I’ve just arrived home from a wonderful trip to Novi Sad, Serbia. Over the weekend growIT took place, which is a new format by a team of successful conference organizers, mostly known for PHPSerbia – which is going strong for the last 5 years.
This time they tried something new, they called it the full-stack conference, I like to call it a T-shaping conference, because it was not just for developers.
The topics ranged from:
- MySQL scalability and reliability
- Dealing with timezones
- PWA with service worker
- E2E testing react
- Games in WebXR
- The importance of tech coaching
- How to (not) manage teams
- Supporting mental health in the tech workplace
- The grey haired developer
In total there were 33 speakers and I was invited to be one of them. For a first-time conference speaker there could not have been a better conference!
As I helped organize the PirateSummit a couple of years ago I know how stressful the job of the organizing team is.
To deliver such a high quality conference outside of there hometown and at the same time be always helpful to all attendees and the speakers is one hell of a job, especially with a small team.
The feedback from attendees and speakers alike have been completely positive. Sure there are always small things to improve – like breaks between all slots – but that’s complaining on a very high level.
I was especially impressed with the hospitality the speakers received. In my opinion this is also the biggest reason why I’ve learned so damn much at one conference.
It’s the essence of a truly agile team and why I feel that T-shape fits better than full-stack. Every speaker was an expert within his or her field, but that meant each and every one was learning from the others.
I consider myself a very good developer with a versatile range of skills, but to then realize that even I had to learn ways to improve the way I use basic git commands makes each and everyone humble again.
I’m eagerly awaiting the videos of the talks to be published, so that I can watch the talks I could not attend myself – it’s a lot, due to so many interesting talks in three tracks.
While doing that I’m thinking of new topics that I could cover. Maybe I’ll get the chance to return to growIT 2019.
Great job Aco, Kristina, Nemanja and the rest of the team
and thanks again to Srdjan for babysitting us 😉