Best pre-COVID-19 events for engineers

Events and Conferences are a core element of any growing industry and ours is no different.

It’s the easiest way to learn what’s new and to gain a better understanding of any technology. After all, we might love blogs and online courses, but at the end of the day, is there a better way to process any type of information than a passionately delivered speech or a lively discussion? You could meet professionals and experts from any company, any position, any country across the globe and you'd have the unique opportunity to discuss with them, ask for advice and share your experiences on your every-day work challenges.

Events aren't just about education and professional networking. They're about meeting like-minded people! These are the ones that will laugh at your geeky jokes. They know every Rick and Morty quote. They started coding just to create Iron Man’s suit... These people are facing the same difficulties in their everyday jobs and they are thirsty for solutions. 

And as more and more of this year’s events are turning into virtual conferences, the industry loses some of its inherent dynamism. We all find ourselves wishing we could reconnect with the community beyond a Zoom call, or to bump into an old colleague at a conference coffee stand. But patience and safety first. So, as you are standing in front of your laptop, feeling a twinge of nostalgia for events past, here's a breakdown of the best in engineering events from last year.

So start scrolling and fall down the rabbit-hole of supporting content:

Big Data LDN 2019

Last year we attended London’s biggest data exhibition, Big Data Ldn. Our booth dream team shared with the attendees our DataOps secrets for success, while our CTO, Andrew Stevenson and Jeremy Frenay from Babylon Health presented how to Free up Engineering and Infrastructure Resources to Scale with DataOps. This presentation, which was inspired by Babylon Health’s case study, showcased how the company overcame any data challenges during its expansion into new markets thanks to adopting new GitOps practices. At the same time, the speakers offered some tips for building real-time streaming applications in a consistent way and how a company can reduce the need for skills by using SQL to work with real-time data streams. You can watch the full presentation here.

Kafka Summit SF 2019

Want a cookie? Of course, as long as it is a Kafka cookie! As every year, our leadership team visited San Francisco to attend the premier event for Apache Kafka. We met plenty of our partners, made new friends, and took some notes on the industry trends (yes, we also had plenty of cookies). Among these industry trends, we identified that the DataOps movement is becoming more and more popular in the Kafka community, as well as the establishment of SQL as the go-to tool for push-based queries for applications. You can get the bigger picture by reading our Top takeaways from Kafka Summit and industry trends.

InfluxDays 2019

At the beginning of Summer 2019 our team attended InfluxDays and Christos shared his expertise on streaming data on a DataOps Platform, using Kafka, InfluxDB and Kubernetes Native Flows. We talked about DataOps personas, IoT challenges and presented how you can implement a streaming architecture for IoT time-series data and real-time insights. As data streams are continuously increasing for companies, as long as their data manipulation needs, we developed Lenses Topology, the creative way to represent the total path of data, from process to process and from data bank to data bank.

You can have a look at our Presentation slides here.

Docker Athens Meetup 2020

We always keep our seats warm in international Conferences, but we mingle in local Data communities too. That’s why we support local meetups that are attended by students, researchers and early-stage professionals. The first event we sponsored this year was Docker Athens Meetup, where Marios, our rockstar Head of DevOps presented Docker on business and how he stopped worrying about anti-patterns. You can find the presentation slides here.

Our red-shirt team can’t wait to see you again live or virtually at an Open-Source community event. After all, the best part of the DataOps movement is the teams that hold it together. Stay tuned, stay safe and let's meet again soon!