YOW! London 2022 — It’s Been a Blast!
On November 29-30 we wrapped up yet another fantastic conference at CodeNode, London after two days surrounded by 200+ developers, architects and engineers from all over the globe. We connected through captivating tech talks and Q&As, fireside chats, VR experiences and even a rock band.
A huge thanks to all who joined us. We can’t wait to do it all again at one of our in-person conferences taking place in 2023 – GOTO Amsterdam, GOTO Aarhus and GOTO Copenhagen among others. Until then, check out a round up of our favorite moments from YOW! London 2022. We’d also love to connect with you on Twitter, where we’ll keep you updated on new videos, podcasts, upcoming GOTO meetups and more!
Top three most rated sessions
Jessica Kerr on gamification
Traditional gamification entailed adding points, competitions and earning badges to make work appear more game-like. This method has proved to be counterproductive as it corrodes collaboration.
It’s imperative to understand how game designers craft an experience for the players, and then apply those principles to the experience of participating in a software team.
You can view the session and access the slides here.
Dave Farley on engineering in software
‘Software Engineering’ is more than just a label for ‘programmer of some kind.’ Engineering is the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient solutions to practical problems. Simply, engineering is how engineers solve hard problems. More simply, engineering is the foundation on which high-tech culture is built!
Farley outlined the fundamental principles underlying engineering: iteration, feedback, incremental, experimental and empirical. In short, the faster the feedback, the smaller the correction.
You can view the session and access the slides here.
Holly Cummins on fun at the workplace
Did you know the most scientific research about fun and humor is not fun, and not humorous? But it turns out that ducks are the funniest animal.
Fun in the office or at work has been shamed and this dates back to the Puritans, who even banned Christmas because it was fun. There is a strong connection between fun and psychological safety. If everyone is having fun together, that is a sign of safety. If only one person is having fun, there is no safety. Cummins outlined key tactics to deploy fun in your teams safely.
You can view the session and access the slides here.
Top quotes from speakers
“Never solve a code problem by introducing a deployment problem.”
Hannes Lowette
“Why are most of our workplaces not fun? It's because dumb processes control us. And fun is important.”
Holly Cummins
“Having data engineers on the team who can tell you what technologies you should be using. That’s key to preventing failure.”
Jesse Anderson
“If you can’t afford to be wrong, you can’t do anything.”
Dave Farley
When music meets programming
Apart from the insightful talks, the conference welcomed a show by the Line breakers, a rock band featuring Dylan Beattie, Hannes Lowette, Mark Rendle and Vagif Abilov.
Will AI take over the world?
The conference ended with Thomas Endres, Martin Förtsch and Jonas Mayer talking about AI, its architecture and what it can do. The demo was powered by neural networks that created art, deep fakes in real-time, an NLP chatbot, and an AI that generated social media comments as a human would.
Recently, AI has been picking up a lot of steam, as the tech is getting astonishingly skilled at mimicking authentic writing, raising questions about how readers will tell the difference between the bot’s content and authentic human-written language. While we’re all far from handing over the reins to AI completely, time will tell how we leverage the technology for the better, not worse.
Hear it from the attendees
“Because its organization was terrific and the lined-up speakers delivered insightful sessions overall”
Rigo Fabio, IT lead developer
“The quality of the talks was very high, good variety and the conference wasn't too large so you could interact easily and chat with other attendees.”
Ian Thomas
“Some good content in there for everyone. All in all, pretty good content and lots to learn from.”
Sachin Engg
“Interesting talks, great people to speak with, a really friendly atmosphere - all around great event!”
Abbi Leverton, community events host
"I had a great couple of days learning and refreshing on lots of topics from lots of people I really respect in the industry and I was also able to bring a junior engineer too who was attending his first conference and was blown away."
Jason Murphy, engineering manager
Our favorite tweets
Thank you to our partners
We were privileged to have companies such as LaunchDarkly, CodeScene, DoubleCloud, Contrast Security, Erlang Solutions, Aardling, Digital Daze, OpenCredo and Eyeora among a few others as our partners who engaged the attendees by handing out swag and giveaways including Star Wars Lego sets.
More on YouTube
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