tl;df; it was a blast!

Visiting my first barcamp since 2019 I know now what I’ve missed: Drinks, food and soulfood!

Location

DevOps Camp was hosted at Brandad Systems AG in Fürth

Coffee

Coffee was sponsored by cloudpunks

Catering

Catering was provided by Frau B.

Incredible as always!

Sessions

Due to family business I couldn’t attend all session slots but I’ve attended a few really nice ones:

Netzwerk für Dummies

A nice ask session all around IPv4, IPv6, NAT, Routers and Switches. DNS and DHCP

Main takeaways: IPv6 is here, no more NAT necessary

DevOops – Pannen und Fails auch in der IT (Uli)

A talk about black swan events, spreading slowness, thundering herds and hitting limits in IT systems.

Main takeaways: “What can go wrong will go wrong” and that the world is more correlated than we think.

Podcast recommendation https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/brady-heywood-podcast/id1159251584

Ulrich’s website https://seism0saurus.de/posts/devoops-vortrag-pannen-aus-der-it/

IDD (Irritation Driven Development) (Domi)

A session about automation in general. Thesis: Every time we become irritated we will try to automated or generalize things.

More than a dozen experiences were shared.

How to use Greasemonkey to make your life easier

Lerncoach – Ask me anything (Latti)

Latti is a corporate learning coach at Datev and shared his wisdom around empowering employees for life-long learning.

Ask me anything about Gitlab (Michi)

Michi provided some insight into the development of gitlab.

Main takeaway: The quote: “Manual work is a bug”

FU-IT Ausbildung in der IT 2022 (Ama) (Johannes)

A session about the state of apprenticeship in IT.

Main takeaway: vocational schools do not seem to provide the necessary skills for the apprentices.

Freelancer, Unternehmer (Awa) (Anton, Frank)

Anton and Frank provided some insights into the world of entrepreneurs and freelance work

Main takeaway: if you are a software crafter you can expect a 50% plus upon your salary if you go solo-preneur!

Bottom line

A perfect weekend with great food, sessions and talks. It is always great to be around like minded folks.

Read more about barcamps

Impressions devopscamp Nuremberg 2018

The post DevOps Camp 2022 Recap appeared first on Creatronix.

I visited:

• SWEC16
• FMD 2017
• DevCamp 2017
• MQ! 2017
• Management 3.0 Stammtisch

All very different formats, locations and price ranges as well. So I was curious what was going to happen at #bcwue.

The location

The event took place in the building of the computer science department of the university of Würzburg on a Saturday. A very quiet place at that time, enough parking spaces as well ?

Breakfast

The Sessions

As always I had a hard time choosing. 6 out of 23 sessions was the goal. Here are my choices:

Grundgesetz vs Facebook Community Standards

The lawyer Chan-Jo Jun told us about the case Anas Modamani against Facebook.

Main takeaway: if you have a case at court where technology is involved the outcome is like flipping a coin!

Planning of Webweek Würzburg

Ute shared with us her plan to organize a web week like the Nürnberg Web Week.

The hashtag will be #wueww

Lunchbreak

Agile Retrospectives

Again a very inspiring session from Denis from flyeralarm. (I heard his talk at DevCamp)

Ten rules for agile retros:

• #10 – Time Boxing
  • 5 min – Set the stage, start with something positive
  • 25 min – Gather data
  • 25 min – Generate Insights
  • 30 min – Decide what to do
  • 5 min – Close the retro
• #9 – A Retro always takes 90 minutes
• #8 – As a moderator have a plan B/C
• #7 – Be prepared, be prepared, be prepared
• #6 – Try always something new (start-stop-continue instead of mad-glad-sad)
• #5 – The moderator is not a participant
• #4 – Praise participants
• #3 – Even the moderator has to improve
• #2 – Solutions come from the participants only
• #1 – Don’t panic!

A book tip from Denis is Agile Retrospectives from Derby and Larsen

Employee Development

Robert from Mayflower shared his experiences with Peer Reviews. At Mayflower Scrum Master get together quarterly to give and receive feedback on their main skills.

Founding

A session for founders. I  shared my experience with my guitar teaching business.

Main takeaway: As a founder do not do all by yourself, hire a tax advisor. Do not overthink the need for legal counsel, invest your money in a consultant which checks your business plan.

Draw Toast

Ute introduced us to a nice concept of design thinking. By visualizing steps of a process on single post-its and rearranging and combining them as a team, you can gather a good understanding of what actually is happening..

The feedback wall

One main issue many visitors had, was the length of the camp: many wished it would have been two days 🙂

Bottom Line

This bar camp was small but mighty! I’m really looking forward for next year’s camp.

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Sometimes You get to something by sheer chance: Scrolling down my Facebook timeline I saw the ad for the Audi MQ!

Why do I have to register?

After visiting a couple of bar camps I was curious how Audi was organizing a conference. So the first thing notably different to all events I’ve visited so far was the registering process: Instead of directly buying a ticket I had to write a letter of intent first to lay down my motivation to visit the event. Duh?

I tried to come up with some cheesy argumentation like “co-creating the future of mobility”, pressed send and waited. After a couple of days I go the following answer

Dear Mr. Bögeholz ,

Congratulations! 
You will have the unique opportunity to join us very soon 
to discuss the future of mobility – participate 
at the innovation summit MQ! The Mobility Quotient.
...
Kind regards,
Your MQ! team

After that I could finally buy the tickets. I decided to book the “Premium Package” which included an overnight stay in a hotel nearby the venue.

Walk the walk

You could park at the GVZ and take a shuttle between the venue. The only drawback: I arrived so early, so there was no shuttle to the hotel where I wanted to take a nap before the event. Bummer. So I walked back to my car, drove to the hotel and checked in.

At the hotel reception a lady from the event’s organizer gave us some hints about shuttle service to the venue.

After taking a nap and making acquaintance with Erik Pellemeier and Balach Hussain, we three were driven in an RS7(!) by a a chauffeur to the venue.

The Venue

At the venue’s reception I was handed an id card and a badge with a little map of the venue location. An improvement would be to print the free wifi info on it as well.

Day 1 – Conference Day

A big surprise: Jean Pierre Krämer of JP Performance was booked as the moderator for the talks.

#neverstopquestioning was the official motto of this event.

Day 2  – Workshop Day

I registered for tracks from Spatial Mobility and Sustainable Mobility

Which realities move us forward?

Markus Kuehne -Strategy Lead Immersive Technologies- and his team demonstrated the Audi VR Experience, a VR supported way to configure your Audi at a local dealership. Because I already encountered this concept at Feser-Graf in Nuremberg there weren’t many new insights.

https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/audi-launches-virtual-reality-technology-in-dealerships-9270

How do smart grids support sustainable e-mobility?

Hm, weird discussion.

Can Virtual Collaboration replace real mobility?

This workshop was awesome!

https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/audi-tests-virtual-reality-holodeck-for-faster-product-development-9873

Catering

Catering was top notch, just like you would expect from a premium car manufacturer.

Bottom line

For a company like Audi it was a big step out of their comfort zone. Inviting people to give feedback -very honest feedback indeed- can definitely improve your business. But: the schedule was very German, if you want to create innovation and foster collaboration you cannot clock the whole day into 45 minute slots. You have to give more space for idea exchange.

I will stay tuned for an upcoming MQ!

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After using the mug for one and half year I can say that it really improved my life quality. Suffering from stomach-ache I tried to reduce my filter coffee intake and switched to espresso from a Bialetti stovetop mokka cooker. By using the travel mug I could enjoy my yummy espresso which I cooked at home at work the whole morning, too. As I started to go to barcamps the mug also saved lots of paper cups.

Marketing claims

What I was really interested in -from an engineering standpoint- was to prove if their claim “4 hours hot – 8 hours cold” was valid or not.
Ok, so the marketing claim is a bit wishy-washy – what is hot and cold? Wikipedia seems to differentiate between a hot drink and a warm drink at around 60° C. For cold let’s assume that an ideal temperature of a cold beverage is below 10° C like in the door of a fridge.

To measure the temperature I used the Fluke 87 True RMS Multimeter with the thermocouple probe. The room temperature is around 24°C.

Hot for 4 hours?

I filled the mug with hot water at 96°C to its recommended filling level, closed the cap and set the timer to 4 hours. And waited, and waited ?

Voila! 65,7°C . Very impressive, still 40° above room temperature.

And now to something completely different:

Cold for 8 hours?

To test this claim, I filled the mug with water and ice cubes.

And again, waiting for 8 hours this time, it really surprised me: spot on 10°C. Not too shabby ?

Conclusion

Honestly this test was a bit extreme because you normally wouldn’t put boiling respective ice cold water into the mug and don’t open the cap for the whole time. Nevertheless to have a real world test setup you have to consider your drinking frequency, the kind of drink, the filling level, etc. etc. This scenario was just to show that this mug insulates really really well. Other especially cheaper mugs from my experience get hot on the outside and lose the temperature within an hour.

So, if you are looking for a travel mug which really works, you can stop searching here and buy the Emsa!

Emsa Travel Mug on AMazon US (Affiliate Link)

Emsa Travel Mug on Amazon Germany (Affiliate Link)

Emsa Travel Mug 0.5 Liters on Amazon (Affiliate Link)

Fluke 87 V Digital Multimeter on Amazon (Affiliate Link)

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The Developer Camp 2017 took place at Z-Bau in Nuremberg on May 17th and 18th. 130 people gathered around 10:30 on Wednesday to plan the upcoming sessions.

The worst thing about barcamps: there are far too many sessions with great topics in parallel. So it is tough to pick the right ones for yourself.

34 sessions on Wednesday and 30 sessions on Thursday are a hell of a lot of topics.

So, which ones did I choose?

• Machine Learning with Apache Spark
• React Native
• Retrospective
• Agile Leadership
• Management Fuckups
• Typescript Primer
• Optimizing PhpStorm IDE
• Fighting Fear Driven Development
• JavaScript Refactoring Dojo
• From school to professional Developer
• MVP – minimum releasable crap?
• Bug handling across several teams

Machine Learning with Apache Spark

Dr. Philipp Brune from University of Applied Science of Neu-Ulm gave an overview about the Data Science Platform Apache Spark.

The core concept revolves around Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD) a fundamental data structure of Spark. MLlib is Apache Spark’s machine learning library and you can access data via SparkQL a SQL dialect.

We discussed a couple of potential fields of application and came up with the idea to scan large code bases and apply machine learning to newly written code to assess its quality.

Not directly related book tip: Your code is a crime scene

React Native

Markus showed us how to build a tic tac toe game with React Native. The cool thing is that it compiles to native application either Android or iOS like Xamarin. Hot Reloading is a handy concept which updates the emulator every time when your code changes. So, if You like ReactJS You will certainly like React Native as well.

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/

Retrospective

Although I went to a scrum workshop and did some “scrum but” at work this session was quite inspiring. The easiest way to do a retro is the mad – glad – sad strategy: You draw 3 lanes on a whiteboard an everyone fills out some post-its an puts them into the corresponding lane. Voila!

Main Takeaways:

https://www.retrium.com/resources/techniques/mad-sad-glad

https://nomad8.com/a-5-why-root-cause-analysis-retrospective/

5 Phases of a Retro

• Set the stage
• Gather data
• Generate insights
• Decide what to do
• Close

Further rearding: https://leadingagileteams.com/2014/07/13/5-steps-to-an-effective-sprint-retrospective/

Vega’s Rule: What happens in a retro stays in the retro!

Agile Leadership, now for real

A great talk from Johann Hartmann, CTO of mayflower about the journey from classic management to transformational leadership in their company.

The talk was based on the Tribal Leadership book by David Logan et al.

Main Takeaways:

Levels of a scrum master:

1. Wolf in sheep’s clothing
2. Scrum scribe
3. Facilitator
4. Coach
5. Servant leader

Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo

Core Protocols

Return on Time Invested

Drive by Daniel Pink

Management Brainfucks

The second talk from Johann.

Main Takeaways

Cynefin Framework

Business value of agile methods

The complete slide set:

https://www.slideshare.net/johannhartmann/management-brainfucks

TypeScript Primer

Typescript is a language invented by Microsoft which is transpiled to JavaScript and the main language of several modern frameworks like Angular2.

http://devcamp.jenetic.de/workshops/TypeScript-Primer.html

Craft Beer Tasting

The last “session”  had nothing to do with software but nevertheless with craftmanship. The organizers invited brewsers to present their beers. Some guys from Z-Bau also brew the Z-Bräu

BBQ

Catering was provided by Haun Catering. They know their stuff!

Due to the nice weather we had the chance to sit outside and enjoy ourselves until the late evening. Stay tuned for the second day!

The post Developer Camp 2017 – Part 1 appeared first on Creatronix.

Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.

Of course I missed the early bird priced tickets so I had to pay the full 199€. And then there is this little topic called health. Becoming older is no walk in the park. The days before the event I realised that the conecpt of hacking for 24 hours with little to no sleep was not going to apply to me. Dang!

Nevertheless I was excited to go to this event!

Coffee First

Barista Bastian Reif was in charge of supplying all the nerds and nerdettes with his special coffee creations. Yummi!

Keynotes

To start the day Benno gave a short talk why his company started this event. To get the party started they invited three speakers which gave some nice Lightning Talks.

Dr. Andreas Knie -a sociologist from Berlin- talked about innovation processes. Main takeaway: innovation has to break rules, sometimes even laws.

Josef Stoll -former CTO of Deutsche Bahn- told us about his visions of future mobility.

A great talk was delivered by Dr. Markus Junginger from MHP. His main point is that companies who concentrate on increasing their efficiency are celebrating the status quo instead of embracing progress and innovation.

Sessions

Some guidelines first:

At a barcamp it is always very hard to decide which sessions to attend.  I attended these three:

Delivery 4.0

We discussed issues with inner city delivery and optimizing the last mile. An interesting idea is that cities can prohibit parcel services and provide central hubs from where just one service company delivers all inner city customers. A nice thing I didn’t know about are the boxes for parcels from DHL:

https://www.dhl.de/paketkasten

Ranging from 230€ to 560€ it is an interesting alternative to fetching parcel from the post office.

Securing mobility in rural areas

This session dealt with the challenges of mobility in small towns and villages where public transportation cut back their services over the years.

I learned about new technology for  car sharing

http://www.landauto-carsharing.de/

And that sometimes you don’t need technology to solve problems

Mitfahrbank

Autonomous Driving and the impact on land-use planning

The third and last session I attended was about the impact of autonomous driving of infrastructure and workplaces.

For example autonomous driving can be a big competition for public transportation, when the car that drives you you don’t have to own anymore.

Overall Takeaways

One thing I’ve noticed: In comparison to the SWEC16 the percentage of women was much higher at the FMD. Perhaps that’s due to the topic which doesn’t automatically imply talking about software development.

I didn’t know before that the expression Barcamp is the open-to-the-public alternative to Foocamp where FOO stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”. So it comes from the classic computer science foobar terminology.

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