Event: The Developer's Conference 2024-6 Porto Alegre (onsite)

The Developer's Conference (TDC) is arguably the most important technology event for software developers in Brazil. It is regularly held around four to six times a year, each time in one of the recurring host cities (São Paulo, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre being some of the most common ones). The talks presented in each edition span a wide variety of topics, giving a great overview of the technology ecosystem as a whole. 

Since 2020, most editions have also been transmitted online, either in a fully remote format or in a hybrid one. I have written in a past blog post about how I have been a regular attendant ever since my first participation in 2019.

Porto Alegre edition for 2024

While most of the times I attend remotely, whenever there is an edition in Porto Alegre I try to be onsite for the event. This was the case for the final edition of TDC in 2024, which took place in Porto Alegre between December 4th and December 5th. 

Going back to the familiar Uniritter campus and meeting in person with some of the most important figures of the national software development scene, as well as colleagues from the past whom I had not seen in years, is always an amazing experience!

Summit AI format

The Porto Alegre edition for this year was in the new "Summit AI" format, in which there are only two days of event and three main stages (plus several other venues such as stands and digital rooms), with all of the talks focusing on the topic of AI. Overall, there were 4 editions in this format this year, with 2 other (in São Paulo and Florianópolis) using the more traditional tracks format. 

While I understand the need for a more frequent and deeper discussion about AI, given the overwhelming speed with which it took hold of the conversation in the tech industry since ChatGPT's launch on November 2022, I admit that I prefer the traditional format, with more tracks and thus more talks and a wider variety of topics being discussed.

Mute talk format

One feature that was new to me, although I believe it was already used in previous editions this year, was the use of multiple talks happening in the same place at the same time, with headsets given to the attendants that would allow them to choose which talk they wanted to listen to. 

While it allowed to easily switch talks whenever there was a dull moment in one (very reminiscent of the online experience of switching rooms in the streaming platform with a single click), I did not find this novelty to be particularly helpful, from an attendant's point of view (although I'm sure it made the logistics much simpler). I also thought that the different talks interfered slightly with one another, as a loud ovation would sometimes interrupt a speaker mid-sentence when one talk ended while the other was still in progress.

Sessions

These were the talks I attended:

Day 1: 2024-12-04

• Nova Indústria Brasil: as ações da Finep para apoiar o desenvolvimento de IA no país. (New Industry Brazil: Finep's Actions To Help The Development Of AI In The Country)
• Inovação no Varejo: A Nova Era das Lojas Automatizadas com IA (Innovation In Retail: The New Age of Shops Automated With AI)
• Inteligência Artificial a Serviço do Farmacêutico: Consulta Interativa de Bulas de Medicamentos (Artificial Intelligence At The Service Of The Pharmacist: Interactive Consultation Of Medicines Leaflets)
• Reimagine o desenvolvimento de software com IA generativa (Reimagine Software Development With Generative AI)
• LLMonsters: desafios de GenAI em produção (LLMonsters: Challenges Of GenAI In Production)
• Discovery Kanbanizado - O que garantir antes do compromisso (Kanban-ized Discovery: What To Guarantee Before Committing)

Day 2: 2024-12-05

• Potencializando a Agilidade com Inteligência Artificial: Transformando Decisões e Processos em Tempo Real (Powering Agility With Artificial Intelligence: Transforming Decisions And Processes in Real Time)
• Uso de Agentes baseados em LLMs como suporte a equipes (Usage Of LLM-Based Agents As Support To Teams)
• Aplique AI e deixe agir: como implementar agentes de IA generativa (Apply AI And Let Act: How To Implement Generative AI Agents)
• Engenheiro de Prompt: A Arte de Fazer Perguntas que Movem a Era da Inteligência Artificial (Prompt Engineer: The Art Of Asking Questions That Move The Age Of Artificial Intelligence)

Takeaways

Attending this edition was a very good learning experience. I was able to hear about the implementation of LLMs for real use cases and in production scenarios - as someone who has been following closely this area, and who has been implementing several personal projects using LLMs, this was extremely insightful. I was also able to get a good overview of agentic AI, a subarea that I hope to dive deeper into in the near future but that I have not yet explored much. 

Finally, I was able to meet a few people whom I had not seen in a long time, which is always nice and heartwarming. As always, I intend to continue attending every edition of TDC that I can, and I hope to next year see more editions happening in the traditional tracks format instead of the Summit AI one.

Event: The Developer's Conference 2024-3

Since December of 2019 I have acquired one of my most regular habits: that of attending every possible edition of The Developer's Conference (TDC), a big event in Brazil focused on the software development ecosystem. While I can't always manage to participate in the entire event, due to conflicting schedules and any other kind of randomness life throws my way, I always try to at least attend a couple of sessions. I find that getting updated on what is going on in the field and engaging with my fellow developers (in the broadest sense possible: programmers, Agile enthusiast, product people, etc.) reinvigorates my passion for this path in life.

The third edition of this year's TDC took place on September 18th to September 20th, in São Paulo. Thankfully, it was also in a hybrid format, so all sessions could be attended remotely. Although I was not able to participate in all of the three days of the event, as I am just starting at a new job and did not want to take any days off just yet, the last day of the event happened during a local holiday in my state, so I could participate remotely in the sessions of that day.

Topics of Interest

Normal editions of the event are always split up in tracks, each focused on a specific topic. I always take a quick look at what is planned in all tracks, but I usually gravitate towards a small set of them. Typically, I attend sessions about Software Engineering, Agile, Java, Cloud, Automated Tests and Artificial Intelligence.

Of course, in each edition I also lean towards a few other specific things that are relevant for my work at that particular moment. This time, I ended up gravitating a lot towards Developer Experience and Documentation topics, both of which are currently very dear to my onboarding-into-a-legacy-system heart.

Sessions

These were the talks I attended:

- DevEx: Transformando a Dinâmica dos Times de Desenvolvimento (DevEx: Transforming Development Teams' Dynamics), from the Tech Leadership track.

- Além Da Programação: Desbloqueando O Potencial Do GitHub Copilot Nas Squads Da EY (Beyond Programming: Unblocking GitHub Copilot's Potential In EY's Squads), from the Tech Leadership track.

- Lidando Com A Pressão Da Liderança Técnica Em Meio Ao Caos (Dealing With Tech Leadership Pressure Amidst Chaos), from the Tech Leadership track.

- Developer Experience No Mundo Front-End: Do Ruby Ao Next.js (Developer Experience In The Front-End World: From Ruby To Next.js), from the Web And Front-End track.

- Segredo Dos Times Escaláveis De Tecnologia: Criando Uma Cultura De Documentação (The Secret Of Scalable Technology Teams: Creating A Culture Of Documentation), from the Tech Leadership track.

Takeaways

While I could only attend a few sessions this time, it was once again a refreshing experience to engage with my community. Exchanging ideas and hearing real life stories of people struggling with the same issues and fighting for the improvement of our craft always gives a new surge of energy that we can then inject in our daily work.

A few concepts and ideas have stayed on top of my head in the days since the end of the event. Mainly:

- "Code UI". While I had always been conscious about making my code clean and readable, I had never formalized the concept that one can think of it from a user-interface perspective.

- "People scale knowledge". Another thing that I always knew instinctively, but I think I found in this expression a great way to sell the idea to other people when necessary.

- Tribuo (Java library). While I did not attend the talk about this library, I got intrigued to check it further. It seems like it does not provide the thing I would most want out of it (a way to run LLM inference natively in Java, without having to rely on consuming a server API), but it appears to allow direct interface with TensorFlow, which might be an interesting thing to experiment with.

Ultimately, I got the usual TDC experience: learned a lot, had loads of fun and reconnected with my peers. I am looking forward to the next editions, and especially to attending in person the final one here in Porto Alegre, this December.