OVHcloud at SnowCamp 2022

Between Wednesday and Friday February 2-4, 2022, the 6th edition of Snowcamp took place, the technical conference with 650+ attendees at Grenoble. Like Touraine Tech’s organizers, Snowcamp organizers have a lot of problems of all kinds to manage but they maintained this particular edition (without speaker dinner, breakfast and with restrictions) and we thank them for that.

As speakers, we are going to tell you how this conference went.

Few words about the conference:

• 650+ attendees
• 190 talks submissions in CFP (Call For Papers)
• 2 keynotes
• 40 conferences
• 10 workshops
• 16 sponsors
• 1 unconference day

The Snowcamp conference is a separate concept: workshops on Wednesdays over a full day to learn or deepen a particular technology; a conference on Thursday and Friday, more classic with 45 minutes talks; finally on Saturday, an unconference/a relaxing day in the snow.

And what can you say about the place?

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Keynote

We had already seen the talk of Noel Macé and Pierre Tibulle (at Riviera Dev and/or at the JUG Summer Camp) but I must admit once again it was awesome!

Title: “👨‍🎨 Once upon a time… the browsers ⛵️”
🇫🇷 👨‍🎨 Il était une fois… les navigateurs ⛵️

Abstract:

“Great battles and great innovations, told and sketchnoted live! Come with us to listen the animated history of the browsers, from the CERN to nowadays… and their probable futures!

Delve back into the adventure and great ideas of web browsing, lulled by the voice of Noël and the drawings of Pierre!”

The keynote format suited them, it was really great. Imagine the story of the browsers told to perfection and sketchnoted live with humor and a great duo, it was simply brilliant! From the first to the last minute, we loved it!

OVHcloud talks

The conference was punctuated by 50 talks, given by 65 speakers from all over France. Unfortunately, the talks were not recorded this year, but this can also be an advantage, less stress for the speakers and freedom of what they want to say.

Among these talks, 4 were given by OVHcloud speakers:

Stéphane Philippart – Open source to the rescue of the developer (and the architect ?)

🇫🇷 L’Open Source au secours du développeur (et de l’architecte) ?

Abstract:

This talk is about the reasons that drove Stéphane to look in the open source development.

Before to being a DevRel at OVHcloud Stéphane was a Software Architect. During these years, despite its passion for development the opportunities to develop were less and less. His talk explains why and how he started to participate to open source projects and what they bring to his developer’s life.

It’s also an occasion to take tips and advice on the problems he met.

Aurélie Vache & Horacio Gonzalez – What the heck is DevRel?

🇫🇷 Mais, à quoi ça sert un DevRel ?

Abstract:

“In recent years, we have seen new job titles appear, at the crossroads between tech, marketing and the community: Developer Advocate, Developer Evangelist, Technical Advocate… These jobs are grouped together in a large category: Developer Relations, or quite simply DevRel …

But what exactly is a DevRel?
What does he/she do for a living?
Is he/she just a glitter thrower?
Does he/she spend his/her life in conferences?
Does he/she know airports and train stations inside out?
Does he/she have a unicorn costume in his/her luggage?

Aurélie and Horacio will show you in this talk, with their humor and good mood, their daily life, the different types of activities and what is really behind this DevRel job… And you might even get some little anecdotes ^^”

Aurélie Vache – Common tips & mistakes in Go and how to solve them

🇫🇷 “Common tips & mistakes” en Go – et comment les résoudre

Abstract:

These tools may mean something to you, you may use them daily, but did you know that they were made in Go? Indeed, the Go language is a language a lot of used to make microservices, cross-compilation, by companies requiring high performance and resilience.

These last years Go is everywhere: micro-services, cross-compilation, used for building resilient and efficient applications. Learning Go look easy and it’s a convenient language (strong typed and a rich ecosystem).

It is a practical language, easy to learn, typed and with a rich ecosystem. And it’s true, creating an HTTP server or even a CLI application in Go only takes a few minutes. It’s perfect … or almost!

Aurélie explained in her conference, based on her experience and real life things, some tips and some recurring errors with their solutions and how to avoid them.

David Aparicio – Father Castor 🐻, tell us a story about OPS

🇫🇷 Père Castor 🐻, raconte nous une histoire (d’OPS)

Abstract:

“Failure as a source of knowledge.

Can we learn from the mistakes of the big tech (companies)?
To do so, we will review some of the major outages of the last decade: Github, Amazon, Google, OVHcloud, Apple, Fastly, Microsoft, Gitlab or more recently Facebook. Through the reading of the post-mortems of the incidents, we will analyze the root cause, the implementation of the remediation, and extract some good practices

~ IaaS (Interruption as a Sageness) #HugOps”

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Our DevRel team

And what about our DevRel team?

Tuesday we onboarded our 4th colleague at the Paris office (welcome again Stéphane!), who presented a talk at Snowcamp as a DevRel for this first week of work at OVHcloud!

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Unconference

Snowcamp is also a day outside the conference, called “unconference”, with snowshoes for some and skis for others. Even if we have to come back on Friday evening, because as we said in our talk about the DevRel profession, it is important to reconcile personal, family and associative life, we hope that one day we will be able to take advantage of this great unconference day!

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Behind the scene

What is behind the scenes of an event of this type?

We know you are waiting this moment since the beginning of the article ^^.

This time we were “only” speakers, but that’s no excuse not to tell you about all the adventures we may have had 😆.

Mixing the onboarding of our 4th colleague and a trip to a conference was sporty enough, enough for Horacio to forget, an important accessory necessary for our talk, on his bed on Tuesday when he left at 4am. So imagine a DevRel running around Paris at 5 p.m. to find … a backup unicorn costume 😆. Challenge accepted and passed!

Between a plane and a train, what about enjoying the sun during a little session of work? ^^

And yes of course, repeat, repeat and repeat our talks even on a plane

This kind of events are also an opportunity to meet awesome people, to share, to get to know each other.

Attending a conference can also be a way to meet sponsors, participate and win one of their contests! Congratulations David!!

Thanks again to the Snowcamp organizers!

Bye bye Snowcamp, and see you next year 🙂.

“Et pendant ce temps à Vera Cruz”

Olivier was not with us, sniff, but our “Poulpito” was there to manage the fort with a master hand 💪.

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