I can finally scratch ‘attending the main SoCraTes unconference’ from my bucket list. What can I say - it was worth it!

Although I have visited several great SoCraTes partner events in the past, I’ve never had the chance to visit the main SoCraTes event in Soltau. This year SoCraTes Soltau took place in July for the first time, giving me a chance to attend (in the past the event was always scheduled in August, which is family vacation time for me).

So whats makes this event special?

Really diverse

I don’t go out much these days, so being confronted with many people enjoying different sexual and clothing choices was new to me. And what shall I say: It was a pleasure talking to all those “different” (to me!) IT nerds.

There was a really strict Code-of-Conduct. It took me a while to get used to it.

Jokes/Conversations about things like

• appearance (i.e. fat-shaming),
• drugs (i.e “your cocktail doesn’t contain alcohol”)
• religion
• or food (making fun of vegans, or people with food intolerance)

…where NOT tolerated.

This was enforced, but easy to follow.

And made conversations always go into a positive direction. Being tolerant and open-minded goes a long way. Even when talking about difficult topics such as politics.

Don’t get me wrong: All other SoCraTes partner events I have visited in the past also have enforced the same Code-of-Conduct, but this event had close to 200 participants, so it was more obvious and necessary.

My experience

The acronym SoCraTes stands for “Software Craft and Testing”, so these topics where obvious. Since there were 11 (!) parallel sessions happening at the same time there was a lot of FOMO (“fear-of-missing-out”) involved. This FOMO feeling continued for 4 days. And there where sessions until way past midnight…

I shared some knowledge by giving sessions on:

• Property-Based Testing
• Approval Testing
• Modern Linux CLI Tools

I also visited many other sessions. Some of them where:

• Custom Keyboards
• Test Strategies with QA
• Teaching IT to school kids
• Hating POSIX - Having a look at NuShell

But the best session was obviously the hallway-track 😎

Aside from a Pen-Testing evening session titled “Capture the flag”. This turned out to be my absolute highlight, because the presented test scenario using hackthebox.org closely resembled my own freshly setup home-server. I visited the follow-up evening session on the next day as well. If you get a chance to be introduced to Pen-Testing by Lisi: Go for it!

During another evening chat I managed to get one of the smart organizers to fix my home DNS setup when using WireGuard - took him less than 10min. How cool is that? (thanks Raimo)

On the last day I attended Markus' Code-Retreat and learned some new constraints for this popular exercise. “Hey” 😃

My summary: If you have the opportunity to visit this great “un-conference”: Go for it!

Travel

Traveling to Soltau was challenging, because no matter if you traveled by car or train, there where many obstacles. I was lucky enough to travel with Chris so the 7 hour trip in each direction was very relaxed.