At the end of May, I had the honour of being invited to speak at Craft Conf in Budapest. It was an incredible event, filled with brilliant speakers giving excellent talks, and I had an amazing time. It was also my first time in Hungary, and as someone with recent Hungarian ancestry I was extra excited to try out the small amount of the language that I speak.
The conference was held in Magyar Vasúttörténeti Park (the Hungarian Railway History Park), which is absolutely beautiful. This year also marks the 10th Craft Conf, and it was wonderful to see the organisers celebrate.
Thursday was the first day of conference talks, and the weather was gorgeous (it was almost too warm). I was very appreciative of the plentiful drinks stations offering water, soft drinks and juice! Craft Conf is also on a mission to go as green as possible, and their water cooler stations came with a stock of re-usable plastic cups in a range of fun colours, which attendees were asked to return rather than take as souvenirs (as tempting as it was to nab one!).
The conference opened up with a heavy hitter: Gergely Orosz speaking about the past, present and future of software development, and connecting up the trends in our industry with wider macroeconomic shifts to help us understand and predict what might be coming next. It was a great keynote, and set the tone for the event as one that would help attendees learn not just the _what_ of topics, but the _why_ as well.
I went to too many great talks to list them all, but my highlight from Thursday was definitely Ashi Krishnan speaking about transformer architecture and how LLMs parse natural language. As a speaker myself, I always love to see how other speakers approach their craft, and watching Ashi was – for lack of a less overused word – inspiring. Her talk was part poetry, part philosophy, and all tech; one of those rare works that gives you a real glimpse into the depth of a topic without overwhelming you.
Almost all of the talks from Craft Conf were recorded and will be posted online, and once Ashi’s is available I thoroughly recommend watching it, regardless of your interest in LLMs. It’s brilliant.
There were also some excellent talks about software testing, in particular Kevlin Henney’s talk about Good Unit Tests and Ian Cooper’s session on test-driven development. Versions of both of these talks are available online, and if you want to understand why testing is valuable – and how to do it well – they’re a great place to start.
Friday brought rain, but it didn’t dampen any conference spirits. Unfortunately, I didn’t attend any talks on Friday morning, as my own speaking slot was right before lunchtime and I wanted to prepare, but I heard great things about many of them.
I got some very kind feedback on my talk, and if the audience is happy then so am I! I spoke about the theory of communication, and the lessons we can learn from linguists and philosophers of years past.
My favourite talk of Friday was one of the closing talks, Escape Hatch Pitfalls with Richard Feldman. As with Ashi, it’s always a delight to watch other speakers excel at speaking; Richard’s talk was a joy from start to finish. Even as someone who’s pretty familiar with the escape hatch analogy, I’d never before thought of the tradeoffs involved in the way that Richard presented them. Along the way, he also managed to weave together lessons from his hands-on work using and developing new programming languages, especially Roc.
The conference wrapped up with an afterparty hosted by FormLabs, one of the sponsors, but by this point my brain was far too full and my body far too tired to do anything but head back to my hotel room to crash. I met so many awesome people at this conference, and encountered so many new perspectives, both technical and otherwise; I very much hope to return next year!
All photos in this write-up are taken from the CraftHub Flickr page, where you can see more photos from this event and the others that CraftHub organise.
