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I Was Developers

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Last week, I crossed a thing off my bucket list by attending a real developer-focused conference. Together with @morning4coffe I attended the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I must say, I had a blast, even when I was starving and sleep-deprived.

Here are some of the cool talks I really liked:

  • AI: Superhero or Supervillain? How and Why by Scott Hanselman
    • It included an interesting thought about us already having the technology people imagined in movies from the 90s, but we just decided not to use it because it’s uncanny.
  • Fireside Chat with Kris Rasmussen, CTO at Figma
  • The Future of Open Source by Scott Chacon
    • The talk went in depth about the rules of calling something a marmalade in Germany while pointing out the similarities to the question of what actually constitutes an “open-source” project and explaining the reasons behind choosing the Functional Source License for GitButler1
    • Scott also mentioned that GitButler takes part in something called the OSS Pledge, which makes participating companies contribute money to open-source projects depending on the amount of engineers they have. This is another super cool idea, IMO.
  • JSON and beyond by its inventor, Douglas Crockford
    • JSON always needs to stay as a subset of JavaScript, it’s one of its core principles
    • null in JS is a mistake. It is also a mistake that it’s not included in JSON
    • YAML was designed purposefully so that it’s a direct superset of JSON, and JSON was tweaked to be a subset of YAML
    • There are no comments in JSON because it was originally designed to be a data exchange format
    • Douglas also mentioned his new(er) data exchange format, dubbed Nota2

One final thought that came to me on my way back from the conference: if the before of something great is shitty and the after of something great is shitty, it’s still worth it. Sometimes, you know what parts will be shitty beforehand, and sometimes you don’t. But, at the end of the day, there’s probably going to be something you will at least remember from it all (and if it’s a conference, you might make some new friends and get some new swag along the way).

Douglas Crockford presenting his talk with "And finally, one piece of advice: Don't make bugs" written behind him

  1. FWIW, GitButler seems incredibly cool, and having chatted to their CTO @krlvi about it, I have to try it out. ↩

  2. Nota allegedly got its name from the “notation” part of JavaScript Object Notation, because that is the only actually meaningful part of the original JSON name, according to Crockford. ↩