BuildStuff is not your typical software conference. It has this special atmosphere, it’s hacker-friendly, topic tolerant & the only conference with a free party and charity poker tournament!

What makes BuildStuff so special? Hard to find all the ingredients but for me these are the most important:

• No marketing mambo jambo. BuildStuff originated as a response to product/platform specific conferences with too much self promotion.
• It’s topic tolerant. The only guidline there is regarding sessions is “it has somehow something to do with software”. With 5 different tracks there’s almost always something of your your interest and if not, there’s always someone in the lobby to chat with (what brings me to the next point).
• Everybody is really friendly and open at BuildStuff. There’s no Speakers Room and most speakers stay for the sessions or a chat in the lobby. In the evenings people get together and organize themselves for diner and/or drinks.

Below I’ve listed the sessions I’ve attended. If you want to check what they are about you can download the full agenda with abstracts here. All sessions were recorded so they will be available online but if I take past year as a reference it might take a few months before they show up on InfoQ.

Wednesday

Oren Eini (@ayende) - Building blocks of a distributed system
Ali Kheyrollahi (@aliostad) - 5 anti-patterns in designing API’s
Itamar Syn-Hershko (@synhershko) - Real-world monitoring and visualisations
Ian Cooper (@ICooper) - Service Discovery and Clustering for .NET developers
Greg Young (@gregyoung) - PrivateEye

Thursday

Mel Conway (@conways_law) - Coding vs the Brain: Can’t We All Just Get Along
Ali Kheyrollahi (@aliostad) - From Power Chords to Power of Models: Insights from History of Rock Music via Machine Learning
Chris Condron (@CLCondron) - Unsafe at any Speed - Successful high performance low latency systems in C#
Mark Rendle (@markrendle) - ASP.NET 5 on Docker
Russel Miles (@russmiles) - Lies, Damn Lies and Consulting Lies

Friday

Sam Elamin (@samelamin) - Monoliths to Microservices. A Journey.
Ben Hall (@ben_hall) - Real World Experience Report on Running Docker
Pieter Hintjens (@hintjens) - Ten Rules for API Design
Mark Rendle (@markrendle) - Programming For The Criminally Insane

Some sessions I could not attend(*) will be watched when they are available
Jef Claes (@JefClaes) - Evil by Design
Yves Reynhout (@bittacklr) - Trench Talk: Model and friends
Richard Minerich (@rickasaurus) - How We Use Function Programming to Find the Bad Guys
Diego Ongaro (@ongardie) - The Raft Consensus Algorithm
Sebastien Lambla (@serialseb) - The Simple Life of ReSTful Microserviices
Phillip Trelford (@ptrelford) - Beyond Lists
Oystein Kosrud - Functional Programming for the Object Oriented

_{(*) due to: conflicting schedules, interesting chats in the lobby, recovering from the party}