“The Software Conference For The Whole Team” is a community event that has been organized by a group of volunteers in Bergen for over a decade. It’s been a while, pandemic and all, since I was there. But this was the 4th time I got to attend, and my 3rd time holding a workshop. This year my proposal for Choose your own command line Git adventure was accepted and on the program.

“Is your team complete without inexperience?”

Siv Midtun Hollup got us started with a wonderful opening keynote examining how we gain experience. I am not surprised she has interesting ideas about knowledge and teaching. In addition to her expertise on developing software, Siv holds a PhD and university lectures, and creates activities to introduce programming concepts to pre-school kids. She has a convincing argument that we underestimate the value of newcomers on a team. By digging into how useful questions are for everyone, and how a newcomer will ‘travel light’, not yet weighed down with responsibilities — or assumptions. She explains approaches to navigate the challenge of teaching and collaborating when our individual ‘universes of knowledge’ typically look vastly different. I enjoyed the way Siv points to different types of inexperience; technology, domain, product, organization — and how we are all constantly newcomers in some shape or form, exploring the boundaries between the known and the unknown.

Workshops for hands-on learning 👩🏻‍💻🧑🏼‍💻👨🏻‍💻🧑🏾‍💻👩🏼‍💻

Booster is a bit different from other tech conferences; here workshops are not an expensive upgrade before/after the main event. Instead they are an integrated and substantial part of the three day program for everyone. My fingers had a blast in a fun Vim workshop with Guro Prestegard. And I might just consider future attempts at more Vim. Choosing this workshop unfortunately meant I missed out on both Git internals and on HTMX, but such is the nature of multiple tracks. So I was super happy that many people chose to join my workshop on Git. I had prepared guides and challenges for different commands and concepts to dig into. Like workflows for diffing and staging and stashing — and more advanced Git operations like interactive rebase. Fun to see people help each other out, and I learnt a lot too!

Meeting new and old friends

One of my favourite features of attending a conference are the discussions I get to have with people I have or have never met before. While I understand why many opt to go with their co-workers, I really recommend the effect of attending alone. I had fascinating conversations over dinners and lunches and during breaks, about developing software in different contexts, about work life and the places we work, the products we build, technology in general. And I have to practice explaining what I do at work in a new way, people have so many interesting questions I have never thought about. (Yeah, my employer really should send me to more conferences, right?!)

“Is there life beyond the terrarium?” 🌱

Einar Høst is a speaker who plants ideas in your head that grow over time, and this is an excellent choice for a closing keynote. He describes the terrarium model of software development where developers are busy little silkworms in a protected glass box, and talks about the pact between two sides:

• developers will produce features in exchange for protection
• and management will offer protection in exchange for features

Over time, this gets harder because “once you’ve given away a hundred features, when you’re supposed to create feature number 101, it needs to fit in with all the others…” The strength of the terrarium model is protection, on the inside people are protected from responsibility of the outcome and on the outside people are protected from too many details and “nasty things like technical debt”.

But is this really the best we can do? Well, perhaps not! But I should warn that life as a developer is way more comfortable without watching this talk. It was easier to strive for the terrarium.

— Elisabeth

A handful of recommendations

• Siv Midtun Hollup Is your team complete without inexperience?
• Elizabeth Zagroba Anarchist Software Architecture
• Bård Aase That’s not my name
• Marit Ånestad De beste råvarene finner kokken selv
• Einar Høst Beyond the terrarium?

…and everything else that was recorded: vimeo.com/boosterconf