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GOTO Amsterdam 2015 review

25 Jun 2015 . conf . Comments #conference review goto amsterdam

I attended the GOTO conference in Amsterdam on 18th and 19th June 2015.

The conference was in Amsterdam and was fully in English. There were 732 attendees, almost two times more than the previous year.

It was the 5th anniversary of the GOTO Amsterdam conference. Very tasty cakes were served for this occasion.

Let’s begin

The conference started with the introduction of Thursday’s tracks. It was started with a delay of over a dozen of minutes. Good for me - I didn’t miss anything.

Then it was the opening keynote about Scrum by Jeff Sutherland.

Best talks

The best talks, which I saw during two days of the conference:

  • How the Bitcoin Protocol Actually Works
  • The Evolution of Hadoop at Spotify - Through Failures and Pain
  • Huge Memory & Collection Oriented Programming -> Less Code More Speed?

Organisation

The organisation was perfect. Agendas on badges, mobile applications, a nice building, a very good catering, a cool small bag for laptop, a map with the rooms, a lot of exhibitors with many contests and gadgets, even cold Heineken beers at the end of each day.

Inside the main two rooms there were perfect conditions to listen talks. Plenty of space, good air-conditioning (it was cold in t-shirt) and nice sound system. On the other hand, in smaller rooms there was too hot and stuffy.

Summary

From the organisational point of view, it was the best conference which I attended, albeit it was also the most expensive one.