Build Stuff 2014 Review

We just got back from BuildStuff ’14 in Vilnius, a "software development conference". As during the last year, we had a great week; this time, apart from attending, our code-review tool - Codebrag - was a partner.

How was it? Firstly, from an organizational point of view, everything went smoothly. Food was great and wifi was fast & stable, so the basic human needs were met. One thing to improve are the chairs: they were quite uncomfortable and too tightly packed.

Secondly, the content. As always, quite a lot of interesting presentations on various topics: from philosophy through agile, database design to object-oriented and functional programming. I attended quite a lot of C#/F# talks which were very interesting for a Scala programmer, though it would be nice to have a bit more variety.

Last year there were more Scala and Erlang talks and there’s a lot of new languages and trends out there: Go, NewSQL, Docker to name just a few. It would be a pity if BuildStuff became a .NET conference.

But, I learned a lot of new things! Just a few notes:

- According to Greg Young, everybody will end up using Hibernate anyway,

- Pieter Hintjens doesn’t buy pizza basing on where its ingredients are bought,

- Microwaves and incubators do have a lot in common, says Luc de Brabandere.

Plus as always, I got envious of F# type providers and the quick eval from the IDE.

And finally a very important ingredient of every conference: both the conference after-party, and the poker tournament (although I lost of course ;) ) were great.

See you next year :)