A Look Back at GOTOpia Europe 2020

This past Friday we wrapped up our second conference held fully online. Over 3 days surrounded by a group of 350+ developers, we shared virtual coffees and beers, stretched our limbs in yoga and practiced mindfulness to kick off each day, built avatars and took selfies to commemorate the time we had ‘together’ at our virtual London venue, CodeNode, and, most importantly, we learned a ton from 30+ of the brightest minds in tech in talks, Q&As and keynotes while genuinely connecting with one another throughout.

If you didn’t make it to GOTOpia Europe 2020, stay tuned for more upcoming online conferences. Until then, we’re here to share a few of our favorite moments with you.

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Keynote highlights

The Pragmatic Programmer 20 years later
Dave Thomas shared his insights on the changes in the world of computing since writing the original release of The Pragmatic Programmer — looking back at the software industry over the past 20 years, the only thing that hasn't changed are people.


Where we're going, we don't need servers
Sam Newman explained that the secret to getting things done is to avoid doing the things you don't have to. He questioned why we are so enthralled with the idea of owning our infrastructure, when we should focus on doing the work we specialize in.


Software is details
Kevlin Henney highlighted that software IS details, and so the small details of your program really shouldn't be disregarded. Don't have your code running on assumptions and hope. Know what your program does, the code you don't own and know the dependencies.

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Our favorite quotes

"It's not the end of the world if you're wrong. Go ahead and try out your ideas."

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"The key to making working remotely work is trust!"

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"Reinforce behaviors that can be described by the actions that are performed.” [...] “The key is the sequential nature of continuously making decisions where you get to a point when you have an optimal strategy."

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Our favorite tweets

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Unveiling our virtual London venue, CodeNode

We’ve been working on a virtual conference world inspired by CodeNode, our real life tech venue based in London. And while it’s still in the early stages of development, we gave GOTOpia Europe attendees a chance to jump in and try it out during the conference. 

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What the attendees are saying

If we haven’t yet convinced you to join us at our next event, some of our attendees’ feedback might do the trick:

“Chatting with your fellow attendees and even the speaker during the sessions adds a whole new dimension to the conference and provides a great sense of community.” - Jan Groot


“The keynotes were so different from one another in a very cool way and the other sessions as well. Having the Slack channels to continue the conversation and exchange links for further reading was great.”
- Vera


“GOTOpia gives you the opportunity to look at software development from quite a number of different perspectives in one conference: the technical perspective on APIs, security, frameworks, cloud and the more human centered perspective on how we work together.”
- Anonymous


‘There is a large variety of topics with outstanding speakers, the organisation is flawless and people are kind :)” - Valentin Vion

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Thousands more talks on YouTube

Most talks were recorded, and our team is already working on editing them for our YouTube channel. While you wait, you have more than a thousand videos from past conferences to keep you busy. Our YouTube community of almost 190,000 subscribers is growing daily, and we'd love for you to be a part of it.

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We couldn't have done it without these fantastic GOTOpia Europe 2020 partners