SocratesBE ’19 unconference diary

This weekend I had the opportunity to visit my favorite work event of the year: a socrates unconference. This is a quick brain dump of the things I learned in sessions, hallway discussions or over a drink. My goal is not to give a full overview of the topics covered during the sessions, but rather showcase what a typical day at a Socrates unconference could look like in case you are on the fence about attending one in the future.

Socrates unconferences use the open space format, this means that there is no predefined schedule. People just show up & share their own ideas for sessions in the morning. After some self-organization we end up with the schedule for the day. The next day this pattern repeats. It’s amazing to see how sessions and discussions during the first day often result in totally fresh session proposals the second day.

Techorama 2014 takeaways

Last week I attended the very first installment of Techorama, a new conference for developers hosted in Mechelen, Belgium. This post will walk you through my experiences of the conference and will highlight the most important takeaways from the various talks I attended.

General impressions

The conference had tracks on ALM, Mobile, Web, Cloud, Language & Tools, Sharepoint & SQL and best-of Build 2014. I mostly attended the Web and ALM tracks since they are most relevant for my current work, but I dabbled in the other tracks here and there. I expected this conference to be heavily Microsoft-oriented but it turned out that there were a lot of non-Microsoft specific talks. As a matter of fact, it would have been entirely possible to schedule your conference without attending a single Microsoft-specific talk.

Most of the talks I attended were high-quality presentations. The booth hall had some entertaining side tracks and there was a lot of swag up for grabs. The food was delicious (warm meals instead of the usual sandwiches!). Overall there was a very good vibe during these two days.