The first GOTO conference in Berlin is due in two weeks, with two days of conference on October 17-18, preceded by two days with training on the 15-16. The program is titled "by developers, for developers" with emphasis placed on presenting the latest developments as they become relevant and interesting for the software development community.
The two conference days are divided into six tracks: Agile & Lean, Solution Track, Cloud / Big Data, Mobile, Web with Modern Web Architecture and Web APIs, and finally Software Philosophy.
Some of the more well-known among the 60 speakers are:
- Dr Alistair Cockburn, one of the original creators of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
- Dr Jim Webber, chief scientist at Neo Technology & co-author of the books Graph Databases and REST in Practice.
- Michael T. Nygard, author of Release it!
- Stefan Tilkov, SOA and REST authority, innoQ founder.
- Steve Freeman, pioneer of Agile, author of Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests.
The two days of training covers five different areas: Erlang/OTP 101, ASP.NET MVC4, Agile Enterprise, Mobile Web App Development and a Neo4j tutorial.
In an interview, Jørn Larsen, CEO at Trifork, the company behind the GOTO conferences, told InfoQ about his thoughts concerning the new conference.
InfoQ: This is the first GOTO conference in Berlin, why have you decided to go to Berlin?
Jørn: Germany is a big market for conferences and through our network of speakers in Germany we received requests to do a GOTO event in Germany. So why Berlin? The GOTO Conference is an international conference with the whole program held in English. We believe that Berlin is the most internationally oriented city in Germany and has a big software developer community. We hope to be able to support this community and bring fresh ideas to the area.
InfoQ: Do you have any special hopes for this first Berlin conference?
Jørn: Yes we do. First we hope that Berlin and the software developer community will receive the conference with great interest. We hope to get around 500 attendees for the first conference and to have a blast of a speaker line up.
InfoQ: What is the conference main focus?
Jørn: The conference is a true GOTO conference with everything its known for. Great speakers and topics like "Agile and Lean", "Big Data and Cloud", "Mobile development and usability" and then "Software architecture".
InfoQ: Who are you targeting as attendees and speakers?
Jørn: We are targeting innovative minded software developers and architects as well as project leaders who want to be at the fore front of the software evolution.
InfoQ: What do you hope attendees will bring home from the conference?
Jørn: I hope that the attendees will bring back 3 things. First of all that they will be inspired from the many great talks at the conference. Secondly that they meet new people and they will discuss issues and ideas they might have. Finally I hope the conference will generate a lot of new ideas for new projects and software products.