Hackference, Birmingham

On Friday 30th, Dave and I attended Birmingham's first-of-its-kind event, Hackference Brum. It was a combined 1 day conference and 2 day hackathon, organised by the wonderful Mike Elsmore.

I'd like to start off by saying that it was excellent. Although we were both only able to attend the conference, judging by the excitement, ideas, and creativity flying about at the conference after-party I daresay that the hackathon was top-notch.

A full list of speakers and topics can be found here.

I particularly enjoyed the talk entitled "Go in the real world" by Peter Bourgon. He gave some brilliant insight into how powerful Goroutines can be, and why they incur less overhead than traditional threads spawned by some other programming languages. I'm definitely going to try this out as soon as possible.

Another noteworthy talk was "Best Practice in API Design" by Lorna Mitchell. Although it reminded me a bit too much of my Distributed Systems lectures from University, it was a highly informative and thorough piece. Delving into the proper use of HTTP status codes; defining, comparing and, contrasting REST and RPC; and highlighting a shared ultimate goal of the majority of devs: eventually ending up at the pub on time, or early.

If you were unable to attend this year's Hackference at Brum, I'd definitely recommend that you grab an early bird ticket for next year's as soon as they're available. Cheers Mike.

-Sam