GOTO Amsterdam

Hi, Habr!

Under the cut a small review of the conference GOTO Amsterdam, which I happened to visit in June. And no, I chose it not because of the location, but because the program had interesting reports to me. The city was only a pleasant scenery.
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About the conference

GOTO conferences are dedicated to software development and have been held for 9 years. They are positioned as events organized by developers for developers, and their slogan is For developers, by developers.

GOTO topics cover the full development stack, including cloud technologies, DevOps, security, as well as current trends such as machine learning and quantum computing.





The conference has its own application GOTO Guide, which allows you not only to get all the necessary information about the event, to plan your schedule, but also to communicate with participants and speakers.

It lasts 4 days, in the first two of which workshops are held (for example, Continuous Intelligence: Data Science, Hypothesis Driven Development and Continuous Delivery), and the reports start from the second.





One of its distinguishing features is the ability to pay for each day of stay separately (usually, if there are similar options, then for master classes and the main program). Those. You can pay one any day of stay (it is not necessary that it was a master class) or all four. The amount, by the way, is rather big: one day of participation costs 575 euros, including VAT. Those who wanted to attend all the days of the conference, including master classes, had to pay 2,300 euros.

About the site and organizing

The conference was held in the very center of Amsterdam, in the Beurs van Berlage building, which was built at the beginning of the 20th century as a trading exchange. Getting to it is convenient, whether you live in the center or in a remote area of ​​the city. The building is large, beautiful and quite suitable for such events. In the central hall was the main activity and communication in the intervals between the reports (and someone instead). The entire space of this hall was divided into a reception, a dining area, a recreation area and an exhibition where Amazon, Google, GoCD, Beat stands were seen. I didn’t see any remarkable activities and entertainment for the participants at the stands. There was also no cute merchandising that they would give or play. But the organizers themselves attended with a souvenir.









Reports were from 10 am to 18 pm with a lunch break. The speakers spoke in English and, as far as I know, their speeches were not translated into other languages.

I obviously did not have enough normal navigation through the halls (to pronounce the names of which, by the way, was of great difficulty), so as not to rush about in search of the right. IMHO, for the convenience of foreign participants could assign a number to each hall.



The territory of the site was free and well-functioning Wi-Fi, if desired or necessary, it was possible to work.

Before the start of the reports they called the gong.



The main surprise for the money was food. Fed exclusively not very tasty vegan food. I have nothing against vegetables and fruits, but sandwiches with rice and some beans for everyone is, of course, overkill. And almost discrimination. Therefore, during a break, my colleague and I went to dinner at the nearest restaurants.

About the program and reports

Among the speakers were representatives of AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, and even the soloist of the Iron Maiden group, Bruce Dickinson, with a report Turning Your Customers into Fans (by the way, I, having returned to Moscow, realized that I was stupid and didn’t make a selfie with him) and one of the founders of the Prometheus monitoring system, Julius Volz.

I personally liked the Liz Rice report from Aqua Security on Getting to Grips with Kubernetes RBAC , in which she described how Role-Based Access Control works in Kubernetes. The topic is quite interesting, and she spoke quite understandably, showing everything with real examples and informative slides.

In general, I can say that most of the reports touched upon either very general topics, which give some superficial knowledge on the subject and do not bring anything new (like, for example, the report on Prometheus, which I mentioned above), or on very specific ones, for example , Quantum Computing ( Can Quantum Computing Help to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe? ).

About to go or not to go

You can go to the conference, and it is absolutely suitable for all engineers of IMMOBILE development (be it backend, frontend, DevOps or testing), but it is important to make sure that there are interesting reports in the schedule. After all, the diverse subjects, although covering a wide audience, may lead to the fact that interesting topics will not be enough to go to another country for a few days for their sake, and even for a lot of money.