The good kind of commotion at Codemotion
Last week I was a first-time attendee at a nearby Codemotion event in Berlin. Codemotion is an organisation devoted to innovation, focused on developers and coding. And by developers, they mean anyone who writes code.
Codemotion had its start in Italy in 2011 and first came to Berlin in 2013. They have been building local partnerships and communities ever since. This year’s event provided a refreshing mix of coders from many backgrounds including web, gaming, software, ux, dev ops, and maker community. The overarching theme was pretty much “we all write code, let's share our ideas and insights”.
The event kicked off with a keynote presentation by Birgitta Böckeler tracing back the steps of the programmer profession to its start over 70 years ago. She mapped out the changes that shifted programming from a primarily female dominated profession to the current male-dominated culture and explored ideas that challenge what we traditionally think it means to be a “programmer”, breaking many stereotypes in the process.
Some of the event highlights included numerous lightning talks and workshops arranged by Women who Code, University of Arts, and Google Developer Group. Of particular note was the Wizards Amigos workshops for children which was a Harry Potter inspired event where children learn by doing. Cast as witches and wizards, children battled with code using the programming game, codecombat.com.
A code based live music and audiovisual performance provided a more subjective, aesthetic perspective on programming. It featured performances by students of the Generative Arts / Computational Arts Class at UdK (University of Arts in Berlin/Universität der Künste Berlin). Each performance was based on self-developer software and sensor interfaces.
Me (on the right) and a friend doing a little brainstorming | Photo by Gregor Fischer (CC BY-SA 2.0)
As a primarily web-based programmer, what was most interesting for me about the Codemotion event was the chance to break out of my usual day-to-day web programmer perspective. I got to not only to see a new perspective, but to experience it first hand by trying new things, discussing issues I don’t see in my day-to-day world, and meet interesting and creative people with a voracious appetite for all things code. Codemotion was a fun way to re-energize me for some upcoming projects and broaden my horizons in the process.
See where you can meet a Sourcefabric representative next, check out our events page.