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!

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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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