Conferences and MeetUps

Our team recently had excellent opportunities to attend two local events related to Quality Assurance and Web Development. Both of them were useful and helped our team members deal with specific challenges they had in ongoing projects.

It’s all about conversation

Conferences are a perfect way to extend your self-learning expertise – they provide you with a plenty of useful information to catch from the main conversation/presentation and jibber-jabber talks. Conference speakers sometimes focus on specific aspects of a topic to describe some issues you may come across and how to address them, which means that if you’re experiencing some troubles while getting things done, you might experience a few “That’s what I was looking for” moments. No matter which approach works better for you, conference makes it easier to connect with new friends and endorse your expertise.

Small conferences are good, but big conferences are even better – the more people in the same room, the more interesting and vibrant conversations they produce regarding topics being discussed, especially when it comes to those that hold different meaning and opinions. Another situation, when you overcame some specific issues and want to share this knowledge with other listeners  is also possible and highly appreciated. The same applies to topics that haven’t been raised yet or described just for introduction – you are free to dive deeper into the specifics.

IT Svit at conferences

For the last couple of months our team participated in three conferences and meetups of different sizes: Kyiv.py #18, Eatdog #5 and Myths About WordPress.

Kyiv.py was already mentioned in our blog and it was a real helper for our Python developers in dealing with current challenges and pitfalls and making code more efficient.

Eatdog was focused on QA approaches and tools: BDD, Codeception, creating relevant scenarios and tests, etc. Our guys had an opportunity to talk to the Codeception founder – Michael Bodnarchuk about topics that require special attention. One of them was related to specific Codeception integration with Testrail that hasn’t been implemented yet. As Michael said, if no suitable alternatives available, this functionality can be added in further releases. Great news!

Other topics that were covered during the conference: BDD approach (Behavior-driven development), how to create tests using BDD and their specific aspects, how to create scenarios and tests using Codeception, etc.

Myths About WordPress was focused on describing a bunch of popular prejudices and misconceptions we know about WordPress and how to deal with them. The second part of the conference was related to development: code quality, common security mistakes, API functionality and authentication, best practices in WordPress development, etc. Our developers found some aspects that can be applied to both projects they are working on and also upcoming ones.

And also don’t forget the very first Karazin Winter School conference where our company had been talking about Data Science and Data Analysis, Internet classification, different technologies and tools that can be used to store large amounts of information.

All these conferences showed that the idea of picking out a particular problem or a set of associated issues and focusing on finding the simplest, yet efficient solution is splendid. In such a way it is possible to get a chance to connect on a personal level with like-minded people or even find collaborators for project you are afraid of managing alone. As our teams accumulate a wide range of new skills and innovative approaches almost every day, thus accelerating company’s growth, so different conferences would become even more topical over time.