“Superfly!”

- Tell us please, what’s the difference between “CodeFest-2013” and last year’s conference?

- Well, actually there are a lot of differences if we take the event plan: we invited several foreign spokespeople. That turned out to be a pretty difficult task: even if we call our city “a silicon taiga”, it is still hard to make a San Francisco specialist come to Novosibirsk. The person should understand why they need to come to this weird land. Nevertheless, we succeeded.  

As for the event list, we made it much better this year. The quality of reports got better, the plan was being prepared more thoroughly, and the casting of spokespeople was more serious. We introduced a new interface design section. It used to resemble a “home party” – people would get together occasionally and tell each other about something. And now it’s a full-fledged part of the conference that attracts large audience.    

CodeFest has two slogans: “Interaction is priceless” and “Superfly!”. We tried to follow these principles and organized a centralized after-party for about 400 people. We’re going downtown in the evening, where we tried to arrange something interesting. And I believe we did it all right.  

- Are there any common features typical of an IT-specialist?

- Yes, there but they are more like clichés: sweater, beard, glasses – here’s a programmer. It’s different in real life. A long time ago when we started, people used to literally sit in their basements in Academgorodok (Academiс Town, part of Novosibirsk) and program something, rarely going out. The question has popped up recently: What was the influence of CodeFest. And we came to the conclusion that it mostly influenced dynamism since salaries have always been high, our specialists have always been smart but there was no dynamism. So we managed to drag them all out, and we keep doing that once a year. That’s how we debunked the beard-and-glasses cliché. 

- You didn’t only debunked the cliché, you also showed everybody that girls are interested in the IT sphere too. 

- Another cliché concerning the IT area itself. IT, in fact, includes very many branches. Not that they are all for men only, but let’s say they are more suitable for men, complex programming, for example. We have women in this sphere but people think that a man would fit in there better, since men are more logical and shrewd. There exist a lot of testing, project management tasks, take HR, for example. There are many IT areas, in which women are much more successful than men.  

- Last year CodeFest was held as part of the Siberians Internet Weeks. CodeFest was included in the program of SIW, and now you have different plans, structure, and location.

- We are friends with these guys. And the first CodeFest was born inside the Internet Weeks. We did the first event together. After we’d done it, we understood which way we should go, because they’re really strong at marketing stuff, design. That’s their strength. We are good at IT. Eventually we conduct two separate events: we do our stuff, they do theirs.     

- Aren’t you disappointed by the fact that CodeFest events are mentioned in blogs or social networks, with the main community slogan sounding like “We are here to have fun!” instead of being covered in professional press or well-known media?

- No, I’m not, because CodeFest is very popular among the professional community. This is confirmed by the speed of participant registration: we received 50 applications on the first day of the second CodeFest, 450 applications within the first 24 hours of the third CodeFest, and this year we already have 900. The registration closes within one week. That’s the result I keep an eye on. When registration is going to last up to six months I’ll start getting disappointed. 

In fact, we tried to combine a pretty useful events with fun. Making the program useful for everybody is very hard: the 1000 people are all very different, and a lecture of some highly professional participant may sound patronizing and boring for some, while other people will be very interested to discover something new. Organizing a 100% training course for such a huge audience is extremely hard. Therefore, we try to bring it all together, which makes the event valuable. Participants talk and share their experience, discover something new for each other. People come from different cities, today even from different countries. Different mentality, experience sharing intertwine, participants learn about something interesting – that’s education too.      

- One last thing…please, tell us the secret of your cranberry pies. Why are they traditionally present at CodeFest?  

- There is no secret. Five years ago we arranged another IT event. We actually wanted to have a small meeting for a hundred people but IT-guys are very special folks: someone accidentally sent their friends a link to the registration website before the start time. In the end, about 500 people registered while we were sleeping. And we had no location yet: we had no Idea where we should take our participants. There is no auditorium in our city with enough room for 500 people, perhaps we could’ve found some place for 100-150 of them but 500 – that was impossible! Now that we have Novosibirsk Expocenter we have enough room even for 1500 participants. But it was all different back then.

We thought it over, found an ordinary cafeteria at a business center and conducted our event there. That was a wonderful cafeteria – they had incredibly delicious pastries there. That was when the cranberry pies came from – we told everybody that we arranged this event just to eat pies. Since then we maintain this tradition ordering cranberry pies for every CodeFest, even the small one held in summer. All the participants like them a lot.

- Thank you very much. See you next year.        

-Yes, CodeFest will be conducted on March 29^th-30^th, if I’m right, on the last weekend of March.