Walking down memory lane

Did you miss out on this years Equinor Developer Conference? Or do you want to take a walk down memory lane and relive the three-day event? Then we got you covered.

Developers from all over Norway gathered in Stavanger for the third Equinor Developer Conference – EDC among friends. With an agenda jam-packed with software treats it was no wonder it had a grand total of 165 attendees from 40 different departments.

There’s no doubt about the fact that knowledge sharing is caring and the conference is one of Equinor’s ways of doing just that.

But now it’s time to ask one of the big questions in life: how did it all go down? Join us for a trip down memory lane and relive the experience once again.

After everyone had flown into Sola Airport and wandered the short walk over to Quality Hotel Air, the conference could finally get crackin’. Tuesday morning kicked off with a welcome by Knut Erik Hollund, who helped start the the first EDC two years ago.

Shortly after introductions and warm welcomes had been extended it was time for the first keynote by Simon Brown. In his talk “5 things every developer should know about software architecture”, Brown wanted to bring some old architecture techniques back into the fray.

“People have thrown away stuff like diagramming and documentation modelling, and I try to encourage people to do some up-front thinking before they’re about to code," Brown explains.

“The pendulum needs to swing back the other way again so that teams do some of that stuff upfront before they start coding and get carried away,” he added.

He also held two smaller workshops that Tuesday and got an outsiders look into the programme. Brown often holds talks at conferences like these and naturally we had to ask him what he thought about EDC.

“One thing I found very interesting was the developer survey. I’ve seen some public developer surveys but I don’t really see internal surveys so it was rather interesting to see that done,” he said.

There’s hardly a better way to kickstart a day than an interesting keynote? Olve Maudal from Cisco’s Norwegian offices seemed to capture the crowd with his talk about how their software development workflow works – and how it could be transferred to other companies. Some of his key takeaways were to do like Toyota: try to suck a little less each time.

“You should also encourage code reviews but avoid them being mandatory. Beware of the observer effect that encourages people to get better when they’re being observed,” Maudal said.

Another natural highlight during any conference are the workshops. EDC was no exception and featured 8 workshops, 5 mini-workshops and 5 sessions dedicated to programming languages. Erik Parmann from Software Innovation in Bergen held the Lisp-session on EDC’s first day. 

When he was asked to hold the session there were quite a bit of thoughts going through his head beforehand.

“I asked myself a bunch of questions, ranging from “do I have the time to do this right” to “is 2 hours enough for people to learn anything?”. But I decided that I’d do it anyway and since it’s such a nice crowd it wouldn’t have to be perfect. After all, it’s better that someone does it than it not being done at all,” Parmann smiles.

With a bunch of workshops spread across three days the attendees had plenty of opportunities to choose from. A popular mini-workshop on EDC’s first day was 3D Printing, held by our very own Vice President Carsten Hammershøj. He had brought three 3D printers with him, which drew quite the crowd. Kristian Reed chose the workshop for a simple reason:

“I’ve always enjoyed being creative and making things myself. Being able to print things we’ve designed in 3D seems like a great way to use our imagination and unfold our creative mindset.”

Reed had tried out 3D printing a couple of years earlier and was fascinated by how much both the quality and the technology had developed.

While the smaller workshops only had a 2 hour format, the main workshops were spread across two days. Among them were the Omnia Radix workshop, where they got a first hand look at the DevOps platform. They got an introduction to the functionality and features of the platform, as well as trying it out for themselves through a case example.

“The workshop was well-prepared, and the example case demonstrated the steps of the process to set up the different environments. My impression is that Omnia Radix will be a very useful DevOps platform for software-developers when it gets released,” Marita Midthaug said.

Another popular part of the program was the last one, the Q&A with Corporate IT and the Digital Center of Excellence. If you ever wanted to ask questions to top-level managers, now you had your chance – a chance that quite a few grabbed.

Management had to answer questions related to organizational structure as well as competence among the leaders – and employees in the entire sector. There were a lot of eager listeners in the room while the questions went flying.