Follow-up on What Happened at Innovative TechTalks

By Petronela State

Following the completion of Innovative TechTalks, the 1st invite-only event for developers in Iasi, we would like to take a moment to summarize how things unfolded. But first we’ll start with a big “Thank you” to all our speakers that brought on the most amazing vibe. It was a great day filled with amazing talks, curious people, and high-quality networking on all things tech-related!

Teams don’t have to be perfect, they have to be united!

We kicked off Innovative TechTalks with an introductory session on how things work when running a company. Founder at Maxcode, Jules van den Berg and Claudiu Costan, director of operations at Maxcode, talked about the importance of giving teams the liberty to make decisions of their own, as well as the freedom to organize their time as they fit in order to be the most productive. We do stand by our motto that teams don’t have to be perfect in a software development company; but they have to be united for things to work out seamlessly.

Functional REST API testing in ASP.NET Core

After a short coffee break, software developer at Maxcode, Sorin Damian, took the stage to talk about Functional REST API testing in ASP.NET Core; more specifically, we learned a lot about the do’s and don’ts of functional testing, and why everything done in ASP.NET Core 2 seems to be better.

How to help your organization adopt TDD with Roy Osherove

Author of “The Art of Unit Testing”, “Elastic Leadership” and the upcoming “Enterprise DevOps” books, Roy Osherove joined us at Innovative TechTalks to share his take on how to go beyond the conventional, and truly help your organization adopt test driven development. What we’ve learned is that personal motivation plays a big part in convincing someone to do something. Believe it or not, “making the undesirable desirable” is possible when you combine a game, a challenge and very strong moral values. Personal ability is just as important when adopting TDD because you’re not just growing and empowering people, you’re also training them to go surpass their limitations.

Introducing C# 8 with Jon Skeet

After a well-deserved lunch break, we continued our session of insightful talks with an in-depth presentation on C# 8 with Jon Skeet, C# developer and software engineer at Google. Released back in 2002, C# went through 7 major changes over the years. As software developers, we were extremely excited to hear about the launch of C# 8 as well about some of its more interesting new features such as nullable and non-nullable reference types, creating C# classes with Records, default interface implementations and pattern matching recursive patterns.

Management vs. Leadership with Adrian Marinica

“Thousands of teams in Iasi, millions around the world, yet no two are alike”, says software developer at Maxcode, Adrian Marinica. And he couldn’t be more right. Teams work differently in most companies because they’re guided by a project manager. Does that mean teams can’t work productively without one? At Innovative TechTalks, Adrian talked about how things are done within Maxcode. Believe it or not, we believe in self-management because we want to give our developers the freedom to speak up, provide guidance, and take initiative whenever they feel they have something to say.

Elastic leadership for technical leaders 

Last but not least, we ended Innovative TechTalks on a very powerful note. Roy Osherove took the stage once again to share some interesting aspects on elastic leadership, a philosophy that could help companies handle daily, long-term challenges successfully, as well as create truly productive self-organizing teams. It’s no rocket science that teams need guidance in order to excel at what they do best.  We’ve learned a valuable lesson during Roy’s talk; that elastic leadership is a framework that’s all about understanding people first and effectively training them afterwards.

To wrap things up, we had a blast at Innovative TechTalks! We’ve learned a lot from our speakers and we cannot wait to do this again. Thank you all for being with us!

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