33rd Degree – Krakow

For the second year running, I went to the 33rd Degree Conference in Krakow.

 

 

 

 

On Sunday I had a chance to visit the Schindler Factory Museum, South of Kazimierz (the Jewish Quarter) or should I say south of the Wistula river. Unfortunately, the museum is mainly about the Nazi occupation 1939-1945. Why do I say “unfortunately”? As I mentioned in one of my previous posts I will never visit Auschwitz as I don’t seem able to cope with the evil side of humans, I was hoping that the Schindler Factory Museum would show me hope but it did not work out as very little is shown about Oskar Schindler so I came out pretty upset.

From there I walked back through Kazimierz and visited my first Synagogue – unfortunately the inside was very much under renovation so I could not really appreciate the beauty of it. Walking through this old quarter, I was very amused by the old small shops, just a door and a small window – old but so quaint. It is rather refreshing to see these shops when everything else is the same. Wherever you go you will be met with KFC, MacDonald, IKEA etc., even in Krakow.

Enough ramblings, what about the 33^rd Degree Conference?

According to the organizer, Grzegorz Duda, the number of attendees increased by 70% over last year and registration was shut a month before the conference due to the lack of space. So next year, 33^rd Degree might have to move to new premises.  The 650 attendees come from all over Europe – Poland of course, Germany, Ukraine and all surrounding countries.  (I believe Grzegorz will be writing a post about the technical side of 33^rd Degree.  Hopefully it will be ready next week.)

One of the key speakers was Venkat Subramaniam – it is always a pleasure to have a chat with Venkat but I will not pretend that I understood his talks –

•  Concurrency without Pain in Pure Java

•  Integrating JVM Languages

•  Pointy haired bosses and pragmatic programmers: Facts and Fallacies of Software Development

•  Scala for the Intrigued

 

Don’t know Venkat? Venkat is the author of several books including:

• Programming Concurrency on the JVM, 1st Edition

• Programming Scala, 1st Edition

• Programming Groovy, 1st Edition

• Practices of an Agile Developer, 1st Edition

• .NET Gotchas, 1st Edition

As you can see a prolific author as well as a good trainer and public speaker.

One of the highlights for me is the speakers diner – I know I am not a speaker, but I am kindly invited for the evening. We went to a typical Polish restaurant in Krakow Centre and enjoyed some good food. The best part was being able to chat with some great guys – Guillaume LaForge (Groovy), Arun Gupta (Oracle) Michael from Oracle, Prague etc. I am sure I will met them all over again during the year.