About Boiling Frogs

Recently I’ve noticed that I am becoming a conference beast. In the last year, I have attended six conferences (Wroc#, DWO, DEVOXX, Quality Excites, DevDay and SpreadIT) and five different meetups. Additionally, this year I may attend even more because new ones have appeared on my conference calendar. The first conference for me last year was Wroc#. It was an excellent conference. I can honestly say that this was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. In 2016, I started with another conference - Boiling Frogs, which ended last week.

The conference “Boiling Frogs” was powered by ITCorner - Wroclaw Fellowship of Technology. Each presentation at this conference was given by a Polish speaker in Polish. This event was a good occasion for less known speakers to appear in front of a wider audience, 450 attendees to be exact. In my opinion, this was a great turn out for their first event.

The sessions were presented in three parallel tracks, and only the first presentation was made to the whole audience. It was given by Tomasz Kaczmarzyk, a co-organizer of this conference. He spoke about the idea behind the conference and about its name. The name “Boiling Frogs” was taken from the experiment with a boiling frog in a pot. When we increase the temperature slowly enough, we will be able to boil a frog and it won’t even notice that it is being boiled. He compared the situation of the frog to a programmer who is doing their daily tasks without bothering to improve their knowledge and skills and suddenly they realise that the world has changed. Only then do they realise that they have been boiled, but it’s too late to jump out. The main idea of these organizers was to alert participants that maybe their pots have already reached 60 C°, and there is still enough time to jump out of the pot, and change their lives.

I think that the temperature in my pot is not very hot but I may be wrong. Anyway, I had the great pleasure of taking part in “Boiling Frogs” and I learned some new things.

During the speech given by Bartek Zdanowski “Developer, develop yourself”, I confronted my path of developing myself with the one proposed by Bartek Zdanowski. And it turned out that they are quite similar, with the exception that I’ve never been keen on hackathons but Bartek showed that hackathons can be an exciting form of self-improvement.

I enjoyed the speech given by the co-host of this conference - Tomasz Kaczmarzyk. He talked about pure functional data structures. I was afraid that it would be a hard presentation that would hurt my brain, but it turned out that the speaker had a clear path for his speech and delivered it quite smoothly. Tomasz started his speech with a short theoretical introduction and after this showed us a practical use of functional structures in GIT.

After Tomasz’s speech, there was a dinner break. I heard that they served 4000 dumplings during this dinner - pretty amazing, isn’t it? After dinner, I chose to see what Michał Gruca had to say. I saw him at the 33rd Degree conference, where he spoke about the mythical 10 times developer. I really enjoyed that presentation, so I expected the same at “Boiling Frogs”, and he didn’t disappoint. This was the perfect after-dinner presentation. I listened to him weave a tale that didn’t include dragons, but another mythical and fantastic creature…the programmer.

Similar to that lecture, was a presentation given by Paweł Lipiński. This one was perfect for the end of the conference. The speaker didn’t bother to prepare slides for his presentation. He had one for the introduction and then he pulled out his analogue slides (I mean small, yellow index cards) where he had written bullet points of his presentation and he led us from one point to the other and delivered a very nice and wise story, in this manner. Examples from Paweł’s speech turned out to be very handy for me at work on Monday.

I heard a lot of talk about a speech given by Michał Płachta titled “Paradise for polyglots - panta rei”. I hope that the organisers make it available to the public, so I can watch it and share it with others.

This was the inaugural conference for “Boiling Frogs”, and I hope it won’t be the last and that the organizers will manage to repeat this event next year. So, to the conference organisers: best wishes and good luck. See you next year! And to you my readers: see you next time.

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