Software as Craft - Agile Conference in Chisinau

In the post I want to highlight very important event for IT community that happened in the Chisinau capital of Moldova. Also I want to discuss my view on the Chisinau’s IT field from knowledge sharing perspective.

Moldova is a small and relatively poor country in Europe but has a very well developed IT knowledge. Chisinau has at least three universities which graduates new IT specialists each year(USM, UTM, ASEM). That is why the country is very attractive for foreign IT investors. So as result most of the developers works for foreign investors as freelancer or in the local IT companies or migrate in better developed countries.

So back to the event itself, as you can see that Moldova and especially Chisinau has a lot of developers BUT what is very specific for the developers within the Chisinau is that as I know it is not very common to get in groups, create communities such as: Agile, TDD, DDD, alt.net, etc… just for improving personal skills through knowledge sharing. The event is conference Software as Craft 2009, 14-16 May. I think the main intention of the conference was knowledge sharing and the second is to grow agile culture in Moldova, both are very important especially because both are far from to be on mature level in the most of the local IT companies. There weren’t any similar events before in Chisinau, so many thanks to Tacit Knowledge who is ONLY sponsor, organizer and initiator (I’m not Tacit Knowledge developer, I don’t advertise here my company). The conference was organized on the very high level. All that was absolutely free for any person who wished to attend. I appreciate that because not all companies can do that in crisis period, other part of the IT companies in Chisinau just want to extract all the juice from developers by outsourcing them without investing in their knowledge.

As side effect of the conference, I hope, that developers’ community will be much closer to each other and open for knowledge sharing. For me was an interesting opportunity to discuss with bright folks and to capture important agile knowledge and practices from the persons such as Tom Looy who is ThoughWorks alumnus and at the moment Agile consultant.

The conference covered interesting talks about Agile, TDD, DDD, Social Media, Parallel Programming..etc.. I think each person found its interests in each talk.

As a conclusion of the post I want to say that nowadays is already old style of trying to learn something new sitting home alone and the only way to grow skills effectively is learning from each other by getting in communities. I don’t want to say that we should not work individually but I want to say that it is definitely not enough. Sadly but true is that among developers flows some skeptical ideas like “why I need to share my knowledge that so hard were accumulated by me”, so it is absolutely WRONG. Try to believe that all your output knowledge to community will have also a resonance back to you and finally you only will earn from that. Just take a look to Udi Dahan, Greg Young, Ayende Rahien, Martin Fowler, etc… they are very smart guys, try to understand why they share the knowledge with community using “tools” such as: Open Source Project, blogs, groups,…

Thank you,

Artur Trosin