INNOQ Technology Day
Yesterday, the very first INNOQ Technology Day wrapped up, and I wanted to write up my thoughts and impressions and upload my sketchnotes from the day. Here is a more detailed write up of the same conference from the perspective of the organizers.
I believe this was the first virtual conference that I’ve attended, and I thought that the organization was very well done. It was relaxing also to have the conference start at noon, so that I could get a few things done before focusing on the conference for the rest of the day. The talks were superb, and it try out SpacialChat and get a bit of the “conference” feeling of being able to chat with different people in the same room, even though the conference was virtual. And since the conference was virtual, without a lot of noise and visual stimuli, I found that I was a lot less wiped out at the end of the day than I would normally be.
This conference was also a new first for me personally: It was my first time rerecording a talk and then watching the recording live with everyone else AND my first time doing a keynote. My colleagues Eberhard Wolff, Andreas Maier, and I each held a short 15 minute talk as a part of a joint keynote.
In my part of the keynote I talked a lot about responsive and accessible design (or “responsible design” as I have dubbed it), and referenced my new microsite on the topic.
Since the talk was prerecorded, I was also able to sketchnote my own talk (another first)! Here is my sketchnote:
The next talk that I watched was incredibly fun to sketchnote. It was a Meta-Sketchnote, since the topic of the talk was sketchnoting in the IT. Lisa Moritz’s talk was very interactive and taught me a few symbols that I hadn’t used before. She’s currently writing a book on the topic and also has started a website displaying her amazing sketchnotes.
As part of a challenge from Lisa, I also sketched out a new symbol for a screenreader:
I find tech conferences to be a great place to listen to new ideas and hear about technologies that I’m not completely comfortable with, or that I haven’t spent the time to learn about yet. Service meshes are one of those topics that I haven’t had a lot of time to research, so I found this talk from Hanna Prinz and Jörg Müller to be just what I needed: I learned which options are currently available, and I learned which criteria I should use to evaluate the different options if I ever need to make that decision. More information is available on the Service Mesh Comparison microsite.
The next talk was also one that I decided to go to specifically because it is a bit outside of what I currently am doing in my day-to-day work. Larysa Visengeriyeva gave an overview of machine learning engineering, including the ten practices that build off of each other. More information is available on the Machine Learning Operations microsite.
My last talk of the day was some live-coding with Idris from Jan Stępień. The sketchnote itself isn’t very interesting (it’s difficult to sketchnote a talk when live-coding is involved), but the talk was very entertaining.
I did not sketchnote the keynote from Dylan Beattie, since I was more in the mood for relaxing on the couch, so my last talk of the day was from Stefan Tilkov, talking about how to create a software consultancy that people enjoy working for. I was interested in hearing what he had to say, especially because I really do enjoy working for INNOQ, and I have to say that I agree that all of the points that he made do indeed make it a pleasant place to work.
All in all, it was an enjoyable conference. The talks should eventually come out on the INNOQ YouTube Channel (although most of them (including mine) will be in German).