Soft Around the Globe

Intro

It all started about a year ago, following the dissolution of Inaka. While working there, the company not only allowed us but actually encouraged us to participate in at least one conference per year anywhere in the world. I used that benefit extensively to attended (and spoke at) many different conferences. This kind of benefits may be usual for folks in the northern hemisphere, but for southamerican developers, it’s not. A trip to the US or Europe is definitely not a cheap thing.

On the other hand, and for similar reasons (i.e. bringing first-quality speakers to southamerica is really expensive), organizing high-quality conferences down here is also hard. We do have conferences in Buenos Aires, don’t get me wrong. I organized one in 2017 and helped to organize another this year. But still, it doesn’t happen as often as we would like.

So, Mono and I decided to do something about it. We figured there must be another way. And we thought that, since we live in a very globalized world where the internet is everywhere (particularly in our line of business), we could reduce the flight and accommodation costs to 0 by simply having our conference online instead using a physical place. And that’s how Soft Around the Globe was born.

Version 1: June 20th, 2018 – 1 PM UTC

After a long period of organization and some rounds of beta testing… we are finally ready to invite you all to the very first official edition of Soft Around the Globe. It will be 100% free of charge, streamed with YouTube through Google Hangouts On Air. If you want to participate, please register yourself at Eventil. Here’s a helpful image that Mono crafted…

The Speakers

We’re very aware that an online conference is not like a regular one, because there are no hallways where you can meet interesting people and have the kind of conversations that tend to only happen at those events. Therefore, the main value of Soft Around the Globe will be the quality of the talks. That’s why our goal was to build a great schedule with interesting topics and expert speakers. Let me tell you who they are…

Oren Ellenbogen

A few years ago I was promoted from Developer to Tech Lead and (as you can see in the video of the talk I gave for the beta testing that I linked above) I was certainly not prepared for that. I had to learn on the road. It was tough, but if it was at all possible that was because of Oren Ellenbogen and his amazing SWLW.

Learning how to manage people in tech, how to improve as a professional and how to make others improve is not easy, but Oren knows a thing or two about that and he’s about to share some of that knowledge with us in his talk titled 
How to find growth material & learn x2 faster.

Ranganathan Balashanmugam

One of the hardest tasks of every software developer and software developer company around the world is estimation. It’s a complex, imprecise and often unrewarded job that is also (at least in my experience) unavoidable.

Ranganathan wrote a very thorough and properly detailed blog post about this subject based on his extensive experience on the subject and now he’s here to talk about it with all of us. His talk will be called Underestimating Estimation.

Alejo Sanchez

After 2 talks that can be seen as more or less management-related, we will switch gears entirely and go deep into the world of Data Science and one of its most important basic tools: Indexing.

Alejo will use his thorough knowledge of the area to walk us through many of the interesting developments from the last 10 years. Fasten your seatbelt and watch Data Indexing with us!

Naomi B. Robbins

Last year I was lucky to be invited to speak at the Erlang track of OpenCampsNYC. After my talk was done, I decided to visit some the other tracks. I ended up watching a couple of great talks from the DataViz Camp. The most amazing one by far was Naomi’s talk on Common Graphical Mistakes.

Naomi is, without a doubt, an expert in this field and she really knows how to share her knowledge. Her talks are funny and educational, even for folks like me who’re certainly not in the DataViz world. It’s an honor for us to have her here presenting her talk: How to Avoid Some Common Graphical Mistakes.

Final Notes

As you can infer from the paragraphs above, we are very proud of the quality of the speakers and talks we managed to gather for our first edition. We truly believe that all of the talks will be interesting and rewarding for everyone.

We are also extremely happy to be able to organize an event like this and still keep it 100% free. A big part of that relied on the service provided by our friends at Eventil. They have a great team that’s always willing to help.

So… what are you waiting for?

Register at our website and join us on June 20th!