Goto Berlin Day 1

Sam Newman trying to confuse us all at the Goto Berlin

Part of the Rails Girls Summer Of Code scholarship is also getting free tickets to a conference of your choice. So I went to my first developer's conference ever: The Goto Berlin!
Such a nice conference! At the beginning I thought, I will be there all by myself, but it turned out I knew a lot of people there and it felt like a cozy community gathering with really good catering and interesting talks.

I can totally relate to this.

First Talk: The Hacker

The first Talk I went to was called "Hacking the Internet of Things for Fun & Profit" by a young hacker, Ruben,  from the Netherlands. It was very impressive to see how easy it is to hack things. Ruben first showed us how he hacked a controlling system for the street lights in a place in California. It felt like a really simple step by step tutorial guiding us through his typical procedure of hacking into something. He of course calles himself an "ethical hacker" which means, that he informes the companies after hacking their products. He basically educates them about their security flaws and gives them tools how to make their products safer. 

One noticable thing was Ruben's most used sentence: "That's very interesting!". And he used this sentence in such an enthusiastic way that indeed he sparked a fire of interest in the audience. It also put the main motivation for his occupation into the center: Curiousity. Now what better way to be is there than being curiousity-driven? Ruben's talk also gave the audience a nice moment of shock: He first was showing us how exactly he hacked his own WIFI password through his soundsystem device. He guided us with only a few steps and it seemed almost too easy. After that short tutorial he took a moment and then told us that the company of this soundsystem device not only didn't fix the security gap, they didn't respond to him at all.

Some interesting tools that he mentioned where on the hacker side hydra and nmap, but on the security side ElastAlert and how to use it properly.

Lunchbreak with the cool People

After that talk I was very intrigued and decided to become more hacky an curious in my coding. I then enjoyed the awesome catering of the conference with some really nice people I met from the broader Ruby family in Berlin. There were some funny inappropriate topics on our lunch table and we had some good laughs and a tasty desert. We browsed through our goodie bags and asked Tobi how to approach the company merchandise stands for gifts. 

Next Talk: Understanding Rust

The next talk was by Florian from Ruby Berlin and it was about Rust, a lower level language developed by the mozilla community. The main aim of Rust seems to be safety, by being restrictive with passing on values. It has a value-borrowing structure that has to be made explicit. Rust also has no garbage-collection and is very static in order to create a higher barrier for risky proceedures. Although the talk was interesting, it was also quite difficult to understand for a junior who just managed to feel comfortable in Ruby but doesn't have a clue about any other programming language. It was still very good to get a little insight into the universe of languages and maybe open up to lower level concepts, because less abstraction can also give you a feeling for less magic and more knowledge of what is actually going on.

Third Talk: Confusion with Sam Newman

This Talk was recommended by many others who all told me that Sam Newman is an extraordinary fellow. And indeed he started making the audience laugh right away by talking about his high age and how he remembers the beginning of the internet that came on floppy disks. His whole talk was a magical marriage of funny jokes and well analysed thoughts, presented in a very pleasing way. I didn't know before that the term "serverless" was such a hype, considering that I come from a gereration after Sam, where the clowd is a normal everyday thing that we all use and where heroku was given to me at my birth as a developer.  But he made a point by showing that a growing grid of servers can destroy your database if you don't make sure it can handle all the queries and that no matter how high your abstraction level is and if you use a clowd or a platform to deploy your app to it will all still be run on servers in the end. Just because the developer doesn't see the actual computing issues anymore, doesn't mean that they don't exist anymore. And Sam pointed out that not seeing some of these processes can actually make things even harder, cause sometimes we obviously want to have some control over what's going on there. Another thing was the question weather we should use multiple vendors or dedicate everything to one. And he pointed out that if one works very well, of course it makes sense to dedicate everything to one, because it also gives you the opportunity to fully embrace the whole service that this vendor has to offer. 

Posing for pictures: my favorite hobby

To Summerize the First Day...

... I have to say that I am very happy being part of a very cool community with interesting topics and great perspectives for future learning. I was also very lucky to get this free ticket and meet so many sweet people and I am looking forward to my second day at the Goto Berlin!