First of all I need to do a brief explanation of the conference layout. The main part of the conference takes place during Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. In addition to that, there are additional workshops on Monday and Friday.

So on Tuesday was the conference opening. As expected it started with the welcome by Maria Paasivaara (general chair). After that, Janne Järvinen offer a brief presentation of the Need for Speed program. A program in Finland that aims to join students and industry. Next there was the keynote by Linda Rising who talked about Continuous Retrospective. The keynote was fine, I wrote down some resources to check.

At the end of the keynote, every speaker of that day had 30 seconds to present his session and perform an invitation, good idea.

The next session I attended was Why we need architects by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. It was interesting but nothing new for me, so in the middle I switched to the session by Nitor guys who perform a technical demo of their tool Willow which provides support for elastic cloud deployments. I really liked it.

In the afternoon I  attended to a Continuous Delivery session by Omenia guys, nice session. After that it was my first session: Continuous Delivery at Enterprise level with Jenkins and Octopush (the tool I developed with OLX guys). Everything went fine, the demo was successful but just in case I had prepared a short demonstration video. The slides are available here.

The next session I attended was a panel about Continuous Delivery. I stayed there just 15 minutes and I left the room because to my surprise the debate was very poor. I moved to another session about contracts by Antti Kirjavainen which was much better.

Finally we got to the best part of the day: the open space, yeah!!!! We had a marketplace to collect sessions for the three days. The facilitator was Charlie Poole and I liked his performance. After the marketplace we had like a cocktail and next to it the open space sessions started. We had 3 hours from 19.00 to 22.00 with up to 7 parallel sessions. For me the best session was the one I proposed: Programming practices. The goal was simple: share ideas/practices/tips among programmers. Four person joined the session: Daniel (a coach from Germany), Sebastian (a developer/trainer from Sweden), Wouter (a consultant from Holland) and Oller (a tech lead from Sweden). For me it was a great session, I really enjoyed it.

The first session I attended was a workshop by Wouter Lagerwaij: Continuous Delivery with Docker and Jenkins Job Builder.  It was really really interesting, the speaker was an expert on the topic and the workshop’s materials were very properly prepared. I took several useful notes to review. When the workshop finished (on time, of course) we had lunch.

The lunch was self-service and included salad, fish, potatoes, cheese and bread. After lunch there was also coffee and tea available.

In the afternoon I had to choose between Fearless Change workshop by Linda Rising and DevOps and Continuous Value Delivery with Lego and Chocolate workshop by Dana Pylayeva. What do you think I choose? Yes, of course, the second one because is more related to the concerns I usually work. The workshop was fine, after brief conceptual introduction we worked in groups in an activity similar to El Pajarraco but with with a different focus: business value and team collaboration. I liked the activity and also the way Dana presented the DevOps theory.

The last activity of the day was a reception at the City Hall where we shared some drinks and soft food. It was a nice networking activity were I met people from several countries including: Holland, Slovenia, USA, Spain, Sweden, Brazil and Finland of course.