Building Beyond Boundaries: ServerlessDays Belfast celebrates the spirit of Innovation
We have launched ServerlessDays Belfast 2024. It’s on Thursday, the 23rd of May, at the Titanic Hotel beside the Titanic Belfast museum. It’s one of the original buildings of the White Star Line, the company that designed and built Titanic. ServerlessDays Belfast will be in Drawing Room One, where they drew huge blueprints for the ships. It has a curved or barrel ceiling with glass to let in natural light. The ship designers drew the vessel to scale here.
It will be hard to top last year’s awesome SeverlessDay at the Game of Thrones Studios. The conversations and content last year were fantastic. But this year’s location and the history of Titanic help frame the thinking around ‘building beyond boundaries’ and how traditionally things were built, engineered, designed, and architected compared to what is available to us today.
It is the third annual ServerlessDays Belfast event. The first one was in Belfast in January 2020. Last year, we were in Game of Thrones Studios, which was very cool. And now in 2024, we’re in the Titanic Hotel.
What is it like to attend ServerlessDays?
ServerlessDays is a brilliant event. It’s a one-day conference, with around ten talks on a single track with a single theme, and it’s a community event as well. We organise it as not for profit. We keep the ticket price as low as possible through sponsorship from partner companies. And although it’s SeverlessDays Belfast, it is a serverless conference for the whole island of Ireland. Everyone’s welcome. There’s a large catchment area from Dublin up to the north of the island. People come from all over Ireland, England, Europe, and even the United States. We design a space where you attend a conference and not just a meetup.
What’s always inspiring at these events is the impact and scale of the things that attendees are working on or developing. Even the side conversations blow our minds with how high up the value chain people are and how much of a global impact they’re having with the work that they’re doing through leveraging the mindsets, technologies and ways of working with a serverless approach. It’s phenomenal.
Tell me more about this year’s theme: ‘Building Beyond Boundaries’
ServerlessDays has been running for several years. Incredibly, people show off projects and discuss the technical details, but we also like looking at their mindset change. The theme of the event this year is ‘Building Beyond Boundaries’ to celebrate the spirit of Innovation. People involved in serverless projects are driving real change by changing companies and mindsets, and to do that, you need to see the opportunity, the courage to try, and the conviction to make it happen. And what is remarkable is the thread returning to Belfast where engineers designed the largest ocean liner in the world at the time, the Titanic. We are amazed at the scale of ambition required 100 years ago to make what were effectively systems. It is no different now when you sit at your desk to build massive global systems.
Our theme, ‘Building Beyond Boundaries,’ is not only about technical boundaries. Boundaries around your location, mindset, business or technical stack can exist. It’s about getting out of your comfort zone and building big.
What changes have you seen at ServerlessDays events?
Things have changed in the industry over the last five to ten years, and with COVID, we have started to build applications to reach the customer where they are. We are deploying remotely from Northern Ireland to South America. Ten years ago, that was almost impossible. It will be interesting to see what other people are doing in that regard and how they’ve changed their approach or how the opportunities have changed.
It’s about thinking, why not us? Be ambitious and give it a go. A lot of the barriers to entry are gone. We see examples of people achieving success with these techniques and mindset shifts. And it’s great for those coming up that they have something to look up to and aspire to. And be inspired to deliver impact and change across the world.
When we first started working for a telecoms company, we would create a tape. We would copy that tape and people would physically get on a plane and take that tape to somewhere like Sao Paulo to install software for a telecom operator. So, being able to do what we do now is insane.
The storytelling part is essential. People will do a technical show-and-tell, but they also talk about how they did it, got buy-in and their challenges, which are fascinating stories. We are a super accessible community in a safe environment. Nobody’s an expert. We’re all just trying to figure out and learn from each other.
ServerlessDays Belfast Call for Papers
The ‘Call for Papers’ is on Sessionize. Look up @BFSServerless on X or search for ServerlessDays Belfast. On Sessionize, we are at sessionize.com/serverlessdays-belfast-2024. So, if you fancy speaking, pop your talk in. If you fancy attending, grab an early bird ticket.
It’s a great reflection on the Serverless community that you see talks online and people writing articles and think they are amazing. And then you meet them and think, wow, they are ordinary people who are pretty friendly. It’s a lovely community of like-minded people. To be fair, we’ve never experienced a community like it. It is very inclusive, and there’s lots going on as well. Everyone has a growth mindset.
We look forward to many excellent talks and social events on 23rd May. Get your tickets now!
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