A subject that I find myself reading about and discussing over the dinner table a lot recently is the promise of self-driving cars. I absolutely love the idea because of all of the problems it can solve in society. No more drunk driving, no more wasting time in traffic jams, no more parking issues and no need to own an expensive heap of metal that looses value even though you only use it a few hours a week.

With this in mind I went to Sanna Pampels talk called “Automated driving - are we taking the human factors researcher out of the loop?”. The talk was relly good with Sanna starting out by covering the different levels of automation. Going from a level 0 with no automation, over different levels of assisted and partially automated driving to level 5 which is full automation or autonomous cars.

Sanna said that british drivers spend 124 hrs in traffic jams each year, and dribing is not as safe as it could be, mainly because of human errors in traffic.

Today I chose to take up an old advice and picked a track that was completely out of my comfort zone for the first day of GOTO. When jumping off the deep end you might as well do it completely, so I decided to go for a number of talks on Deep Learning Analytics.

I had high hopes because the first talk was an introduction to the subject called “what is it and what can it do for you”. Sadly the talk didn’t really do it for me, because it started out really theoretical, and Diogo Almeida seemed almost too passionate, which meant that he started speaking really fast and jumped between usecases, both current and some for the possible future.

This year is, believe it or not, the 20th anniversary of the GOTO conference. So I think the expectations are high, with the event being hosted at the Bella Center.

Dan North, who is a regular speaker at GOTO, was tasked with doing the first half of the keynote, and as always he delivered. The topic was on the future of agile, so a topic that I have seen Dan speak about a number of times. He went over how we are still a young industry with the vast majority of us being the first in our families to work in IT.

One of the things that makes GOTO special for me is that it is the one conference i visit every year where I run into developers with so many different backgrounds. Most conferences are in one way or another centered around one platform and one programming language. Even though GOTO started as a Java conference back when it was called Jaoo, this is no longer the case, with Microsoft being regulars on the speaker list, and with tracks on languages like Elixir, Pearl and NodeJS being a regular occurance in the past.

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So it's that time of the year again. GOTO Copenhagen is just around the corner, and this year it is the 20th anniversary, so I expect it to be an even bigger deal than it normally is. It certainly looks like it, with the event being hosted at the Bella Center on the 3.-4. October, and with a very impressive speaker lineup.

After lunch I picked a talk by Dave Thomas on Fast data - tools and peopleware. Dave threw some punches at SCRUM and OO languages, while describing the challenges of handeling the huge amounts of data and the variery of devices that we have today. With that he concluded that the amount of serialization and modelling we are doing is hopeless and that going through layers like ODBC is terrible. More...

The day started with a keynote by Brian Goetz called "move deliberately and don't break anything", as kind of an answer to Erics talk and going against Mark Zuckerbergs "move fast and break things". He quoted Bob Dylan saying "when you aing got nothing, you got nothing to loose" making the argument that move fast and break things make sence for startups, that have all to gain and not much to loose, but for a mature company with a large userbase it is a different story. He described programming as an economic exercise, where programmer time and pizza is turned into software and technical debt. Building on this he argued pragmatism and that there is no good or bad, this time quoting Yoda saying: there is no good, there is only good for.

The rest of day one i skipped blogging, in order to stat focused for my own talk. I ende me up seeing the other talks on the Microsoft track, which were really good. Anders Lybecker did a nice talk on comming things in ASP.NET, Mark Seeman had fun with a tennis kata demobstrating property based testing and Jeppe Andersen introduced the new build feature in Visual Studio Online - something I have an actual need for on a current project.

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Today GOTO Copenhagen was kicked off and it has been packed with good talks. The keynote was by Anita Sengupta, who talked about working on descent and landing on Mars based on her work at NASA. Amasingly interesting subject, and some really extreme conditions that these people work under. To illustrate it takes 7 minutes from when they enter the atmosphere on Mars until the robot has landed, but the signal takes 14 minutes minutes from it is sent until it reaches control on earth. More...

We are at that time of the year where GOTO Copenhagen is in sight, and I am once again on board as a blogger. This year will be a little different though, because I will also be speaking myself. My talk is titled "TypeScript - a look at SPA's with Angular 2", a topic that I've had the pleasure of speaking quite a bit about, so I look forward to doing it at GOTO.