It's been a while since I attended a conference in-person. So I was quite excited. Looking at the agenda and the speakers I knew from the beginning that I was looking forward for two specific talks. Two out of ten.

In the past I was always joined by somebody. This year I went alone. Well, not entirely alone I had my laptop with me just in case I had to work on something extremely urgent.

What was the experience like?

It was a mixed experience from my perspective but, in the end, I would go again next years.

I think you can easily split this into two: the speakers with their talks and the other parts - the networking, the sponsors's booth etc.

Overall, the number of people that attended versus the amount of space available was great. It didn't feel overcrowded at any point in time which gets a thumbs up for me. Many breaks and many opportunities to connect and learn about new companies.

Speaking of companies, it was quite obvious that the main objective of the sponsors were to try and recruit developers to join their company. Pure and simple.

Moving on to the summit agenda. It is highly likely that each person attending came in with very different expectations. Some set their expectations based on the title of the summit "Software Architecture". Therefore, they were extremely upset after certain talks which had little to no connection with the "architecture" part.

Others, such as myself, had certain expectation based on the title of presentations. And I had a mixed experience. I was under-impressed by some and over-impressed by others.

And, probably some had no expectations at all. Therefore they had less chances of being dissapointed or impressed, right? Good for them.

I like to focus on the positives, so I would say that the best talk at the day was called "Monoliths in a microservices world" by Phil Wilkins. Not much of an Oracle fan myself, yet this talk was spot on.

If you paid attention to it, you would realise that the purpose of it is for you, as a developer, architect, CTO etc to ask yourself the right questions. That's the point. Skip what is "popular", skip what "everybody is talking about" or praising and focus on these questions that you should ask yourself.

Switching the direction from "how can we use this technology into our product" to "how is my product working now, where can it be improved and what will benefit it".

I got the feeling that Phil is a fan of Domain Driven Design. The fact that he had an entire slide specifically about how to introduce an Anti-corruption layer to help protect the modularity of your system speaks in high volumes.

What about the other talks?

There were two keywords that I've heard repeated in many different contexts in the majority of the presentations: cloud (and it's variants Docker, Kubernetes, containers, serverless) and Kafka.

What did you gain from attending ?

Good question right? You just spent an entire day at an event. What's the outcome?

For me, the biggest win was getting out and listening and hearing about other things that I deal with everyday. A change of perspective or focus was appreciated by me.

Yes I also heard or learned about a couple of different tools but that's just a nice side-effect which unknown impact.

Then it was the networking. Having met new fellow developers was a nice change of pace from a normal day.

Bonus points: learned about some new companies that I haven't heard of and I am now confident that they are definitely not the type of company I would like to work with.

That's a wrap.