“The most interesting parts of a conference are the coffee breaks”
That is a key idea on which the concept of “unconference” was based upon. That the networking and information transfer, the best part of a conference, happens in a more efficient and enjoyable manner between sessions.
Also known as an open space conference, an unconference steers away from the classical concept of fixed conferences with predetermined subjects of discussion.
Participants propose subjects of their own. These can be topics on which they have knowledge and want to share, or are seeking knowledge from other participants.
Non-profit, low-cost. Very much resembles a retreat with highly-collaborative interactions.
After a few years, SoCraTes has expanded as an event, and now takes place in multiple places across the world (United Kingdom, Belgium, Canary Islands, Switzerland). The Germany edition of SoCraTes took place in Soltau.
The conference started on Thursday and ended on Sunday.
On Thursday, the conference began in the evening. Participants attended a World Café, a meeting where they got to know each other better.
On Friday and Saturday were the Open Spaces, the main attraction of the conference. On Sunday, the participants were free to make workshops of their own, where they could apply the knowledge they had accumulated and/or work on different projects with people they had gotten to know at the event.
The main tool of the open space: the board! On the left side of the board were the time slots available for the session (base time of 1 hour each), and on the upper side, where the meeting rooms available for the sessions.
After the World Café event from Thursday, the participants had gotten to know each other and were more comfortable with sharing their ideas. So, they were invited to line up and present the topics they were interested in.
The line of people waiting to add topics stretched on both sides of the board. The board was filled with topics, which stretched out from 10:30 up until 18:00 on both days! Some topics were later expanded and discussed at dinner, after dinner, at the bar, or repeated the next day.
An average of 10 participants attended each session, creating the atmosphere of work colleagues discussing random topics after work, over beers. Most topics were discussed without any presentations prepared before, so the questions were welcomed at any time clarification was necessary. Because of the small number of people, the questions could flow at a comfortable pace for all that were present.
Some sessions started discussions that grew into other sessions. In these cases, they were either continued outdoors, in the hotel court, they found another timeslot later, or they exchanged contact info or blogs.
Inevitably, there were situations when a participant would leave during a session, which was perfectly ok. Participants were free to attend more than one session in a given timeslot, and get basic information or references from each.
Bootstrap library was presented. This library permits an easier design of the front-end of web pages by adding predefined CSS templates to already existing div elements in web pages.
2 . Personal knowledge management and productivity
Blog all about it. If you have an idea or article you want to share or remember, a blog can be an excellent centralizing spot.
“Getting things done” – David Allen
Apps with email integration, to remember and remind about tasks. Examples: Todoist, Evernote
Pomodoro technique, allocating a modest fixed timeslot for a well defined task
Personal Kanban boards
Mind mapping tools
Podcasts. Examples: “Turing incomplete”, “.NET rocks”
3 . Blender 3D modelling introduction
4 . Remote work, where a number of people shared their thoughts on this process and compared notes. Some of the people worked remotely, some had colleagues who worked remotely, and some managed over people who worked remotely. Each brought some original ideas to the table.
Tips:
Communication is improved via webcams
Communication should be often, either via email or wiki pages
Apps
Skype for voice
Slack for chat
VNC for screen sharing
Cons
Working alone
Distraction from non-working environment
Pros
Time independence
Time for personal stuff
Office distractions absent
5 . Remote pair programming, where some tools were presented, with the purpose of improving this process
Saros – Eclipse plugin, in which two users write on the same code. Only one resource in the IDE is shared via an XMPP protocol, so the users are actually sharing text with this plugin.
Tmate – Instant cross-platform terminal sharing
Screen Hero
Cross platform screen sharing
HD quality
Voice chat
6 . Code is music
In which examples of code were shown that create music, by setting the frequency, amplitude and tone of sound waves and overlapping multiple music beats to create a complex music piece.
7 . Monorepos
How Facebook and Google distributed their source code repositories
How one startup in Berlin experimented in having each employees’ salary disclosed to all other employees
When new people join the company, their salary is decided based on a 2D chart depicting their experience on one axes and their expected responsibilities on the other axes. All employees can participate when deciding the new employees’ salary.
At first, most were paid less than what they should have earned, based on the chart
Presently, most are paid more
Excel sheet with what they should get and what they actually get
8 . Concurrency, robustness & Elixir
Elixir is derived from Erlang
Basic physics don’t permit much more MHz in processors, so basic programming paradigms should be changed
Functional, robust, lightweight VM, massively concurrent, asynchronous
An ecosystem which allows design patterns to be added to build robust systems
Improvements in Elixir:
Syntax improved over Erlang, inspired by Ruby
Full Erlang compatibility
Elixir processes are extremely lightweight
Photos: https://twitter.com/coderbyheart/
Socrates 2015 Sessions: https://www.socrates-conference.de/wiki/2015/index
"Code is music": http://supercollider.github.io/
