FullStack 2017 in London: details

The FullStack Skills Matter conference, which I traveled with my Avito colleagues, took place July 12–14 in London. It was definitely one of the coolest confaces I have visited, but I will not describe my delight here, but walk through interesting details in my opinion. It may be useful to familiarize them with those who organize such conferences. If you are wondering how FullStack guests themselves participate in distributing the speakers to the halls, what their breakfast, lunch and dinner look like, what reports I and my colleagues liked the most and who won the ticket to FullStack 2018, then you will find a cat.

Photo: flickr.com, skillsmatter

The conference was held in London, in CodeNode . You can read about my impressions of the city itself and see the pictures in my blog on Medium .

Features of the organization

The flow of reports was divided into two categories: general reports for all - at the beginning and at the end of each of the three days of the conference and reports that are held in different audiences at the same time - usually 4 pieces each.

The first keynote from Douglas Crockford (do not ask about the deuce)

CodeNode has very different halls. They have the names of keyboard keys: Control (the largest - 300 people), Enter, Alt (doubles with Tab), Shift, Commands, Backspace and Kapslok. And what about the gap, you ask? And the gap is dedicated to ...

It should be noted that even the largest hall could not accommodate all those who came to the key reports, so one of the small halls was used at this time for broadcasting. Incidentally, it was also filled to capacity as a result, so that some people, like in the main hall, listened to the report while standing, over 80 people gathered there. This is not surprising, since 450 attendees attended the conference in total:

My guess: most of the participants attended all three days of the conference

How to understand exactly how the reports should be distributed among the halls so that the larger hall does not turn out to be half empty, and the smallest one does not become an obstacle for everyone to visit the report? To do this, before each session of reports (and there are two of them before and after the lunch break) such a board is put and after a short time it becomes clear that many people are going to listen to this report, but this one - maybe a couple of dozen. A little more time passes and the voices erase, and instead they write the name of the hall in which this report is destined to happen:

Voting for reports

As elsewhere, there are all sorts of recruitment forces at the conference, and this company even posted a board for you to post your company's vacancy on it:

British recruiting company eSynergy Solutions

Content

As for the content itself, I really liked all the keynote speeches and speeches of Amy Danielle Dansby - a very interesting girl who is involved in creating all sorts of robots, modeling, printing on a 3D printer and directly programming. On the last day I went to her workshop, where we tried to do the thing in the form of a Twitter bird, in the middle of which there was a screen where tweets from a certain account would be displayed using this network card.

Amie DD for favorite work

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen because There were too many of us and we didn’t understand the problem of simultaneously connecting a large number of people at once, but of course I was awakened by the interest in such designers.

In addition, I really liked the report on the generation of music from Tero Parvianen. I chose some reports like this: googled its name and if I saw that it is on youtube, I looked for the following and thus tried to go on a report that may not yet be online.

But the reports that my colleague Alexander Amosov noted:

Understanding blockchain

What is blockchain and how technology can be applied in projects other than cryptocurrency.

Life of a pixel

How the browser renders, what is done to render the simplest pixel, and how to optimize this process.

Once upon a time on the web

Stories about where technology could go if things had gone a little differently in the past. How some standards were adopted, and what ideas and technologies never saw the light of day.

It is important that immediately after the end of the conference, anyone can look at the recording of reports; all you need to do is to register at Skills Matter, even without confirming the e-mail. This is a very nice feature of FullStack.

Food

On FullStack they were very nicely fed: breakfast and lunch. There were also evening beers and cider. When we first arrived, we were given a "starter pack," which, among other useful things and souvenirs, included three cardboard cards that could be traded for alcohol in Speysbare. That, however, did not prevent us and our colleague from having breakfast once, as ordinary Londoners can sometimes do it, or just tourists:

Breakfast in Jimmy and the Bee, 135 Goswell Rd

If breakfast looked like a picking up of favorite rolls or fruit from Speisbar’s rack, then the lunches were packed and lay in huge piles on the tables behind him and ultimately could look like this:

Typical breakfast and lunch at FullStack 2017

The unusual moment here is that there is no separate dining room in the CodeNode.

At the end of the conference, all kinds of cool things were played out and my colleague Vadim Arkadov , who shared the morning meal with me on Thursday, won a trip to FullStack 2018! I congratulate him very much on this, for the conference is cool, I don’t know if you understood this from the above details.

Alexander Amosov and me at the presentation of prizes. Photo: flickr.com, skillsmatter

Perhaps I will also be here again, it was cool! I suggest in the comments to this post to discuss the chips of relevant conferences that you remember, as well as how not to do it.