So yesterday (11th of November) I’ve landed in Berlin, knowing that in a few hours I’m going to go to one of my favorite conferences – Codemotion. This time I’ve attended codemotion Berlin it was a 2 day conference.
Codemotion, for these of you who don’t know, is the platform that improves the developers’ professional growth by connecting IT professionals, tech communities and companies. Last year I got to visit Codemotion Amsterdam and you’re welcome to click here to read about it.

Opening

After catching the train I arrived to the conference and the fun began! The room was full of different developers. At the welcoming hall you could find different beverages and snacks and also stands of different sponsors, which some of them include – IBM, Toptal, GDG (Google Developer Group) and more! I even got to meet people from my home country, Israel, at the WhiteSource company.
At the opening we had 2 great keynotes and then we went on a coffee break.

My favorite talks from the first day

There were some great talks in the first day but these are one of my favorites:

1. “Designing Your Career: Explore a Career Change and Do What You Love” by Dr. Aygul Zagidullina. Aygul gave an amazing talk about seizing opportunities in your life and always try to big dream and achieving your goals. Her lecture reminded me of the lecture I gave in Droidcon last year. Other than that, I got the chance to speak with Aygul after her talk and she is such a wonderful person who is really passionate about her job and field – you can sense she is always trying to challenge and better herself. Another really awesome thing to mention about her is that she does it all while being a mother, and seeing her daughter in all of the conference she is going might just be the cutest thing ever!
2. “Live hacking: Breaking into your web app” by Brian Vermeer. Brain explained about different vulnerabilities in well known packages. He made demos and it was cool to check out how even lines of code which you would never think of checking or making quality insurance for, can be a very big point of failure.
3. “Gender inclusive interfaces” by Kai Katonina. The talk was about how to make your interface accessible to all genders. I must admit that this question was in my head while developing BuddyBug. Kai offered different solutions for the big question “What is your gender” while signing up to different services. Kai’s lecture really inspired me to work in the near future on a more gender friendly version for BuddyBug – hopefully you can see it soon enough!

Currywurst!!!

while visiting Berlin I knew I’m going to have some currywurst – for my surprise codemotion decided to serve them with beer while networking hour – it was a real treat!

The first day was really exciting. I got to meet a lot of new people and just had a fun!

My favorite talks from the second day

The second day had great talks just as the first one had! here are some of my favorite:

1. “Welcome to the Machine” by keynote speaker Hadi Hariri. In his talk Hadi discussed the “bad side” of technology. We are all aware of the whole “keep our privacy intact” debate the goes on between us, the users, and companies that want to sell our data. Hadi delivered a really good talk about the whole situation – why it happens, who is responsible and how can we deal with it. It is always funny to see how developers, like Hadi and I (and many many more!), are a bit of “technophobes” (Well maybe that’s a big word to describe) to the point where some of us don’t even use Facebook, Whatsapp etc.
2. “Panel discussion: You should give a talk next year!“. The panel discussion was really interesting and it included the following speakers from the conference – Armagan Amcalar, Lara Martín, Dave Cheney and Raffaella Isidori. They all shared great point of views and it was a great pleasure listening to them. What I really liked about this discussion is how it motivated people to speak themselves. I think that giving talks is so important – it holds two benefits – first one is good for yourself, you develop your talking skills and that can be useful (literately everywhere you go!) and the second is good for the community. You share you thoughts and ideas with others that can grow and learn and maybe even spread your knowledge in the future. So yeah, go give a talk!
3. “From Github to Chatterbug: Lessons Learned by an Accidental Entrepreneur” by Scott Chacon. Scott is a co-founder in Github. Scott talk about something I really cherish – A self experience in starting your own business. Scott talked about lessons he have learned from his career that he takes to every new business with him.
   First thing is “use your own product” – that’s a good advise. If your product is good, you should use it yourself! If you don’t use it yourself, it means you can better it!
   Second thing is “Listen to your customers”. Sometimes we are so confident in our products that we totally ignore customer feedback – don’t do that! Listen and to the feedback and make sure it is easy to give you one!

Final Thoughts

Codemotion is such a great conference is has not failed to deliver this time. I really recommend all of the developers out there to try and attend the next Codemotion – You will listen to great talks and meet extra nice people!
See you at the next Codemotion!