Knowledge gained from conferences

Rabea Gransberger: In the beginning, I learned a lot about core Java and about performance in Java. Learning about the future of Java helped me because I knew more than other people and could pass this knowledge on to them in conversations.

The main thing is just the broad knowledge that you get at conferences. You get a very early look at some new tools that are coming out, like Testcontainers, for example.

I did hear about that a year ago at the GeekOUT conference and now it's gaining an even bigger audience. So, I think it's good to be one of the first people to know about a certain tech.

I invest a great deal of time in researching a topic for my talks. It's not always that I know everything about the topic myself. For example, with code reviews, I had my own impression of them. I also read papers about code reviews to actually create the talk and to get some more knowledge.

I put articles that I find on my reading list. When I go to conferences, I try to catch up with where software development is heading. I try to get these ideas back into my company as well.

I usually read Twitter, where I get plenty of ideas. You get people tweeting new and cool stuff from conferences, even if you're not at the conferences. Almost all the people I know from conferences are on Twitter. If you're following those people on social media, then you get something out of that as well. I've been to too many unconferences that got me into bad habits. So, nowadays, I tend to hop between talks, even at normal conferences.

Geertjan Wielenga: Can you talk more about unconferences?

Rabea Gransberger: The official name of an unconference is an Open Space Technology conference and it's a conference with no fixed schedule at the beginning. You just go there, then everybody is asked to propose a topic.

You try to cluster similar topics and put them into a preliminary schedule.

The interesting thing is, you don't have to have any prior knowledge of the topic. At the unconferences I've attended, I mostly just went to discussions where everybody could have a say. I think this is a more intense learning experience for me. I tend to learn more at unconferences than I do at conferences.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are some things that you've learned, maybe over the past year, that you didn't know before?

Rabea Gransberger: There's a reason that I'm always taking pictures at conferences and that I like to take pictures with my phone: sometimes the year moves by so fast that I enjoy browsing through the pictures. I like to review the year and see what I've done throughout it.

I think one special thing that I learned at conferences is to enjoy talking to people, even if they have very different ideas on the topics. Usually, when you're in your personal environment, you try to find people who have a similar opinion and you become friends. But at conferences, it's somehow different. I learned to actually enjoy talking to people who have a different opinion, which broadens my point of view as well.

What I also like about conferences is learning from people who come from different parts of the world. I always had this feeling that there's a certain truth about some aspects of the world.

I thought that everybody has to have the same feeling that something is right or that something is wrong, but it's just not the case. Everybody's so influenced by how they grew up that they have a very different view on what is right and what is wrong. I think that's something I really enjoy about conferences: hearing about how other people are living in their own countries and their own cultures.