The last week of February I went to Montréal to speak at ConFoo. It was my first time in Canada and I was really excited about the trip and the conference, but before I tell you about the conference, let me share with you a little story.
When I sent a few proposals to the conference back in August 2015 I didn’t pay too much attention to the date of the conference. Then I got the acceptance email three months later and I realized that perhaps the weather in Montréal during February would not be so “nice”. I googled how the weather was during February 2015 and then… ouch! Yes, on average it was something between -5ºC and -25ºC. Challenge accepted! (I guess)
But let’s talk about the conference. My favourite talks were:
12 Reasons Your API Sucks by Keith Casey: In his session Casey explained what makes an API good, how to design a good one, the things we need to care about and a lot of examples of bad APIs. The talk was really funny and interesting.
A TARDIS for your ORM – application level timetravel by Magnus Hagander: This session was amazing! Magnus, a PostgreSQL Core team member, explained how to built an applicacion level timetravel for our data using Postgres amazing features such as the timestamp with timezone range (tstzrange) field without modifying our source code.
Cloud Native Java by Josh Long: Watch a Josh’s talk is always a must. He’s a great speaker and really passionate during his talks. He did a live-coding session about different components available in the Spring Cloud Platform to make our live easier as developers creating a microservices architecture.
And speaking about Josh, we ran into each other after my first talk and went together to see his Pivotal colleague Mark Heckler talk. I knew Mark previously from twitter and Josh introduced us to each other.
After Mark’s talk we went to enjoy a drink and we talked about a lot of things. It was really great spending some hours that day and the following with them. Thank you guys!
About my talks, this time I did Metaprogramming with Groovy and Mum, I want to be a Groovy full-stack developer. I finished both talks really happy and I got very good feedback, specially for the Metaprogramming talk 🙂
The conference was really good, the venue, the food, the nine parallel talks to choose,… but there was a strange thing during the conference presentation. One of the organizers spoke some sentences in English and then the other one in French. After that, more sentences in English and then in French, and so on and so forth. It was really odd. The worst part was during the closing keynote because they spoke first in French and then in English :-(. But, besides that the conference was great.
A final advice: If you want to go to Montréal, be sure you go during summer unless you really like the cold and snow 😉
This was the third stop of my #IvánOnTour2016. Previously I did the inaugural talk at Spring Madrid User Group and also an introductory talk about Groovy at T3chFest.