10 bright reports TechTrain 2018: AI for the masses, interfaces and much more

How to evaluate which reports at the event were better? If you are collecting audience ratings, the task may look simple: calculate the average for each report, that's all. But is it worth it, for example, to take into account the number of viewers? If one report received high marks, having gathered few people, and the other one had a slightly lower average mark, but it gathered crowds, how can we compare this at all?

As a result, any rating of the “best reports” turns out to be partly subjective - it can be considered differently. And we have compiled for Habr a subjective selection from the reports of our IT-festival TechTrain 2018, who have everything excellent with audience ratings.
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Since the IT-festival is a mass event where thousands of people should be interested, we took into account the number of spectators. Not surprisingly, the selection was not from reports like “Flutter's place in the life of an Android developer” (where the audience is limited to a narrow segment), but from speeches on more general topics that are understandable to the most diverse IT people. And not only IT specialists: for example, when Ivan Yamshchikov speaks about AI, it is interesting to listen to him even to people from other spheres.

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How data turns into knowledge and why dreaming is one of the most important skills.

Speaker: Ivan Yamshchikov
Presentation of the report

The topic seems to be not new: in recent years only lazy has not spoken about machine learning. But Ivan Yamshchikov differs very much from the casual “lazy” one from the Internet. Firstly, he works at the Max Planck Institute and collaborates with ABBYY, therefore he sees machine learning simultaneously from an academic point of view and from an industrial one.

And secondly, with all this background, he knows how to present the topic very vividly and easily: without turning it into an academic lecture or into hardcore for specialists, and making it interesting for everyone.

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Intelligence with Ivan Yamshchikov

Speaker: Dmitry Puchkov

After the report of Ivan - also an interview with him. Of course, “Goblin interviews an AI specialist” is a rather non-standard format. And unlike the report, which can be rehearsed to the smallest details, it is also less predictable: nobody could know in advance exactly how interesting it would be. In general, it was an experiment. But the reaction showed that the experiment was successful: judging by the audience reviews, the only noticeable disadvantage of this conversation was the small problems with sound.

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Project management practices and cases

Speaker: Dmitry Zavalishin
Presentation of the report

Dmitry’s entrepreneurial experience is over 15 years old, and IT experience has been around since 1985. It is not surprising that he knows a lot about project management in IT. The interesting thing is this: he begins with the words “everything seems pretty obvious to me in my report,” but the audience did not criticize him for being superficial, but, on the contrary, gave high marks. It turns out that for Dmitry is obvious things, for the industry as a whole, it is far less obvious.

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Why do you need another programming language?

Speaker: Roman Elizarov
Presentation of the report

The novel is now known for its work on Kotlin, and, of course, it affected the report - but one should not assume that this is a “Kotlin report”. Here we consider the general trends in the development of languages ​​for decades - from Pascal to Swift. And to dive into how the approach to typing changed over time, it may be interesting for those who have nothing to do with Kotlin: as it becomes clear, these trends also affect other modern languages.

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Full transparency in the company

Speaker: Mikhail Samarin
Presentation of the report

The idea of ​​“revealing to the employees of the company all the inside information, except that which prohibits opening the law” looks utopian at first glance: it sounds beautiful, but who will go for it? Well, maybe in a startup of three people there are no secrets from each other, but this approach cannot scale to hundreds of employees? Mikhail Samarin from Futurice says that everything is arranged in this way for them - and he shares details about what caused this decision and how it works in practice.

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Myths about Spark, or Can a Sparkle Java Developer Use Spark?

Speaker: Yevgeny Borisov
Presentation of the report

Here is an interesting situation: the report is designed only for javista, immediately cutting off most of the potential viewers, but even with an adjustment for the size of the audience, it still turned out to be very high in the rating. Probably, in part, this tells us that there are many Javista. But what it says exactly is how cool Yevgeny Borisov is: the javists always listen to him with bated breath, and this time is no exception. And everyone else can look at this report for a common outlook - for example, to find out how different are the lyrics of Pink Floyd songs from Britney Spears.

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debugger; for developers

Speaker: Denis Mishunov
Presentation of the report

The themes “perfectionism of developers”, “impostor syndrome” and “recycling”, of course, are not new. And a lot of blog posts about them. But one thing is to read the next post, and another is to watch this performance. The audience clearly added Denis points for artistry: from the very first seconds, when the music begins to sound, it becomes clear that his performance is different from ordinary reports. A separate moment - slides: Denis draws himself illustrations himself, it takes a breakthrough time, but the result is clearly worth it.

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Reliability in distributed systems

Speaker: Oleg Anastasyev
Presentation of the report

The topic of distributed systems is becoming so urgent that we even launch the new Hydra conference. But the format of this report on TechTrain is different: if people interested in the topic gather at Hydra, and some of the speakers will be from the academic world, then a conversation was needed for a wider public and from practical positions.

Who has experience with a very large-scale system and is able to clearly talk about it in Russian? Oleg Anastasyev, who has been working at Odnoklassniki for a long time - that is, in a project with several data centers and thousands of servers, where you inevitably encounter many difficulties and learn to solve them.

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Artificial Intelligence and Digital Business Transformation

Speaker: Dmitry Soshnikov
Presentation of the report

How can artificial intelligence help a business? Dmitry is a technical evangelist at Microsoft, and it is not surprising that his report turned out to be built on examples from the activities of this particular company. But audience ratings show that it didn’t turn into a boring advertisement, but turned out to be bright content.

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Design patterns for smart responsive interfaces

Speaker: Vitaly Friedman
Presentation of the report

Once we tried to publish the decryption of Vitaly's report on Habré, and finally we came to the following conclusion: you still have to watch his speeches. The text does not convey his charisma and charm. Ideally, of course, this must be attended in person. But video is already a good option.

The next TechTrain will be held in St. Petersburg on August 24-25. So far, it is not known which particular reports will be there, but using the compilation above you can get a general idea of ​​the format. And at the same time, now is the most opportune moment to buy a ticket: since June 1, they are becoming more expensive. All the details are on the site .