What’s new at Codemotion Milan 2024
Last month we participated in Codemotion, the conference for developers in Italy dedicated to the Tech world. This year’s edition was full of news and it was an important year for us as Bitrock was one of the main sponsor!
What does it mean to be a Codemotion sponsor? In addition to supporting the community and what the conferences can offer developers, it involves having your own stand to get to know and be known.
One of the most impressive and proud things for me was that many participants who came to visit us at the stand already knew Bitrock. Until a few years ago Bitrock was mostly known in enterprise contexts and it was very satisfying to see so many developers recognising the brand and being part of our community.
This event gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of new developers, exchange knowledge and expand my professional network. Codemotion was a perfect opportunity for us to spend time together. Working remotely in fact often complicates extra-work relationships with colleagues and these events are the ideal setting to get to know each other better.
…not only tech talks
In addition to our sponsorship, at this edition of Codemotion there was another great news: we organized our own talk! Our Engineering Team Leader Simone Esposito and Head of Engineering Franco Geraci led a talk called ‘From Sensor to Artificial Intelligence’: a systemic journey that starts with the sensor and the measurement of events in the physical world, continues through various stages of data processing, and ends in the digital world of artificial systems. As a first talk it went really well as the room was full and there were even people standing!
And speaking of talks, this year’s opening keynote by the legendary Luca Mezzalira with the talk ‘Modularity: the key characteristic for software excellence’ triggered a thought I want to share.
One of the main features of Luca’s talks is storytelling, thanks to which he manages to take us hand in hand to the concept he wants to share with us. By recounting the various steps and motivations behind each choice, he allows us to fully understand the concept presented.
At the end of the talk, I waited for Luca to congratulate me personally and exchange a chat and immortalise the moment with a selfie. This is the strength of this kind of live event: the personal and direct exchange that no technology can replace.
Another really interesting talk was from Andrea Saltarello titled ‘L’insostenibile leggerezza dell’essere (tecnico)’ (‘The unbearable lightness of being (technical)’), which tried to clarify the costs of projects and the impact that an irresponsible choice made by us ‘technicians’ can have. There was also a moment when we talked about accessibility and how, every now and then, by making choices we think we are being inclusive, we risk doing exactly the opposite. Summarising the talk in a few lines is very difficult, but if you try to follow him on his social channels you will certainly be able to get some more useful and detailed information on the subject.
….and even with him, you couldn’t miss the selfie!
The importance of Community
To sum up this edition of Codemotion with one word, that would be ‘Community’.
This year the concept of ‘community’ was fundamental and several talks presented were aimed at novice speakers with useful tips
Among my favourite talks was undoubtedly the one by Emanuele Bartolesi (Microsoft MVP and one who has done countless talks!) entitled ‘The Marauder’s Map to Your First Great Talk’ and the talk by Serena Sensini (known for the blog theredcode.it) entitled ‘Making Tech Concepts Grandma-Friendly: Being a Tech Content Creator’. Disclosure in the tech world is very important and I am glad that two great content creators shared their experience in this field.
Among the remarkable initiatives were the ‘Tech dating’ to help people expand their network of contacts, the ‘Tech expert’ area , expert professionals on a variety of topics available for a chat and an in-depth discussion, and the ‘lightning talks’, sessions during which anyone could talk about whatever they wanted for five minutes, as well as many quizzes for fun and learning together.
Speaking of fun, I was proud to participate in the organisation of Slide Roulette, an improvisation game inspired by the ‘PowerPoint Karaoke’ game devised in 2005 by a group of engineering students for a party. The aim is to train improvisation and public speaking skills and the way it works is very simple: participants in pairs randomly extract a topic to argue from 5 random images.
The creation of this open source tool itself was based on ‘Community’. At the beginning of the development process I extended a request for collaboration to my contacts and thanks to the support of other developers, including some bitrockers and members of the Fortitude group, I arrived at the final version. By the way, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Marinella Mastrosimone, UX/UI Designer at our sister company Radicalbit, and Massimiliano Attianese Web Developer Junior at Bitrock.
Conclusions
There would still be so many things to tell and memories to share, but if I wanted to summarize, I can definitely say that in addition to the skills I learnt and the insights from the talks, I will take the people with me from this Codemotion. The new people I have met, those I have met again since the last edition and those I have finally seen live after years of online interactions.
Main Author: Daniel Zotti, Team Lead Front-end @ Bitrock
