Recently Michał, our CEO, and I had the opportunity to participate in Craft Conf in Budapest. The event was a software craftsmanship conference. With 2200 attendees from all over the continent it is one of the biggest such conferences in Central Europe.

The six presentation tracks were filled with a fantastic international speaker list such as Martin Fowler, Bjarne Stroustrup, Bryan Cantrill, to name a few.

It was hard to choose, so we split the work. Michał concentrated on topics on team, project, and company management. The speakers gave a lot of compelling insights on how to run and develop innovative, sound, and agile software company.

I attended some more techie presentations about service mesh solutions, data pipelines behind Call of Duty or the nitty-gritty details of video streaming in the browser from UStream. It was interesting to hear how Twilio provides a self-service, declarative, build-, deploy-, and run-platform for their more than 100 independent product teams that otherwise work like standalone startups. There was a great introduction to the Elixir language and Nerves project which focuses on embedded and IoT, including the most energetic and at the same time hiccup-free live demo I’ve seen in years.

The main hall showcased a number of the big IT companies present on the Hungarian market (Prezi, IBM, Microsoft, Skyscanner, BalaBit, LogMeIn etc.), which was not only an excellent opportunity to network but also to have fun like shooting down bugs for goodies.

The surprising venue is also worth mentioning, the conference took place in the Railway Museum. Having lunch between locomotives and riding a mini-steam-engine train added to the overall vibe.

With such an excellent organization and program Craft Conf is undoubtedly an event worth attending. We will share the knowledge obtained here within the Appliscale team and certainly come back next year