Another year has passed, and with that, the Geecon conference came back to town, and so did we. With a focus on Java and JVM–based technologies, Geecon is still recovering after Covid, but is slowly getting more and more traction every year. This year, the attendees could listen to 49 speakers throughout 43 lectures spanning two whole days, all attended by over 600 IT professionals and enthusiasts alike.
AI and Programming
The conference was kicked off by a lecture from Michael Feathers on AI, determinism, code generation, and refactoring. While the talk mainly was a very high-level look at the current AI landscape, not really delving deeper into particular topics, it posed a few very good points to think about. What stuck out for me the most was the idea that prompting generative models might, in the future, become another form of programming language that we, as developers, use to create programs. Just like assembler was to some degree replaced by languages such as C, and C to some degree replaced by languages such as C#, the prompting can become another form of programming in the future, producing already built executables.
Where Did All the Fun Go?
Throughout both days, there were plenty of other lectures, some of them aimed at more advanced IT folk, while others on the beginners just trying to get their bearing in the field. But what really stood out was a lecture by Bogomil Shopov at the end of the first day called “Where Did All the Fun Go?” which started with him playing a recording from a heavy metal concert and running around in a red wig, followed by talking about Krtek (the one from traditional Czech cartoon), playing Jozin z Bazin song and ending with him smashing a phone. What was the message? Well, the Joker summed it up best, I guess: “Why so serious?” …
OAuth and Beyond
And where did Y Soft fit into all of that? As a partner of the whole event, we built our glorious booth and got talking with the attendees. And since there were League of Legends finals, we also shared them live on our display in the booth. But we also came in as speakers, namely me and Dusan Jakub, with the topic of “OAuth and Beyond: Modern auth not only for the web”. Our allotted slot was on the very last day and the very last lecture of that day, so throughout the conference, we joked that only a cleaning lady would come to it to vacuum the room during our talk. Nothing could be further from the truth… We were simply swept away by the number of people who showed up (we pretty much filled the whole auditorium). Based on the feedback, we are already considering taking our lecture to other venues, such as a conference in Barcelona next year to which we were invited.
Overall, it was a fun conference, specially made so by the abundance of YSofters being there, enjoying tons of fun, both at the conference and afterward in the bars of Prague…