithic huge repository for their source control. So That was an action I took after the conference - to read more about advantages as well as challenges of mono repos.

Professor Dan Cristea from University of Iasi, Romania, had a particularly interesting presentation on a remarkable work done by his team of students around annotating paper books in such a way that you can deduce relationships between book characters. Example was demonstrated on Qua Vadis novel. Concepts as natural language processing, ontologies creation and other machine learning techniques were presented.

ARMAGAN AMCALAR had a pretty fascinating presentation around how we can ...script our brain? colonsole.log(brain) was his keynote on a system he created in order to mentally type text on a computer, using brain sensors, C++, Node.js and Javascript. See more on this on his website.

As AI is one of the hot topics these years, this topic could not be forgotten at the conference. HENK BOELMAN presented a health aid mobile application done using Microsoft technology around speech and text and image recognition. One takeaway that I took note of was that using custom vision AI from Microsoft we can training your model on images and download them in different formats so you can use them offline - Tensorflow for Android,CoreML for iOS11,ONNX for Windows ML.