Last week I have attended 2 conferences in Wroclaw. First, there was WROC# and the day after BoilingFrogs.
WROC#
WROC# has built stable and well-known brand awareness in Poland. Especially in the .NET community. As far as I know, this was the fifth edition.
WROC# has evolved over time. The organizer’s committee has changed (and will slightly change again) and new ideas start to appear. What I really liked this year was the magnitude of the different presentations. We had Kubernetes, AI, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, DDD and some other topics. I had an impression that those are the building blocks that can make you a complete software engineer. Maybe the algorithms and data structures could be addressed as well.
BoilingFrogs
BoilingFrogs (BF) is a cult. By many considered as the best conference in Poland. What I truly love in BF is technical diversity. BF participants are programmers using PHP, Java, C# and many other languages. This was a great opportunity to share experience, problems and ideas that we all have in our own ecosystems (I should call them silos).
BF had 3 tracks. The main room (Audytorium) was packed with topics I already know, so that was not interesting for me (but Gerontologia kodu session was something new and innovative!). Instead of that, I did a lot of networking :) Hala Stulecia is a very good venue for that. I had a very interesting discussion about building an MVP with or without tests and plumbing from the start.
My thoughts
Having in mind MVP Summit sessions and comparing them with the above conferences I have mixed feelings. There is too much DDD-related topics, too much obvious soft-skills, too much anonymous use-case sessions. On the other side close to no innovative sessions :(. I know that guys from Bottega are top-class experts and I truly admire what they do, but sometimes it’s just healthy to listen to some other topics :)
Friends
ps. Yes, afterparties were nice :P