My experience participating in the GOTO Conference 2019

It comes a time in every developer’s career where you’ll feel like you’re not evolving. Problems that arise in your way are problems that you have already seen before, and their solution is quite trivial. If you have ever found yourself in this position, then the GOTO Conference (and this post) is precisely for you.

GOTO Conference

The GOTO conference pride themselves in bringing the best minds in software together to share their experiences and discuss technological trends. It is not only recommended for software developers but also CTO’s and Heads of Engineering looking for inspiration. The conference is hosted in 4 different cities around the world every year (Amsterdam, Chicago, Copenhagen, and Berlin), and this year, I managed to attend the GOTO Berlin Conference 2019.

It’ll give you not only a good idea about the current state of the market but also what will be high-on-demand for the next few years. As expected, artificial intelligence and cloud computing were the tech buzzword winners of 2019 and highly debated throughout the conference.

But there was a topic that appeared in many talks and was a pleasant surprise, the human factor. If you have been working in this industry for a while, this won’t be a surprise for you. Still, soft skills (communication, teamwork, adaptability) are essential for the job, maybe even more than having phenomenal coding skills. Several speakers presented how efficient communication affects your company’s success, improving quality, responsiveness, and innovation.

The Greatest Talk

Below are some of the best talks from the conference, you can find most in GOTO’s YouTube channel or their app.

Randy Shoup (former Director of Engineering at Google and Chief Engineer at eBay) shared how important psychological safety is and its effects on developing high-performance teams. Also went through different techniques to become one.

Christina’s talk is not the usual talk you are expecting. She is very energetic and has been following the China market for 15 years. Her speech shares China’s strategy to become the world AI leader by 2030.

Sam Newman is one of the most influential people in the industry today. His opinion and book on Microservices highly recognize him. This talk is very close to his heart, covering how to (and if you should) decompose monolith architectures.

Aino’s speech was the first keynote at the conference, and it was such a great talk to break the ice. In a fun way, she shows the science behind a burst of laughter, and how to use it to your advantage, be it for public speaking or your life.

Heading back home

Before the conference, I was studying and looking for new problems to solve, but still feeling stuck for a few months. I left inspired, with multiple book recommendations, and a clear path of how to improve and what issues I should solve next. In the next posts, we’ll look deeper into software design choices and high-performance teams.

About the author

Lucas Medeiros is a Software Engineer at Poatek