I had an awesome opportunity to be part of the crew for GOTO Amsterdam 2019! If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically an international event that attracts software developers and IT people alike. There’s lots going on, for example, attendees can attend various masterclasses (for a price) by specialists in the field and usually lasts a day. The rest of the days are filled with keynote speakers, conferences, talks, stalls from various computing industries and food and drink (usually unlimited)!
GoTo conferences are held roughly four times a year and they are as follows (including masterclasses):
- GOTO Chicago – April
- GOTO Amsterdam – 17th June to 20th June
- GOTO Berlin- 21-25th October
- GOTO Copenhagen – 18 – 22nd November
For someone new to computing conferences, my lecturer suggested that I join as a crew member and why not, I’ll get to know the inside and the outside of the event and has to be one of the most exciting things I have done in a long while.
Credit: Oliver Kristoffersen of Trifork
There were amazing speakers who did an awesome job of talking to a massive audience, talking about their work, their life experiences and much more. Here are the highlights of some of the speakers but please note, ALL of them were amazing!!!
Iron Maiden fan anyone? Yep, that’s Bruce Dickinson presenting the opening keynote of conference on Tuesday…. (just for the record Bruce is a Businessman, pilot and lead singer of Iron Maiden).
We all know of ‘black mirror’ TV series which (sometimes) morbidly shows us the dark side of tech…but what about the good?…..Using technology to light up a small village in the Himalayas, a speech/talk by Jaideep Bansal called the ‘Energy and Education Access for Remote Communities’.
Fancied going to Mars? Dr Anita Sengupta explains concepts based on transportation and Mars in her talk ‘From Flying Cars to Humans on Mars’….and yeah…I did raise my hand to volunteer to go to Mars!
The hall itself with vendors such as ING, Google Cloud, Picnic, StoryScript – and that’s just a few!
What happens when you marry coding and music (with a bit of multithreading) You get Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi and Live Coding Musician:
Some of us were very lucky to get a free book ‘Infrastructure as Code’ personally signed by Kief Morris. Kief is the author (if you didn’t guess already) and is the Cloud Practice Lead at ThoughtWorks. He also gave a talk: ‘Building Evolutionary Infrastructure.
There were many talks going on at the same time after the initial key and end notes and it was physically possible to attend every single one of these. Luckily with GOTO play, you (and I) can download and watch all of the talks (including previous years) in the comfort of your own home.
So, if you fancy being crew member which means you do tasks like packing goody bags, show direction to conference members and lots of coffee and tea check out the following links:
GoToAmsterdam 2019 (expired) >>>>https://gotoams.nl/2019/pages/crew
Next one is GOTOBerlin>>>https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSevNmUcHDScFBG_btbwJoN9NG6aTfFSlmZJvMFdKClRpohQow/viewform
The important stuff
To find out more about GoTo Conference in Berlin, click here>>>https://gotober.com/2019
To find out more about GoTo Conference in Copenhagen, click here>>> https://gotocph.com/2019
To watch the GOTO talks>>>https://blog.gotocon.com/goto-play/
