Extremadura Digital day 2019

This year, I have also had the opportunity to participate as a speaker in the most cutting-edge technological event of the moment in Extremadura, and I would like to share impressions and feelings about this year’s experience on the blog.

First of all, I would like to thank the organization for the effort and work done to put an event like this into operation, I know for good what it implies, and what they have achieved has great merit.

As in almost everything in life, there is always room for improvement, but in general terms, the event worked perfectly, everything was well distributed, there were no incidents, the schedule flowed properly, the quality of the content was very high, the Volunteers and technical staff did an exceptional job and there were visible improvements over what was EDD18.

Regarding the structure of the event, from my point of view, the impressive facilities of the Minimal Invasion Surgery Center Jesús Usón clearly prepared for large-scale congresses. The rooms were spacious, very comfortable and had a very professional technical deployment. The only point that tarnished perfection was in the Wi-Fi connection, which did not allow many frills.

Another of the things that I liked the most was the gesture that was promoted between the organization and the speakers to give part of the budget of the event that was designed for the costs of traveling to the Children’s Red Cross here in Cáceres. At the end of the event, the symbolic delivery was made, but the children admitted to the Cáceres hospital will receive some toys and activities to help them cope with their stay there. A very nice gesture.

Regarding content, the talks that I liked the most were those of @sailormerqury en Black box, white box and the immediate future of Artificial Intelligence that invited the reflection on the impact of AI on society, the one from @Fortiz2305 about High-performance teams: what they are and how to identify them that explained in a very simple and direct way what high-performance teams are like in the software world and why, and that one from @MariaJesusRuiz7 called DELETE FROM stereotypes; that supported by data spoke about the digital gender gap and gave ideas about things we can do to correct it.

I wanted to see the talks of @Ricard0Per titled Your darkest secrets with Hashicorp Vault a tool that I have wanted for a long time: D and of course, the one from @robermorales with a very simple title: Go 101 Which not only sure was great, but it introduces the next programming language I want to approach. I hope to see them delayed.

However, what I stay with most of the event are the sensations of being there with my great colleagues and current and past coworkers, in a more relaxed and close environment, meeting other colleagues and friends who I admire and have special honey and other people with whom I may not have so much contact, but with whom very interesting conversations always arise.

Of course, all the networking of this type of event always leads to the fact that you also end up meeting new and interesting people who in one way or another are involved in the exciting sector of software development.

About my serverless workshop, I have to say that I was very satisfied with the result. Last year maybe if I was a little more nervous the moments before the speech, but this year he was much calmer, perhaps from exhaustion (I was busy for a few days for various reasons) or perhaps because I spent a significant amount of time preparing it.

It is the first time that I have prepared a talk / workshop and I have to say that the main difference I have found compared to the typical 40-45 minute talks is that they require much more preparation time.

Given that we were going to play with the code and that my intention was to show the complete stack of a serverless website that used at least DynamoDB and Cognito, 1h 45 minutes seemed little to me to be able to do everything (however simple the project was) with exercises in which the attendees had to think about the solutions and then implement them.

That is why I decided to prepare some projects and one of them, divide it into clearly differentiated steps and separately tested so that although the attendees had the final code of the solution in their hands, they could follow the guide that I had prepared in each step so that , without worrying about the implementation of the code, they could move forward in the project and understand as much as possible what they were doing thanks to the guide and my explanations.

I tried to interact a lot with the attendees, inviting them to ask and reflect on what I was commenting on. I am aware that there was a lot of content and an important part of it, required a knowledge of AWS and moderately advanced knowledge of web development.

However, I think the example of the complete project provides extra value, because not only are the basic concepts of the framework being worked on, but also a palpable result is seen.

In general, the feedback I have received so far is positive, but I hope I have been able to reach attendees with the message I tried to express or at least have aroused enough interest so that they return to the content of the workshop and try it for themselves or dare with the other examples that I left in the repo: https://github.com/neovasili/101_serverless_workshop

I have also left in the following link the slides that I prepared for the workshop: 101 Serverless Framework workshop.

It only remains for me to add to this retrospective that the afterparty in the 7 gardens, A beautiful corner of the old town of Cáceres, put the end to a magnificent evening that I am already looking forward to repeating at EDD20. Very happy to have been a part of all this. My sincere congratulations to all who have made it possible.

Will you come with us next year? ;)