Spartakiade 2014 - My Impressions

The workshop motto: "Mobile in the enterprise"

Right on time at 9 a.m., Saturday began with relaxed small talk and getting to know the location and the participants before the "sporting" event officially started at 10 a.m. with the introduction of the trainers and workshops, signaled by a whistle.

The competition for my workshop, "Cross-platform development with Xamarin", was not to be underestimated. Here is a small excerpt:

• "Enterprise web applications with Ext JS / EXT.NET" with Johannes Hoppe
• "Composite user interfaces for service-oriented applications" with Daniel Mahrbach
• "Mobile Backend as a Service / HTML5" with Mike Bild
• "Graphic Recording" with Marcus Frey

That made me even happier that, with 17 participants, I was able to hold one of the larger workshops and definitely the biggest one I had ever given at that point. In addition to familiar faces, I was also able to make new contacts.

All participants were fully engaged, because after all the task was to implement the app idea "SpartaQuiz", proposed by Alexander, for Android and iOS within eight hours. While I was still introducing Xamarin, Stephan had already created the repository. If he ever tidies up his repositories, there is still a fork on GitHub.

We also received support from Sven, who must have sacrificed his lunch break to create the excellent UI mockups that can also be found in the repository. Otherwise I would not know when he could possibly have found the time.

A workshop exactly to my taste

From my point of view, it was a workshop exactly to my taste: free of PowerPoint slides, spontaneous, and above all full of eager participants who at times asked challenging questions and stayed fully engaged throughout. With relaxed conversations, smoking heads, and cold drinks, all workshops eventually transitioned into the evening event, "casual get-together", at around 7 p.m.

Day two

Just like on Saturday, Sunday started at 10 a.m. with a whistle and the introduction of the workshops. This time, among the options available were:

• "Azure Mobile Services" with Sascha Dittmann
• "Cross-platform for WP8, WPF & WinRT" with Loek van den Ouweland and Christian Lang
• "Android" with Marc Plogas

Unfortunately, I had to start my trip home fairly early, so I did not sit in on the cross-platform workshop by Loek and Christian. Who would want to catch only half of a workshop on that topic? Instead, I used the time to exchange experiences about Android with Marc and the other participants before they dove deeper into the platform and I headed home.

Conclusion

Spartakiade is a great alternative to the large and sometimes anonymous events. Its focus on workshops is a welcome change that, in my view, offers a lot of potential because you can immediately get your hands dirty with what you have just learned. And if something does not work as expected, the speaker is right there to help.

As far as I am concerned, I would be happy to travel to Berlin for Spartakiade again next year. If you would like to get even more impressions from the past few days, take a look at the photos at spartakiade.org/fotos.