BuildStuff is a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. It’s generalist, but many talks focus on backend topics, which is great for me because my primary job involves creating REST APIs. Although it brings remarkable speakers from all over the world, it’s not too crowded like other international conferences I know about, which is also great.
I learned about this conference in 2023 thanks to Pamela Hill from JetBrains and I was lucky enough to attend in person that same year. I loved it, the sessions I attended were interesting and fun, and the speakers were all very kind, and with lots of experience. I had a great time so I decided to propose a talk when they open the call for proposals.
In terms of proposals to conferences, 2024 was hard. It was the first time I actively tried to land international conferences outside Spain, and it was almost impossible. I got rejected so many times! But my talks were picked for Nerdearla Chile (online format) and BuildStuff 2024. I was thrilled and I still am for both opportunities, but in-person talks are always special and I prepared one new only for BuildStuff, A modern testing tale.
Public speaking is always a huge effort, at least for me. For new talks, I could spend some months preparing the material and practicing. I envy people who just walk into the room and deliver an incredible talk. On top of that, it’s a matter of the language. Spanish is my primary language, I speak fast and know how to continue if I am blank, but English is a completely different thing, I always feel weird.
A modern testing tale
With my talk, I tried to understand if it's possible to obtain good and thorough unit test suites using just 1 AI prompt, that is, without human interaction.
I plan on writing a more extensive post about it I think it went well for the first attempt. I had some technical difficulties and I got feedback for future events 🤞
My pick
I attended several talks but if I picked only some of them it would be the following
Five things every developer should know about architecture by Simon Brown
A software architect cannot be detached from the code that implements the architecture she designs. That is one of the reasons this talk resonates with me. The speaker also mentioned some books that look very promising like Facilitating Software Architecture
Reading code by Marit van Dijk
I read some months ago The programmer’s brain, it's not my favorite but I think the author has very good points. The talk by Marit is based on that book and it helped me to see things differently. Also adding a bit of Intellij magic is always fun.
Developers Joy by Sven Peters
This talk was really fun and it brought a lot of interesting topics to the table. If I should pick just one it would be the idea that maybe, just maybe, the DORA metrics aren't the best for your team and you should measure others that are more critical for your daily job.
The epic battle between Kotlin and C# by Max Arshinov and Rendle
This talk was about comparing both programming languages, their features, their area of use…It was very interesting, especially for me because I've never worked with C# before.
Microservices, Where Did It All Go Wrong by Ian Cooper
I started suffering microservices some months ago, in the past, I worked with them in a way that was pleasant not a pain. But the talk Ian Cooper gave, highlighted all the problems I’ve been finding myself with lately. I recommend it if you're planning to start using them.
I miss several fascinating ones which I plan to see once they are online.
I hope you find it useful. My name is Isabel Garrido, and I'm a Senior Kotlin server-side developer. You can follow me on Twitter, Bluesky, Linkedin and GitHub