The second GOTO conference in Berlin is due early November, with two days of conference on November 6-7, preceded by one day of training. The program is titled "for developers, by developers" with emphasis on presenting the latest developments as they become relevant and interesting for the software development community.
The two conference days are divided into 14 tracks including:
- After Agile: What next?
- Architecture War Stories
- DevOps & Continuous Delivery
- Monoliths & Microservices
- Programming Languages
- Software Craftsmanship
Some of the more well-known speakers among the 80 attending are:
- Martin Fowler, author, speaker and consultant on software development.
- Gabrielle Benefield, agile trainer and founder of Evolve Beyond.
- Adrian Cockcroft, technology fellow & architect behind Netflix cloud infrastructure.
- Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology and co-founder of Neo4j.
- Michael T. Nygard, author of Release it!
- Stefan Tilkov, SOA and REST authority, innoQ founder.
- Gojko Adzic, strategic software delivery consultant.
The training day covers three different areas: Continuous Delivery, Neo4j Data Modelling and Systems Thinking and Methods.
In an interview, Bianca Legorreta at Trifork, the company behind the GOTO conferences, told InfoQ about her thoughts concerning this second year’s conference.
InfoQ: This is the second GOTO conference in Berlin, how was the first one?
Bianca: The first GOTO Berlin last year was a great success considering the fact that it was our first conference in Germany, and we started to build up our market from scratch only 10 months before the kick-off. We ended up printing 412 conference badges, and our attendees seemed to like the content and the set-up. We got a lot of positive feedback, not only from our attendees, but also from our sponsors. Another important note is that we as a conference team felt really good when making it all happen.
InfoQ: Are you changing anything for this year’s conference?
Bianca: We try to keep one concept for all our GOTO conferences. We still have 6 parallel tracks on both conference days and one day of trainings, like last year. The newest thing is our venue: This year we will be in the "Kosmos" close to Alexanderplatz in Berlin. The "Kosmos" is a former cinema and now a historical protected event-venue.
InfoQ: What are your expectations for this second year?
Bianca: We expect that there are some attendees who chose to come again after seeing the first conference. Further, we of course hope that we get the word about GOTO Berlin spread even more in Germany and that people talk about it. Last year gave us a very good first impression on how to approach attendees on which we can learn and improve the conference this year. We really value the feedback from attendees and try to implement as many things as possible within our conference.
InfoQ: Who are you targeting as attendees and speakers?
Bianca: Our attendees are the right mix between diverse software developers and business people. As GOTO is a conference from developers to developers, the majority of our attendees are of course software developers. But we do also have managers visiting our conference as we do have many different tracks attracting different audiences. We would like more women to come to our conferences, but this is something we do not consciously target in our marketing of the conference. Our speakers are always the best local, European and overseas speakers. We like to have some famous local speakers, and at the same time we always have some big international names that will be of interest to everyone in IT. We want to give our attendees that "wow" effect.
InfoQ: What do you hope attendees will bring home from the conference?
Bianca: I hope that the attendees will bring home a lot of new knowledge that they can start using at work or in their spare time. They should have seen the newest trends, something known but with a specific specialization angle, and all in between. And of course, we hope that the attendees will have enough time to mingle, establish new connections and have fun.