Friday, December 07, 2018

Tejones Conf 18 / the next step of the tribe

The Joke

As I have described in previous posts, TheMotion's original team evolved into a kind of tribe with a shared culture (honeybadgers from team to tribe). A fundamental characteristic of this culture is sharing and learning as a team. So the next logical step in this evolution was to generate a space for just that... learning and sharing... our invitational conference, or rather, unconference.  Our Open Space, the HoneyBadgersConf / TejonesConf18.

It started almost as a joke, but we quickly convinced ourselves that it was an excellent opportunity to enjoy together and learn at the same time.

It took us a long time to agree on a date, but a month ago we were finally able to book a country house to spend the whole weekend and organize the openspace.



The Open Space / Sessions

We made a single track openspace. But although we were few we had many proposals so in the end some talks/sessions were left out of the panel.
  • Craftsmanship. We saw together the talk Run 2018 - Masterclass: Craftsmanship (talk in Spanish from Xavi Gost) and discuss the ideas present in the talk. A very interesting discussion. I proposed this discussion to confront some ideas about agile, the dark side of agile and how to transmit the idea of agile software delivery.
  • Show me your data pipeline. In this session, we talked about data processing workflows. We didn't focus on technology. The focus was on organizational and team design to develop and operate these data pipelines. You know, Conway's law. :) The session was proposed and conducted by Jorge Jardines.
  • Traceability and observability. Fran Ortiz introduced us to the concepts of distributed tracing and observability for applications. We talked about opentracing, zipkin, and honeycomb and were able to make a small demo using opentracing.
  • My life as a junior developer. Georgina gives a talk about her exciting evolution in our profession. It was a very inspiring talk and full of insights.  We talked about power relations, diversity, team culture, power dynamics, etc.
  • A light introduction to Terraform. In this session, Ivan explained how to use Terraform. He detailed how it compares to other tools and approaches for systems/resources provision. There was a lot of diversity in the degree of knowledge about systems architecture, cloud, etc. This diversity generated a fascinating conversation that we continued in the next session.
  • Kubernetes. In this last session Abel, Ivan and I explained the basic concepts of kubernetes and how they fit with the idea of applications that follow 12 factors.

The idea was to have more sessions, but the truth is that the lunches and dinners were longer than expected :)


Conclusions

The result of the experiment was remarkable, and although due to date conflict some of the Badgers could not come, we want to repeat the next year and even invite some friends.

On the one hand, I feel part of the tribe and its culture, and on the other hand an astonished spectator of this process of growth. For me, this process has been as surprising as it has been rewarding.

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