I have just returned from the first Chamberconf conference which took place in the beautiful Moszna Castle.

A really good event! Relatively small (~80 people), with a lot of conversations (and beer), and good talks. KUDOS to organizers and to all participants... I hope to be there next year! :)

Now some notes about things that grabbed my attention during the conference (in random order). Some are my thoughts, some are quotes which I find worth remembering. The event was all in polish, so translations are mine.

• almost no women attended, which is pretty sad,
• during big events you bump into other people, during small events you meet with them (which is much more fun),
• 20 people during the talk is a great number to have a great discussion during and afterwards,
• there is a lot of diversity in what we do - and it is a pleasure to learn about how different things people are doing,
• I think it was the first sponsor-free conference for me, and I liked it - no booth, no stands, no gifts.
• quote (author known, but I won't tell you who he was!) : "the days when you did nothing at work but watched youtube the whole day are the worst ones: you come back home totally exhausted, and with zero energy for family life; all you want to do is to spent the rest of the day doing nothing (e.g. watching TV)"
• the old saying "if you have a problem that can be solved with regex then you have two problems" is 100% true: we proved that trying to figure out some simple regex during @MarcinStachniuk IntelliJ Shortcuts workshop,
• TIMTOWTDI - definitely true when it comes to IntelliJ shortcuts,
• flame wars never die - we had some pretty fierce (but fun) one between Eclipse/IntellJ and Mac/Linux :) We also had a Commodore/Atari flame war, but a shorter one.
• quotes from great talk by @MichalBartyzel (might not be 100% accurate):
  • "the main goal of refactoring: stop further damages",
  • "anemic domain model wasn't good, but at least everyone knew where to put what",
  • "we adapt to crap code",
  • not a quote but worth remembering: product owner and domain expert are usually different people - do you have access to both?
• quote from Wojciech Erbetowski "Why procrastinators procrastinate?" talk: "procrastination: the action of ruining your own life for no apparent reason",
• quote from @MarcinStachniuk IntelliJ Shortcuts workshop: "CTRL + B, CTRL + ALT + N, CTRL + ENTER, ALT + F1, CTRL + N 'test:5', CTRL + ALT + T, ..." ;)
• It was the first time we have discussed when the Java jobs market in Poland will collapse. Interesting/scary thought: up to now, I (naively) believed it will always stay the same. Time to figure out plan B?
• unconference is fun and interesting,
• seems like everyone recognizes frame from "The Sixth sense" but only some of us have seen "12 Angry Men",
• electric guitar is fun for the first ten minutes, then it becomes noise which disturbs discussion,
• the most scary thought is that I will forget what great conversations I had with some people, and next time we meet, I will have this awful feeling of "I know this guy, and he seems to recognize me, but who the hell is he?!" :( even thinking about it pisses me off!
• some technologies are well-known, but only from conference talks - almost no one really uses them in production (e.g. event-driven stuff),
• Are we coders really introverts? I have seen so many counter-examples during these 2 conference days.
• castles are huge,

I'm gonna repeat myself, but who cares:

KUDOS to organizers and to all participants... I hope to be there next year! :)

P.S. New Year resolution: I will stop procrastinating. Staring tomorrow. ;)