How not to succumb to panic, if a lot of programmers came to visit?

Lifehacks of our IT conference

Hello, dear lovers of the Internet of Things! Let me remind everyone that my name is Oleg Plotnikov. I am the director of the industrial internet center of a large Ural IT company. We recently organized a large-scale IT.IS conference. Usually collected no more than three hundred guests. However, this time something went wrong and the result exceeded all our expectations. Two weeks before the start of the conference, almost 800 people registered on the site. For the Chelyabinsk region - this is success. But we had no idea how to fit this “success” in the hall and not scare it with the number of all our speakers.

How not to succumb to panic, if programmers came to visit?

I share with you our valuable experience in organizing the Ural IT.IS-2019 conference.
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How did the idea

We regularly attend IT conferences. This is a really interesting and rewarding experience. But at some point, we realized that we could not always find something new there for ourselves. But on the contrary, there is something to tell and share. And without hiding anything, because it would help others to avoid mistakes.

Competences of Chelyabinsk developers have reached a new level a long time ago. A couple of years ago there was a really big outflow of specialists from the city, but now everything is changing. Work here is always there and it is more than promising.

Our specialists can calmly talk about the entire production cycle of intellectual products - starting with an idea and ending with the introduction of technology. All this information in the framework of reports, workshops can be obtained not metered, but in full and completely free of charge.

Two years ago we held the first IT.IS conference. Only 100 people took part in it - half of which were employees of the company. They talked about web development, mobile applications, the concept of "Smart City" in Chelyabinsk. For dessert - informal communication with all participants and a buffet table.

What was wrong?

For us it was a “breakdown of the pen.” Experience in organizing such an event at that time was not enough. We picked up a not very convenient place, in which everyone could not physically fit. There were few speakers at the conference, and those were few, so we left at 5 o'clock and quietly went home.

What changed?

First, we changed the venue. We chose a more suitable spacious room for this, which can be quickly transformed into several convenient locations. Guests are now simultaneously listening to reports in three different sections.

Secondly, they invited speakers from other companies. After all, our goal is not just to share our experience, but also to rally the IT community in the region. In addition to Intersvyaz specialists, speakers from the Yii Core Team, Everypixel Media Innovation Group, ZABBIX, Yandex and Google spoke with their reports.

Thirdly, we changed the approach to the reports. We divided them into several of the most popular topics: machine learning, artificial intelligence, development of mobile applications, infrastructure, networks, services and telephony. Only 25 reports (6 of them in reserve) and 28 speakers.

Increased the conference itself - now it takes two full days. On the first day, guests can listen to the speakers, present their achievements, receive constructive criticism and feedback, talk to speakers in an informal setting at the buffet table. The second day is completely devoted to workshops and master classes.

What happened?

IT.IS-2019 was the fourth free industry conference from our company. The news of what is really interesting here, spread instantly. Mainly due to word of mouth. But we were still surprised when the number of registered exceeded 700. In principle, there are not so many programmers in Chelyabinsk, we thought. And they were not mistaken. The guys decided to come from all over the area. In addition to the existing specialists, there were many students. Everyone didn’t fit into the conference, but we didn’t cancel the registration at our own risk.

Panicked too not long. We decided to focus on the situation. As a result, not all came, but only 60% of registered participants. But even this was enough to feel how important such conferences are to people.
The most common question was - "why free?" I answer - and why not?

We managed to gather like-minded people to whom this trip cost practically nothing, but instead brought useful experience, interesting acquaintances, new knowledge, contracts and business connections.

Conference program

Our conference was very intense. The speakers presented a lot of open business solutions. The most popular were the following:

Reports:

Google's SRE engineer Konstantin Khankin:
As I learned not to worry and fell in love with a pager

The report of Konstantin Khankin described the basic principles of SRE in Google: a department that focuses on the reliability and maintainability of large systems. SRE at Google not only monitor the health of services, but also pay attention to the fact that the system is easy to develop and maintain the efforts of a small team.

Intersvyaz Engineer Julia Smetanina, Engineer:
How Methodius became Anna: experience in developing and launching voice message classifiers

This report is about the features and problems that we encountered in automating the processing of customer voice calls. We told you which way you will have to go from training the call classifier to the introduction of the system into production. And why, when solving practical problems, it is important to think not so much about stacking and neural networks, as about the design of user interfaces and the psychology of people.

Director of Products and Innovations of Intersvyaz Alexander Trofimov:
Agile Application in Iron Development

This report is about the use of Agile in electronics design. About positive experience and a rake, and also about what you need to be ready customers and performers who decided to work on Agile in a project related to iron.

Oleg Plotnikov, Director of the Intersvyaz Industrial Internet Center (this is me, this is me)

I talked about my destinations of the smart city. Control of heating mains, dispatching of housing and public utilities, lighting control, monitoring of ecology, I already wrote a lot about my articles. I will write about something else.

Master Classes

Workshop from Intersvyaz Ivan Bagaev, head of the development department of the Company, and Nikolai Filipp, head of the web application development team:
Optimization of a web project for high loads

For the workshop, the organizers took the understandable task of monitoring events, implemented in PHP and the yii framework. We considered typical methods and tools for optimizing PHP projects under high loads. As a result, in an hour and a half it was possible to increase the project's productivity by several orders of magnitude. In general, the workshop was designed for mid-level developers, but according to reviews, even some experienced developers found new moments for themselves.

Workshop from the developer, data analysis specialist in the Yandex.View project. Alexey Sotov:
Meet the Fastai Neural Network Framework

Participants processed text using neural networks using the Fast AI framework. We considered what a language model is and how to teach it, how to solve problems of classification, text generation.

Workshop from the engineers of the machine learning department of the Intersvyaz company Yuri Dmitrin and Yuri Samusevich:
Deep learning to recognize objects in images

The guys helped to solve the problem of recognizing objects in images using various architectures of neural networks in Keras. And the participants examined what approaches to data preprocessing are, what hyper parameters will influence during training, and how data augmentation can improve the quality of the model.

We also went overboard a little with a meal, so it was enough not only for workshops that went on the second day of the conference, but even for a full breakfast with colleagues in the office.



Abstracts of all workshops are available on the conference website itis.is74.ru/conf

And the impressions about the conference of guests and participants of the event you can see in the video.

VIDEO