GOTOpia February 2021 Highlights

Last week we wrapped up yet another fantastic online conference after two days surrounded by 300+ developers, architects and engineers from all over the globe. We connected through captivating tech talks and Q&As, fireside chats, quizzes, and even a couple yoga sessions.

We can’t wait to do it all again at our next GOTOpia (new dates will be announced soon!), or at one of our in-person conferences taking place later this year – GOTO Amsterdam, GOTO Aarhus and GOTO Copenhagen. Until then, check out a round up of our favorite moments from the past few days.

Rewatch the first round of GOTOpia February Talks

We’re getting ready to release the first GOTOpia February talks on our GOTO Play app, available for both iOS and Android — get the app to stream or download these videos along with hundreds more from past GOTO conferences.

We’ll continue adding all GOTOpia February talks to this selection in the days to come, and we’ll soon make these available over on our YouTube channel. 

Start with: 

• Scale, Flow and Microservices – James Lewis
• How Microteams Change the Way We Collaborate. Again – Sander Hoogendoorn
• Practical Cloud Native: What Works, What Doesn’t – Sarah Wells
• Embarking on Your Security Journey – Seth Vargo
• Streaming with Structure – Katherine Stanley
• Dungeons, Dragons and Developers – Matt Brunt
  

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Keynote highlights

Chaos Engineering

Nora Jones, leaked a hot secret: incident analysis is not actually about the incident. Going on to highlight that an incident analysis is about revealing your organization, finding out what you’re good at and where your organization needs to improve.

Hybrid Intelligence: First Rate Humans, Not Second Rate Robots

Jacob Sherson shared concerns around continued advances in AI potentially deskilling humans, explaining that rather than focusing our attention on AI, we should be focusing on machine hybrid intelligence — rather than taking the human out of the loop, we can incorporate the human into AI.

Scale, Flow and Microservices

James Lewis presented the odd finding that the more Amazon grows, the easier it is for them to get bigger. James linked the reason to their decoupled systems with decoupled teams, comparing Amazon’s structure to that of natural scaling laws in mammals.

Favorite quotes

“Software architecture is a collaborative game: all lose or win together, everyone has a specific role, communication is essential.”
Eberhard Wolff

“ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS start with a very specific business case when embarking on your chaos engineering journey!”
Olga Hall

“Design the organization you want, the architecture will follow, kicking and screaming (eventually).”
Evan Bottcher (Via James Lewis)

Favorite Tweets

Virtual Highlights at CodeNode

We once again invited our attendees to explore CodeNode Virtual (based on our real-life venue in London). Since the last event, we added some new features and made chatting with other attendees as easy as enabling your mic. Attendees unlocked swag, tried out different outfits, got a beer from the bar, took selfies, found prizes in the scavenger hunts, caught up on our Book Club episodes and lots more…

Straight from our attendees

“As a person, you leave richer than you came.”
Maarten Koopmans, polyglot software engineer and team lead

“One of the best online experiences. Always an interesting and reliable set of talks.”
Eoin Woods, CTO at Endava

“What I like about GOTOpia 2021 is that it is very carefully structured. Every topic is there with reason, they are all in synergy with each other, making a wonderful event in the end.”
Milan Kalinić, senior software engineer at iOCO

“The GOTO conferences address the core problems of software engineering. A mandatory event for all people working in this domain.”
Michael Repplinger, team leader at SHS - Stahl-Holding-Saar

Thousands More Talks on YouTube

Most talks were recorded, and our team is already working on editing them for our YouTube channel. You have more than a thousand videos from previous conferences to keep you occupied while you wait. Our YouTube community of nearly 210,000 subscribers is growing every day, and we’d love for you to be a part of it.