Two years have passed. That’s funny. Because I love to write. Actually I find it more rewarding than public speaking.
Joke. Killing joke.
Things are moving pretty fast. Faster than I wish. As usual I am doing too many things at once, thous none of it ends in a perfect shape. Which is fine. Perfection is boring, you need to kill this little shmug.
So I am doing new conference, in a worst possible moment, but let’s bury private stuff in soft shell of silence. Let’s write about conference.
It is called SegFault.
Ooops, he is doing it again. Why? Haven’t you check your business plan. Looked at market? There are soooo many things going on it IT in Poland. Don’t you have enough? You were already part with major conferences in Poland. Don’t you have enough reasons for sleepless nights? These are all valid questions I have received once I made it public, that Justyna, Kuba, Wiktor and I are going to work together (no surprise) on a new conference (no surprise) (or conferences, which should sparkle your curosity a little bit).
And, yes thank you for all of your care. Really. But the moment I am going to stop, means I am dead. So think about it like I am on a run from sudden and unexpected death.
So why SegFault?
Why we have named conference after one of the most serious error messages in computing history? (except, “Disk C: formatted successfully” ;)).
Because our dream is to segfault all currently running processes (we mean, you, attendees) and do some modifications and restart whole operating system (your life), new, fresh and clean.
If you know my previous posts, you know what I mean. I complain all the times about frameworks, how programing became boring job of gluing (not composing, but wrapping and gluing) frameworks, copy-and-pasting from StackOverflow and not listening to elders. Following every trend without even a moment of reflection.
I wanted, dreamed and tried many times to build conference far away from specific frameworks, languages and platforms. And this is one of dimensions of SegFault. It doesn’t mean you will not hear names of technologies or we will ban you from conference if you say name of your favorite platform. No. We just want it to become a background, a back story or a reference to something more important speaker wants you to remember. This is one of the reasons we don’t have call for papers. It is invitation only for speakers.
Some people we have talked with think this is way too abstract. It is for architects. Yes, it is, for architect INSIDE of you. Architect which asks two the most important questions every architect should ask (in my opinion, but I know you don’t care about it):
- what is the structure of the system?
- what is the purpose of the system?
That’s why we have “we are all architects” on our main page. Because this conference is for people who ask questions, questions about structure and purpose. People who seek and don’t want easy answers. People who are ok to feel uncomfortable during talk. Because what they hear is against widely accepted good practices or is so abstract and disconnected from reality it never gonna work.
Yes, deep inside of me I am creating conference for myself. For Justyna, Kuba, Wiktor, Paweł, Tomek, Norbert, Grzegorz, Wojtek and Mariusz, Marcin, Robert and all other speakers. A place where we can push boundaries of what’s widely known and accepted. The universal truths we all believe in IT. We want to stop it. Stop repeating these truths, blindly. “Goto considered harmful” (who read this article till the end?), “Java is slow”, “Windows is operating system” (oops). Yes. You need to be out of your comfort zone to feel comfortable at SegFault. Because we want to learn you truths far beyond what priests of your favorite platform are trying to sell you. It is all bullshit.
Yeah me and my lonely ego. But hey, who said you have to listen to the crowd? I believe that only if you build a product you want to use on your own, you can be yourself and take control over the world.
It is a long journey, it will take time to build community around it, to keep it always fresh and inspiring. It will be hard, because we will not provide answers, we will give you more questions. So you can come to next edition and answer to them on stage.
We will be talking all things distributed, programming languages concepts, good old papers we all love and how to stay in your passion and not loose mind in the meantime.
Yes, we all feel that we have reached the point where we need new place to gather all freaks like we and ask this question, what is next? I am writing my own VM, because I think this is the only way I can move forward. Wiktor is in secret exploring his own database. Worry not. Not for production. But to understand. Some of us want Haskell on JVM. Some of us want batch processing to die. Some of us ask if it is ok to have impostor syndrome and what to do when you are in your 40ties and you still code?
I hope will see you all soon at SegFault.
