After the first intensive day of I T.A.K.E. Unconference the participants started the second one sharing briefly to each other their impressions and takeaways. Mozaic Works teddy bears supported them, being their pair right from the intro.
All speakers presented briefly the next talks and workshops. Already used to five parallel tracks, the participants joined their preferred sessions. These were:
- Refactoring Legacy Code – a true Story
- BDD with Cucumber JVM
- How we did it: The Story of a Website
Architecture and Design Practices
- 100% Confident with Legacy Code Workshop
Software Testing
- Getting Started with Test Driven Development Workshop
Technical Leadership
- From Requirements to Tests in Kanban Workshop
Kata Lounge track allowed those interested in coding to practise anytime they wanted, all day long.
Day 2 speakers: Felienne Hermans, Aki Salmi, Andreas Leidig, Alex Bolboacă, Csaba Patkos, Thomas Sundberg, Rémy Sanlaville and Johan Martinsson. They shared their knowledge and experience through simple presentations and practical exercises, code and facilitation.
After the first sessions in the parallel tracks ended, the participants attended “Putting the science in computer science” talk by Felienne Hermans, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology. Her talk was a quick tour of scientific experiments related to software development, experiments that resulted in surprising conclusions:
- Strongly typed languages (like Java) help development more than loosely typed languages
- The more people work on a piece of code, the more error prone it is
- Design patterns help because they allow developers who know them to remember more things and apply them faster
Her talk contains much more details, make sure you’ll watch it (will be published soon).
After lunch the program kept the same intensity. The participants joined Tom Gilb‘s keynote who talked about:
- architecture than can be made better by developers
- how one can get quality by designing it in, not by debugging it
- that engineering is defined by multidimensional problem solving.

- Keeping interest in the project inside the team
- Switching from dev to architecture
- SOLID principles in practice
- ATDD live coding session
The programming contest ended at 3:00 p.m. The jury formed by: Sandro Mancuso, Aki Salmi, Michael Feathers and Alexandru Bolboacă deliberated the winners checking the programs for clean code, test coverage and simple design.
The winners were:
Iulian Dogariu rewarded with
- One Apple IPad Air 32GB Space Gray, 4G and one-year free subscription with 4G included, offered by Orange, the main sponsor
- I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 ticket, offered by Mozaic Works
Bogdan Szabo rewarded with
- One Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, 7″, 8GB, Wi-Fi, 3G, offered by Mozaic Works
- I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 ticket, offered by Mozaic Work
The retrospective of the day helped us collect the feedback from the participants. Besides the positive feedback they offered new valuable opinions which we will take into consideration for I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015.
The day finished with “Geek Networking Party” sponsored by Accenture. There was a friendly environment where one could enjoy technical discussions and networking. According to participants and speakers they had fun during the evening.
From the feedback, I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2014 was a great experience and went by too fast. Preparing for I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015, we have the first confirmed keynote speaker Simon Brown, an award-winning speaker and the author of Software Architecture for Developers. Stay close to the #itakeunconf twitter hashtag for further news and comments.