Newcraft's conference in Paris

I had the opportunity to attend the Newscrafts conference in France and collect the latest tech trends.
The relevant lectures are now available online and I have put together my top 3 and a few experiences for you.

Top 1 – For everyone

Hedy – a free programming tutorial

Felline Hermanns entertainingly explains “Hedy”, her new concept for learning programming skills.

The program is intended for children; it has a straightforward structure and is available in multiple languages.

Top 2 – For techies

“Engineering for Software”

Dave Farley opened the conference on the first day with this talk. With a lot of humor he explains what “engineering” means and how this definition can be applied to software development. Key Fact: Failure is part of it. You have to learn from your mistakes.

Top 3 – For techies

“Tidy First?” A Daily Practice of Empirical Software Design

Kent Beck's talk was about software costs and what trade-offs software developers should make so that the software remains expandable. With joy and a touch of sarcasm, Beck describes the connection between software expansion and costs and emphasizes that the software team is also a stakeholder and what trade-offs should be taken into account when developing software.

My impression of the conference

In May 2023 I set off for the Newcrafts software conference in Paris. The program sounded very promising with four parallel lectures and a workshop at the same time. For example, Kent Beck, Dave Farley and Emily Bache should appear.

(For non-techies: Kent Beck, US software developer and co-founder of Extrem Programming; David Farley, programmer, system architect and founder of Delivery Ltd; Emily Bache, technical coach and executive board of the Samman Technical Coaching Society).

My goal for day 1: take part in the workshops and on day 2: listen to lectures. Since it was a smaller conference with 500 participants, I was able to meet a lot of new people on the first day, because Newcrafts also had the advantage of having a program called “Conference Buddy" gave. If you wanted, you could put a sticker on your name tag and show that you were ready to be addressed. This made it easier for many people to see who they could immediately start a conversation with.

I attended the following workshops:

• Hands-in techniques for getting legacy code under control; Emily Bache
• Slow Code Retreat; Philippe Bourgau
• Coding as a Yoga; Emmanuel Gaillot
• Domain Modeling Coding hands-on; Michel Grootjans & Thomas Coopman

The workshops were all very informative and I even had the opportunity to work with other speakers, which was really special. Even the breaks were interestingly filled: one participant had opened a kind of game to simulate ticket throughput in a software project on his laptop. We quickly stood around the laptop with six participants and took part in the game and waited with interest for the results.

At the end of the day there was Felline Hermanns' lecture about Hedy. It was about how to teach children to program and what difficulties they had to deal with during development. For this purpose, the speaker has developed a free website called “hedy”. I can only recommend the lecture to everyone.

In the DDD workshop we had to test our application by sending our requests to a cloud-based application written specifically for the workshop. This made the workshop feel more like a real project and not a simple workshop. Overall, I was able to pick up a lot of new information.

Conclusion
In summary, I can say that I found the Newcrafts conference very good and informative. I liked that it wasn't too big and you could talk to participants and speakers alike and exchange ideas.

Author 

Sven Hilsman
Advanced developers