A Technical Conference where Speakers Write Code

A few months ago we were announcing the launch of a unique technical conference: I T.A.K.E. It’s now time to tell you more about why it’s unique.

Speakers are obviously a very important part of a conference. We put a lot of effort into bringing the best development minds from around Europe. They are community leaders and experienced programmers who master multiple technologies and programming paradigms. For example:

• Sandro Mancuso is a director at UBS Investment Bank where he writes code, looks after the quality of the applications, mentors developers and helps teams. He will have a workshop for Testing and Refactoring Legacy Code and talk about Software Craft. He works mostly with Java.
• Cyrille Martraire is co-founder and technical director of Arolla, a company specializing in software development. He is passionate about TDD, BDD, DDD and founded the Paris Software Craft community. He will show us how Functional Programming works with Domain Driven Design and will facilitate some Domain Driven Design learning games. He uses functional programming and OOP paradigms together in Java and other programming languages.
• Radu Marinescu is a professor of software engineering at the Politehnica University of Timisoara and a researcher focused on the areas of quality assurance and software evolution. In 2009, a prestigious a jury that included Fred Brooks, Erich Gamma and Grady Booch granted him the IBM John Backus Award for “having done the most to improve programmer productivity”. He will talk about maintaining software.
• Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is the president of Wirfs-Brock Associates and IEEE Software’s Design Columnist and is a well-known and respected object-oriented practitioner. She invented the way of thinking about objects known as Responsibility-Driven Design and is the lead author of Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations (2003) and the classic Designing Object-Oriented Software (1990). She will help us better understand architecture and design.
• … and 10 more equally interesting speakers that you can read about on the conference website.

We learned from experience that having experienced speakers is not enough. We wanted to do more to ensure the quality of the talks. That’s why we have a few rules:

• We don’t like speakers that don’t interact with the audience. That’s why we encouraged the speakers to involve the audience as much as possible.
• We picked the sessions so that they bring new techniques and new information to the audience. Be prepared to learn!
• We’ve been to technical conferences where no code was shown. The I T.A.K.E. speakers will show code during all the talks. Some talks will only have code; experienced people will show how to apply modern programming practices in languages like: Java, C#, PHP, C++, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc.
• Many conferences talk about a specific technology. We focus on the ideas and practices that help you in any programming language. But don’t worry, your favourite language will certainly be present.

Join I TAKE  Unconference today to enjoy this amazing range of speakers and the interactivity the conference will bring for all participants. More about the interactivity, in a future blog post.