I was first told about how amazing SoCraTes unconference is by Chris about a year ago. Ever since I have been wanting to go. I finally made it! The whole of last weekend I spent in the middle of Cotswolds learning hard and playing hard with developers from allover Europe.

For those, who don't know what unconference is, let me quickly explain. Another name fot it is open space. Each day any of the attendees propose topics, set time and place and add it to the schedule. You end up with a full schedule and get to pick which of those sessions you want to attend. Some sessions are hands-on workshops, some are demos, others can be more of discussion format. Schedule gets full very quickly, most of the time you are torn because there are some many interesting sessions to go to and some happen at the same time.

Unconference tends to be smaller than regular conferences. It is usually under a hundred people, which makes it more intimate and this is one of the reasons why it is so amazing. You get to know people closer, because you have more time to spend with everyone. Plus all attendees stay at the same hotel in the middle of nowhere, and there are no distractions. You have meals together, you go to sessions/talks, and in the evenings everyone huddles together around the bar.

In case you are wondering that there probably aren't enough sessions at the event like that, here's a list of some of the sessions we had:

• ~ Functional Reactive Programming, building snake
• ~ Test driven infrastructure
• ~ Scalability YAGNI vs YAGNI
• ~ Bad practices of testing
• ~ Typescript
• ~ Haskell hacking session
• ~ Meta pipleines
• ~ Microservices
• ~ Java8 + ApacheSpark
• ~ Functional calesthenics
• ~ Concourse CI
• ~ Event sourcing
• ~ F# (?)
• ~ XP values
• ~ From zero to continious integration
• ~ ... and many more

Mateu, Sam and myself ran a session on Extreme Learning. It was based around the same exercise I mention in this post. We had a really good feedback from all the participants, and some said they will start using this practice.

Some of the sessions that really stood out for me were on Docker and Impact mapping. There was also a session on music modelling which I didn't get to attend due to clash but it sounded like a lot of fun.

Completely new to me terms were: event sourcing, currying, microservices vs Service Oriented Architecture. I have learnt loads but I also met a lot of people from London Software Craftsmanship Community and planning to stay in touch with them.

It is very common for SoCraTes attendees to organise other activities. This year some attendees were going for a run in the mornings, someone held a Tai Chi session. I did yoga in the mornings and some people joined me, which was great! Couple of people brought their guitars and played them in the evening.

After a long day of learning people would have dinner and gather in the bar area. But very few were just having drinks, most people were either playing various board games, engaging in discussions at the bar or hacking away at something. I have been introduced to the game of Set, Warewolf and Avalon. I actually got completely hooked on Set. On the last day after breakfast we all went for a long walk across fields and through the local town to get the taste of local ice cream. The whole event felt more like a summer camp, to be honest, and it was really sad to say goodbye to all these lovely people.

Overall, I had a blast and I am really proud that 8th Light were among the sponsors. I am already looking forward to the next one.