Being a developer, working on highly specialized projects, with time you stop exploring the world around you. This is a common problem for all of us. I'll tell you a few words about how this happens and how we figured it out.
Caution traffic! Under the cut there are photos in pretty good quality.
A few years ago, I discovered that I did not understand anything in the outside world.
People created and closed startups , invented JS frameworks and replaced the old ones, soldered some hellish nishtyaki , Abdulmanov wrote several articles with which it is absolutely impossible to compete in terms of the number of advantages, and so on.
And I sat and wrote Java code. Then he began to work at home and finally lost his human appearance. The farther into the forest, the more specialized projects became. It became clear that a little more, a couple more years - and I will only understand these things and nothing else. Had a job change - how to sell this highly specialized secret knowledge? Well, yes, there are three and a half more companies that will take me for sure ... Or not. And how do you generally communicate with friends who are cutting cool microservices on Golang and Rust? What am I doing with my life?
So began the transformation, as a result of which I came to freelancing, and then to the organization of conferences. But if you just want to understand what is happening in the world, this way is a strong overkill. Shoot nuclear sparrows.
Now there is a way easier and better. Starting this September, we are doing TechTrain - a festival where you can watch a slice of the entire modern IT reality in two days, talk live with half of the Russian IT world (including top speakers and company representatives), and so on.
Let's take a closer look. Here we have a weekend, a certain small amount of money (no more than two thousand rubles), and I want to get the most for it. Remember the book "Your Best Year Ever" (one of the best books in 2018 according to Business Insider )? Something similar, but only we want to arrange not the best year, but the “best weekend”.
As it was found out once in the “Levada Center”, the average person enjoys watching TV most of all. (Lord, burn!) We enter a small group of those who are more interested in learning something new.
Options:
- Read a new article (you need to read regularly) or even a whole book;
- View the video from the conference (less often, but still need);
- Allocate time and go to the mitap (once a month);
- Go to a big conference on your technology (once a year).
IT is developing in Russia, there are more and more opportunities to do something interesting at the weekend. But there is a problem: there is no more free time. For example, conferences - specialized, go to several conferences at once will not succeed. There is a growing specialization, not an outlook.
In addition, to learn something new to expand the horizons - is doubly difficult. It is necessary to separate the important from the unimportant, otherwise the task skop will go to infinity. But in order to separate the important from the unimportant - you need to have an outlook ... To understand recursion, you need to understand recursion. What to do?
TechTrain and what will be on it
We seriously believe that a broad outlook is the most important component of an IT person’s career. Therefore, on TechTrain, we decided to gather representatives of various IT areas under one roof. You can share experiences and tell who does what in their work.
It will be possible to develop virtualization with those whom you read every day on the Internet. There will be community leaders, moderators of famous Telegram chats, and so on. In the future, these acquaintances can be used to bring the dialogue in these chat and communities to a new level.
There will be a huge number of booths of companies: from start-ups to banking enterprises, from hardcore hardware to fashionable JS-developers. As planned, it will be possible to be tempted to a new job, to solve puzzles in a fan, to dissolve the creators and developers of products for holivary about their use and interior design, and much more.
And there will be reports that are the speakers of the largest professional conferences.
The exact list of reports is being formed right now, and that's who is already with us:
- Roman Elizarov - tmlid Kotlin libraries in the company JetBrains. Well-known expert in the field of multi-threaded programming, member of the organizing committee of the ACM ICPC Final, winner of the President's Award in the field of education, Java Champion;
- Denis Mishunov - UX-guru, frontend developer, popular international speaker, who understands art and psychology, has a passion for optimizing performance;
- Dmitry Soshnikov , an evangelist for FI and AI at Microsoft, is working on Internet-of-Things, F #, Roslyn and popularizing modern software development technologies;
- Vitaly Friedman - Co -founder and Editor-in-Chief of Smashing Magazine (one of the largest resources on web design and web development), UI / UX expert, author of books and top reports;
- Anna Veronika Dorogush is the head of a group dedicated to the development of machine learning algorithms in Yandex, in particular, CatBoost . Worked for ABBYY (in the morphology group), Microsoft, Bing, Google;
- Ilya Klimov is the owner of WookieeLabs, a company specializing in JS solutions. 12 years of experience in JS, 10 years of teaching in two universities;
- Anton Arkhipov - the master of builds and the magician of integrations. Technical evangelist at JetBrains. Previously - product manager at ZeroTurnaround. Resident podcast "Debriefing". 10+ years of Java development;
- Sergey Abdulmanov - marketing director at Mosigra, number 1 on Habré ( milfgard );
- Philip Keks is a developer with diverse experience, from Enterprise and finance to high-performance graphics applications and video games. Active speaker and participant in technical conferences in Europe and Russia;
- Ivan Yamshchikov - author of Neural Defense , an analyst / consultant at Yandex, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig, Germany);
- Vitaly Khudobakhshov - leads the development of data analysis tools at JetBrains and at the same time is a leading analyst at Odnoklassniki.
All this is already interesting, but it is only the beginning. Two days, 24 reports - you can always find something to your liking from so many topics. We, most likely, will publish their detailed descriptions in a separate post.
If you have never been to the events of the JUG.ru Group (for example, rightly consider tickets to be expensive), this is a chance to visit the reports for very little money and see if you need it.
And of course, there will be food, coffee, aftepati with beer and other means of maintaining a constructive dialogue.
In the evening there will be BOF sessions. If you have already been to the conferences of the JUG.ru Group, then you already know what it is. If not, we will most likely write a separate post about it.
In general, it turns out a great way to spend a weekend pleasantly and usefully - and all this is no more than 2000 rubles (for an individual, of course). That is, it costs less than a book like Effective Java. Coverage will not so deep, but wider. If you participate in everything and do not lose time, you can get more knowledge than from the book.
What about communities?
If you are a representative of the community, then we will allocate a stand area and can help with the equipment. You will be able to chat with regulars of your communities, chats and podcasts, as well as with completely new people. It’s a good idea to record a new podcast release right there, or to have a mini-MAP.
We will have a track with reports specifically dedicated to communities. You can apply for your report.
But this is not the only possible format. For example, everyone really likes live demos, hands-on trials, mini-meetings right next to the booth. All this is quite possible to do, we will help.
The optimal number of participants at the mini-mitap is no more than 30 people. If you plan to collect more - you should think about a full-scale report in one of the common tracks.
And, of course, the community leader gets a special TechTrain ticket. If you decide to participate, you can write to me in a personal or better yet - apply on the site .
Here who already with us:
DotNet.Ru is a group of independent .NET-developer communities from all over Russia. Hold regular meetings to share news and best practices in software development;
MskDotNet # 14
PiterJS is a monthly Mitap around javascript, Node.js and everything connected with it. Spread knowledge, talk about the pain and the thrill of JavaScript programming;
PiterJS # 19
GDG St. Petersburg is a non-profit IT community based on Google technologies for developers for Android, VR, AR, IoT, Go, Chrome and others;
GDG DevFest North 2017
Kotlin User Group - regular meetings about Kotlin in St. Petersburg;
Kotlin Meetup # 2
JUG.ru - Java User Group in St. Petersburg.
Mitap "Graal Almighty"
Atlassian User Group - conduct mitaps around Atlassian products with current trends (Agile, DevOps, ChatOps). Communicating how to improve life on an existing infrastructure;
And what for companies?
We are waiting for different companies - from the harsh banking enterprises to startups to develop frameworks. We expect that there will be several thousand people on TechTrain, which will help you to turn around in full force. You can:
- Strengthen the team with interesting candidates and find out what they think about you;
- Communicate with technical directors and chief engineers of hundreds of companies;
- Tell thousands of your users about their products and services;
- Financial products can be shown to several thousand wealthy and technically advanced users;
- For IT-intensive products, this is an opportunity to meet advanced early adopters.
To apply for participation with a stand, you need to fill out this form here on the site .
From engineers - for engineers
We will also try to bring a bunch of interesting things like augmented and virtual reality, robot battles, arrange programming contests (for example, like HolyJS - two people compete in writing code, but don’t see the result of execution until the last moment) or anything else unusual.
Now we agree on all this and later we will describe everything in more detail in a separate post. From what exactly will be - an exhibition of retrocomputers. It will be the iconic Apple Lisa , for which it is already worth a look at the exhibition.
Remember that we, the organizers, are also IT specialists, and we will take care that it is interesting first of all to us, and not just to the abstract geeks and anime artists.
This festival is not only and not so much for geeks. Rather, it is a festival for engineers from engineers.
Next steps
The festival will be held September 1-2, in St. Petersburg, in Expoforum.
Further acquaintance with the project can be continued on the website: http://techtrain.ru . Pay attention to the newsletter subscription form: the news will definitely be.
We are waiting for you on TechTrain! It will be great!