Right after Joker 2018 I was approached by one of the speakers Ivan Ugliansky with a very interesting proposal – “Hey, you know I’m from Novosibirsk, we have quite a big conference named CodeFest happening usually in the end of March. Would you like to come to Siberia?”. I answered – “This will be an honor for me!”.
It took me about 12 hours to reach Novosibirsk from Sofia. First 3h30m from Sofia to Moscow. Then I had my shortest night for this year – we took off at 21:30 MSK and landed 5:30 NSK time. The time passed quickly, the Aeroflot flight attendants were we so beautiful, that all of my attention mainly focused on them.
When we landed in Novosibirsk, I just couldn’t stop staring at my GPS position. Wow, I’m almost in the middle of Eurasia!
The first day was quite intense! My great friend Ivan has made a wonderful excursion to a place named “Akademgorod”. In English this may sound like “academics village”. It was created from scratch bak in the 60s to accommodate Soviet workers of science in a very peaceful close to nature environments. As a result it has transformed in a huge scientific cluster. A lot of institutes and research laboratories are now located there. There is also a huge university.
Students and specialists from all over Siberia and even Russia come to this place for study and cool projects!
No surprise, there is a big IT presence here. A lot of Russian and not only Russian companies have their R&D here, and no surprise the CodeFest conference gathers more than 3k attendees.
I had the privilege to be invited to the office of JetBrains
and the office of ExcelsiorJET
I had some truly wonderful time there! We had some pizza and great chat! Huge thanks to Ivan for being such a great host.
The end of the day was dedicated to a special event – the local JUG meetup. Together with Paul Finkelstein I had the honor to give my talk about Java and JPU in front of the local community. The event took place on the 22nd floor in the office of the famous Russian company 2GIS. The location was really awesome!
More than 150 people come to the event! It was fully packed with even standing people!
To be honest, I was a bit scared to be in front of these people. Siberian developers are famous to be the most hardcore developers in the world. Mostly the strongest compiler writers. Isn’t my talk going to be too smoothy for them? At the end of it I was happy to find out that it was really ok! I had a lot of questions afterwards!
It was a sincere pleasure to talk to this community!
The next day was the first day of the CodeFest. Luckily I had my talk scheduled for the day two. It was really good news for me, since I still had some jetlag.
So.. the conference is huge! It has 7 tracks and it is not focused only on Java.
Actually the variaty of technologies and a SC fields was a big plus for me. I learned a lot of new stuff. I think I was mostly stuck at the Data Science track. I’ve been playing a lot with tensorflow lately, so it was a natural choice for me.
I’ve heard some nice Project management and Team lead oriented talks as well.
I was even interview on the conference radio. I had a lovely chat with Vladimir Plizga from CFT.
The conf is huge!
The day one ended in the local pub with the concert of … the speakers! Singing about.. coding!! Awesome experience!
My talk was scheduled to be the first on day two.. I’ll be honest, I have expected no more than three people to show up. Three listeners would have been a victory for me!
Surprisingly.. it was almost packed for my Microprofile.io talk! (based on the MicroProfile.io tutorial created together with Ivan. St. Ivanov)
Every went smoothly! All of my demos worked! What a releaf!
Usually its not just giving a talk on CodeFest and you are free. After the talk there is an expert zone, where the speaker can make some live discussions and answer audience questions. I spent almost an hour there! I’m really happy that Microprofile.io enjoys so much interest! I hope it was useful for the audience!
The second part of the day I have decided to spend in the city exploring it.
The famous Transsib railway is crossing the big Siberian river Ob here.
The old and new come together!
The cultural life is very intense!
The famous Opera and Ballet theatre is really huge!
Siberia and Novosibirsk are definitely wonderful places to visit! If you have the chance to go there, you definitely should!
I’ve met really wonderful people and had some amazing time!
The next day I was in the airport having something I’ve almost missed – Siberian pelmeni!
Ok, I’m going home! Siberia, you are endless and beautiful!
Yet another 12000 km up in the air! (SOF-SVO-OVB-SVO-SOF)
Huge thanks to Ivan Ugliansky for making this possible.