For me the SoCraTes was awesome! I am writing especially “for me” because I assume other people expect different things, e.g. less participatory, from a conference. And also for me, it took me some time to “get into” SoCraTes. What did help, was that I already knew some people (about half a dozen former colleagues were also there) and experienced other unconferences before.
Some of the sessions I attended (beside bumblebeeing in and out of others, not mentioned here):
Only a bit interesting but my main outtake was to see – again – that others expect a lot of different things from their career and their employer. My age and having a lot of years and some “career twists” in our profession might have given me a different viewpoint here.
Seeing Xavier refactor traditional imperative code into functional code was an inspiration. And jump from JavaScript to Haskel at the end was also a nice bonus.
Still a topic I feel like I do not yet understand it enough.
Understood more about monoids and monads. At the end of the entertaining session I got confused and did not understand anymore, what Xavier tried to explain. So I - still – do not really understand Monads. But nobody does, so it does not concern me too much.
It was nice to contribute a little bit here, by introducing people to the --verbose switch for git commit. (Make it permanent with git config --global commit.verbose true)
Always nice to compare our experience (which I mostly enjoy) with others.
Again and again I hear about one thing we do not do yet: The rule that if one person is remote, all people attend remote. Meaning that if some people are remote and multiple people are in the same place, the latter do not gather in the same room, but in that case everyone joins the meeting via a videoconference.
Another practice that I heard repeatedly about video conferences (though not this time): People mute all the time and only unmute when they want to say something. But they do not talk right away, but instead wait that a dedicated moderator, who keeps an eye open on who wants to say something, says that it is their time. This sounds helpful especially for longer, larger meetings, e.g. retrospectives, but I do not yet have experience with it.
I knew a little about them before. Now I understand a lot more about them and know that I still do not understand a lot about them. A very helpful session, making me curious to learn even more about it!
Yes, “dirty” and “clean” is neither binary nor an intrinsic goal.
On deciding whether I refactor I already apply the “Rule of three” a lot, as I read it from Martin Fowler in his book Refactoring.
I got another good rule of thumb, which I think I already apply a lot unconsciously but I am happy to be more conscious about it: If you implement something new and for it you need to do the same modification in multiple places, then consider refactoring the code so the modification has to be done only in a single place.
And another small side note: We had the session outside and the flipchart paper kept blowing up by the wind. We tried to prevent that by holding down the paper by hand but then I got some masking tape and stuck the bottom of the paper to the board. It gives me a warm feeling if I see small deficiencies like this and a possibility to take the responsibility to fix them.
An inspiring lunch session, motivating me to pick up meditating again.
What an awesome shell! Motivated me to skip zsh and giving it a try to go directly from bash to fish. (Did chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish already and feeling fine with it so far)
One evening I took a walk in the woods, the other I ran for an hour. There is a lot of good to say about the hotel and it being a bit secluded (from a metropolitans point of view) and especially being surrounded by woods with an awesome smell is one of those things.
Each night I got into bed considerably after midnight, because I just got into talking (and sometimes coding) with old friends. This was very great.
And I got an Alfred workflow from Alex Bepple, which now lets me press ⌃⌥⌘↵ to open an iTerm, starting in the correct folder if I had the Finder in front.
Surprisingly I did not play a single board game, even though I enjoy them a lot, but other things happened and that was fine.
Which is probably the best summary of SoCraTes: Things happened, and that was fine.