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Kambu was in Infoshare 2021, and we had a great time. Amidst insightful meetings and acceptable-to-good coffee, we also visited a handful of conferences. The talks covered mostly development and marketing, and, in the Infoshare spirit, I’ll relay here some highlights.
But first, a quick recap.
Infoshare is the biggest tech conference in Central and Eastern Europe, having started back in 2007. It’s a space where tech leaders, startups, investors, marketing experts, and executives meet.
The goals: share stories, get inspired and, of course, do business.
Being there allowed us to connect with people from different walks of life. Attendants, from students to managing directors, were (mostly) willing to shake hands.
Highlights
State of Frontend in 2021 – Is it easier or harder to develop nowadays?
A really engaging and insightful talk. The presenter made a case that, in the last five years or so, developing websites is actually becoming harder.
Some of the reasons include more preoccupation with privacy, accessibility, and the growing complexity of stacks.
Finally, there’s the increasing Performance Inequality Gap. In other words, the performance difference between low-performing devices and high-performing devices is widening. That means a wider range of cases to assess and test.
So, in mobile development, we know not only Android vs iOS, but also low-range vs. mid-range vs. top-of-the-line devices.
And the performance is getting harder to assess also on desktop browsers. The presenter advocates for including browser extensions in the benchmarking tests to get more realistic results.
The first retort to the Performance Inequality Gap is”But my analytics metrics show that the average page load is decreasing, which means every user device is loading the page faster.” The tricky part is that it can also mean that users with slower devices are abandoning the page even before it loads completely. As a result, we are blindsided by analytics, since it didn’t even take the slow devices into account.
Other Interesting Talks
There were dozens of talks and presentations, but other ones that made an impression on me are:
- Own Your Data: Changing Our Digital Future for Good – Very anticipated talk from Brittany Kaiser, who whistleblowed about her period as business development director for Cambridge Analytica. The company became (in)famous for misuing Facebook users information.
- Talent Shortage is Reshaping the World of Work – How leadership and HR are forced to think career first in a market with more and more demanding talends.
- Why your marketing to Gen Z will (most likely) fail. And how to prevent it – A refreshing and funny take on how to approach the generation Z – maybe only Gen Z themselves can do it?
Quick Takeaways
You Can’t Escape Some Topics
Seven of the ten presentations I went to mentioned Covid or vaccination directly. It makes sense since these are still relevant globally (unfortunately), and it’s great to address them.
Some attempts were awkward, however, because the presentation had no relation with the topics whatsoever. Something like “Covid is tough, right… speaking of which, here’s how to increase ROI.”
It was really nice when the speaker integrated this topic into their talk organically – think “I’m a specialist in statistics, so here’s a chart about vaccination to illustrate what I mean.”
But jokes about bad reception during Zoom calls are getting old!
Meeting With Competitors Was… Great
Representing Kambu, I had different meetings with different purposes. Some of them were variations of the straightforward “Hi, I have a product and I believe you would benefit from buying it.” Those were by the book, as expected.
But something surprised me. Some of the most interesting meetings were with fellow networkers that are virtually competitors. I met with a couple of people that hold a similar role to me, also offer software development (though different stacks), and even cater to similar industries.
And actually talking with a competitor was… great, once we established that we both aim to grow. Exchanging anecdotes about our day-to-day and big-picture challenges was very relatable.
Also, hearing about different approaches to solve the same problems was refreshing. It’s always a good reminder of how easy it is to fall into the “This is how it’s done” trap. In the end, I hope I could inspire these professionals as much as they did me.
