Despite having a master in computer science, being in tech for more than two decades, having worked with tech, understanding how tech works and how systems with tech work, knowing what good engineering looks like, getting loads of feedback on being a tech person, and even doing talks like “Lockdown learnings from technical leaders”, I tend to see myself as “not very tech”, because I work mostly with the hard and complex things: people. I work on collaboration, communication, leadership and management, responsibility and accountability, psychological safety, coaching, engineering practices, feedback, facilitating tech discussions, and the occasional structure, OKRs, helping “translate” visions and strategy to daily work… Not tech, not programming, not architecture…
And yet tech person is probably what I am 😃
Last week I attended Copenhagen Developer Festival to do a talk with Jakob Wolman on “Autonomous teams require great managers”. My expectation was to enjoy hanging out with Jakob and doing a talk with him, getting free food, and then maybe talk to a few others.
The conference looked so tech – programming and very tech heavy – there were talks about ASP.NET core razor pages, firewalls, rewrites, dev containers, rustifying and even an evening quizshow with questions on javascript “Who Wants to be a JavaScriptær”…
So, I had low expectations; quite tech heavy, not many interesting talks (except ours of course 😉), I knew only two of the many speakers, and 95% of participants are developers. How could I possibly fit in?
It started with the keynote by Dylan Beattie about becoming a rockstar developer. I guess that is not true – it started the evening before as I met a friend for dinner. He was doing a workshop at the conference, and we were joined by three other speakers; one I had seen before, but never talked to and now we had the opportunity 😊
Nice conversations all evening, and as most speakers were staying at the same hotel, I met a few more for breakfast, and I started feeling a bit more like I belonged.
Back to the keynote – ah I loved the keynote. It was super funny and interesting, and more importantly for me personally: it made me feel very tech and geeky 🤓
Dylan took a walk-through of the timeline of some programming languages, and I recognized working with quite a bit of them. And then came Perl 💕 With a room full of techies of which 95% were developers, I was one of about eight who have done proper programming in Perl (or as some of my friends say “you were one of 8 who admitted that you did programming in Perl” 😉 ) – and it felt so good to be able to say that 😊
It made such a difference for me; a very good example of us setting up hindrances for ourselves by having limiting talks. My geekiness was awoken again 😊
In the break I went over to say hi to Dylan, who was standing with some people that I then met, and quickly my circle of people to talk to grew and grew.
And boy did I fit in 😃
I had an amazing time talking to all sorts of people, connecting to a bunch of them, hanging out with Jakob, having so many great discussions – and I even heard some good and relevant talks 🙂
I am glad I don’t get star struck, as it makes it easier to connect and have conversation with “famous” people 😊
Like I met the amazing Liz Fong-Jones in person for the first time; I had followed her for ages on twitter (when that was a good place to be), and it was so good to meet her; we had good conversations as well; normal conversation – well normal for people who attend tech conferences 😉
I encourage you to approach speakers if you are at a conference. My experience is that the vast majority are super interested in talking about their topics and learn from you 😊
I was all hyped and almost giddy with all these cool discussions; I missed out on some talks because I was in great discussion – and I even had another speaker come to ask for advice, which made me feel valuable 😊
As it turned out, there were topics here and there that were interesting for me as well. Semi relevant ones like “Ditch your Backlog and Shape Up your product development”, “An Introduction to Residuality Theory“ (watch this if you are in anyway interested in technical architecture).
Relevant ones like “Developer Happiness and why it matters” by Damian Brady, since it gave new input to the work, I have been doing for many years – of course it also helps that the things he talked about confirmed the things I have experienced and used 😉
There was “Case study: Managing a complex engineering project”, which was very in line with the talk Jakob and I would do the day after. “The community power in the developers life” made me consider if communities can help us with this “epidemic of loneliness’ that we see.
And here were talks that were interesting and not relevant for work like “Understanding nuclear power”, “The History of Computer Art”, “On becoming a space-faring civilization” – oh and “Locknote: The Albatross Project”, which was super funny because it was so close to reality – or maybe it was reality??
“The Sky(net) is falling” by Damian Brady gets it’s own paragraph. As it was 29th of August (where skynet became sentient), the talk was a word play on that. It was mainly about AI; would it replace us? what is it becomin?, how long will it take to evolve? Etc. etc
What I found most interesting, was the theory that the inventions we see, are inevitable: being able to phone let to computers, let to network, let to the internet (I might have forgotten some steps). While the inventions are inevitable, the use and control of them are not; we can influence that. As an example Damian said “What if we had to pay to be on the internet to begin with? Would it look the way it does today? I find it hard to imagine a TikTok on a payed internet”
The point was that we can still influence AI and how it is used; we can talk to governments, standardization fora (I added this), companies, other people… Right now is the time to decide what kind of AI we want, and how to use it.
Super interesting perspective… I am thinking maybe we could stop using AI for silly pictures, and use them where they provide value like helping doctors treat more people in better ways?
The best of all talks was “Stand-up Maths” with Matt Parker; he is on youtube, but if you ever get a chance to see him live, go go go (no offense other speakers, but he was so goooood)
The last day was also the day that Jakob and I did our talk. It was our first time talking together, and it went really well. It would of course have been better, if our clothes had matched, but for some reason Jakob does not have any clothes with dinosaurs on?!?! 🦖 🦕
It was what I had come for in the first place, and I am content. It went well, and the topic is super important. It felt very natural – which is good as we have to do it again, and I am trying to convince Jakob to do more talks; he wants to – he just hasn’t acknowledged it yet 😃
This week I even got an request for a proposal on a workshop from someone I met at the conference. Payed work is always nice.
All in all a great conference, where I fit right in and found new friends – I have even had conference blues this week 😢
I might need to watch my talk 0n imposter syndrome again 😉