A long time ago, back on September 12, Natalya, the organizer of the Ufa developer community ufacoder, wrote to me and invited me to give my talk about GraphQL at the UFADEVCONF conference. I didn't have to persuade me for a long time (I didn't have to at all) and so I became a speaker at ufadevconf.
As time went on, on September 15, I spoke at BIF 2019 - I met Sergei Zhukov there (the author of books about ReactPHP and just an excellent engineer from Skyeng) and invited him to submit his report to Ufa - he was approved too!
After a while, Devrel Skyeng came up with the idea to organize a PHP meetup a day earlier in the Modulbank office. All the stars came together and so Sergey and I became speakers at two events for two days in a row.
The road to Ufa started from Domodedovo airport. Departure at 11.45 in the morning and, therefore, at the airport, I was around 10. Not long before this trip, I was told that S7 has an excellent canteen with reasonable prices. The words "adequate" caused me some skepticism. As it turned out, in vain. Prices are at the price level in the MIPT canteen and it's a 5 minute walk from the airport - that's great.
Having eaten enough, I went to the airport and flew to Ufa. There was nothing unusual here, except for the amusing fact that I met a friend of mine who works at passport control - she is from a completely different city, but we met her where you can get to thousands of other cities.
After landing, I went to lunch with Serega and after that we went to Modulbank to prepare for our meetup. At the meetup, we were met by two employees - Pasha and Alena. I adore the world of IT development for this friendliness at every step and every person - they set up the sound for us, launched a broadcast on YouTube (record is here) and we began our reports.
The first was a talk from Sergey Zhuk about ReactPHP, after the traditional quiz and my report about images. After that I made a repetition of my report on images, but Sergey treacherously did not take a single photo of my speech. The magic of the meetups did not disappoint here too - very home-like, atmospheric and interesting. There is nothing more to add. For the afterparty, we went to the nearest institution, where we had a great time.
I performed in different cities and new people appear in large numbers - not without old acquaintances. People from the DIRECTUM company, whom I met at UIC.DEV in Izhevsk, came to ufadevconf.
We went to the #UFADEVCONF conference itself with a cozy and familiar company, consisting of the backend developer Skyeng Sergey and DIRECTUM's training and development manager Lena.
I miscalculated a little in time and came right next to my report and, 5 minutes before the start of the speech, I found out that the organizers had an old version of my report, but I did not send the last one. As a result, right in front of the audience, I was actively engaged in looking for the right version of the presentation and uploading it to the organizer's computer. I ended up starting my presentation 3 minutes later.
I got the impression that I began to speak more slowly. If in Skolkovo my report on GraphQL barely managed to be brought to 27 minutes, then in Ufa I barely settled in 40 .. For sure there were more content, but not that much. When there will be the recording, let's see how quickly I spoke 🙂
After finishing my report, I went to lunch. Special thanks to the organizers for everything related to the speakers. The lunch was excellent - I ate all to my way home 🙂 During lunch, we as usual, left with sarcastic comments with Zhuk and went for a walk around the conference.
At one of the stands (Tenzor company) I was offered to participate in the snowboard drawing - I refused, because the time of the drawing coincided with the time of Sergey's report on Code Review. To which I was told that this was not a problem and that I could collect my prize if I won, after the report. And they talked about all this in an extremely friendly manner.
BUT! When the snowboard was played and good friend of mine became the winner, but she was at the report of her colleague, she was barbarously promoted andwhen i started asking questions about this accedent they answered with the utmost detachment and even, a little, rudely "we had to come to the draw - we don't know anything." I was unhappy with this fact and I hope I do not have to ever use services of this company 🙂
Let's go back to the conference - we went to a couple of reports, but they didn't seem very interesting to us. And the time has come for Serega's talk about Code Review optimization.
The report was amazing and is very useful for any teams where the Code Review of the developers' work is held and, most importantly, the presentation was excellent - at some moments I laughed so loudly that I was even slightly uncomfortable 🙂
Well, after Sergey's report, we already went to the hotel to sit, drink tea and I had a little rest before the plane
I flew back perfectly and quickly 🙂 As always,In general. After arriving home, I returned to my standard processes and started preparing for my performance at GDG in Warsaw in a week.
Finales
Thank very much to the organizers for the warm welcome. I liked the city itself, the conference and the atmosphere.
I didn't really like the fact that the screens were very high and, being a viwer, I had to look all the time up at the screen or down at the speaker - not very convenient, especially in the front rows. Everything else is cool! I will look forward to next year and UFADEVCONF 2020!
