The code.talks conference opened its doors in Hamburg, Germany at the Cinemaxx movie theater on 14th and 15th of September. The two day events covers a broad range of computer science topics with a focus on getting to know each other. While some talks are held in German, most are held in English and suited for an international audience.

During the opening keynote, the organized mentioned a ratio of 1 speaker to roughly 10 visitors. This is great, as the two days are packed with a range of talks - around 6 talks are happening in parallel per 45min slot. Still, there is enough time to switch to the next talk and breaks are planned into the program.

The organization has been superb. A movie theater makes an awesome venue for a conference. Next to huge screens to watch the slides, sitting & relaxing in movie chairs can’t get any better. And during the lunch break, everyone could sign up to play Nintendo Smash Brothers on the biggest screen. Talking about lunch, food was included through the full day. Starting with breakfast, warm lunch, ice cream, cake as well as popcorn and nachos as it’s expected in a movie theater. Yummy. Moreover, big compliments to organize the after conference party at NOHO to further connect over dinner and drinks.

As code.talks tries to cover a range of topics. The talks tend to give an overview on the current state of the art and are rather programming language independent to attract a larger audience. Therefore, I recommend to visit topics, that are mostly new to you. Use topic specific conferences (i.e. KontlinConf, etc) to listen to expert talks.

In case the vidoes get posted online, I do recommend the following talks (selection):

  • “Open Source-Entertainment: Vim für schnelles und nachhaltiges Coden!” is an introduction to vim in a highly entertaining live demo
  • “You Can’t Hide: How a Device Can Give Away a Fraudster’s Secrets.” divided into how detecting a VPN (using package mtu size) and matching images taken by the same phone camera in a highly technical way
  • “Scalable by Design: How to Build an Elastic Cloud Infrastructure That Serves More than 60 Million Daily Users” gives valuable insights into design decisions and their learning
  • “The Rise of the Tech Lead: Redefining Leadership in the Tech Industry” presents the Tech Lead role as part of a tech career track, which isn’t as established in Germany as in the US.
  • “Kotlin Meta Programming - Code Generation with Kotlin Poet” shows how to generate code at compile time, a technique used by i.e. lombok and great potential to generate data-transfer-objects and/or interfaces from shared schemas.

All in all, I recommend code.talks and hope to see you there next year.