Recently, I had an opportunity to speak at the software development conference abroad for the first time. I visited Malmö in Sweden and gave a talk during the Øredev 2018 conference. The main theme of the conference was Deus Ex Machina, so I decided to adapt to this topic and prepared presentation about Brain-Computer Interfaces, which is my interest since the end of my studies at the Silesian University of Technology where I wrote a Master Thesis about similar topic. Before the conference, I prepared the same presentation in Polish during the SAP Lunch Talks for the colleagues from my company in Gliwice, Poland.

Interactions with the audience

After my presentation people sent tweets on the web and even made really nice notes!

I was impressed by that!

Except for interactions on the web, I got a few interesting questions from the audience during the Q&A session and after the presentation. Moreover, people were willing to talk about the subject of the presentation during the conference what was really nice and shown their interest in this area. If you didn’t have an opportunity to see this presentation, but you are interested in watching it, it should be available on YouTube on the Øredev Channel and I’ll add appropriate link on the talks page on this website once I get it.

Experiences from the conference

Attending such international event as a speaker was really interesting experience, which broadens my mind. I met nice and interesting people from different countries all over the world. There was also some time to grab local craft beers and talk with other speakers. Organization and logistics of the conference were really good. Conference organizers covered costs of the flights, accommodation and organised everything in advance. Moreover, there were additional activities for speakers like sauna, dinner and meeting in the city hall of Malmö. There was also a party and performance in the end of the second day for all attendees. Breaks between the sessions were fine (around 20-30 minutes), so people didn’t have to rush from one room to another. There were 7 concurrent sessions on 2 floors. Technicians in the rooms also did great job and everything worked without any problems. It’s worth mentioning that food was quite good and healthy what is not usual thing during IT conferences. I also attended talks of other speakers and I can tell that there was wide variety of topics: programming, AR, VR, mathematics, JVM, new programming languages (e.g. Unison), UX, Mobile, Music, Security, Machine Learning, AI, Biohacking, Art, etc. Presenters were well prepered and most of the presentations I attended were interesting and entertaining. There were also discussion panels where audience could ask questions. This form of sharing knowledge and opinions was good addition to regular talks. To sum up, I had to put some effort and spend some time during my preparations and sending call for papers, but in general it was good decision to join this event. I can recommend it to everyone interested in IT.