Today I went to the Women Techmakers Madrid and it was an overdose of Iocain for me, in a possitive way, of course. Iocain? To understand the meaning, you should have watched Teresa de la Torre’s talk, but I will explain a little bit later :)

The organization was fantastic, thanks to Tech & Ladies and Google Campus Madrid! The speakers were awesome, funny and very professional. I learn a lot from different technologies and subjects and I have some ideas to carry out thanks to those talks:

• Introduction to web technologies with Python (Yamila Moreno): I used to code in groovy with Grails framework and this talk reminded me of those days. You should choose the framework that fits most with the project or even don’t use it and do it with the language itself. She spoke about Brython for Frontend, so maybe I can start with Python and don’t give up Frontend at the same time!

• Hi, my name is Teresa and I am Iocain addict (Teresa de la Torre): This was a very motivational talk, about leaving your comfort zone and not die trying. You can start learning a new thing by going to a meetup, reading manuals, starting with simple talks. You don’t have to do it alone!

• Geb + Spock: long and prosperous life to your functional tests (Esther Lozano): I have worked with Geb in the past and I should work with it again, very reusable, easy to use and with the same syntaxis as JQuery. Esther explained how to use it very well.

• Creating web elements with Polymer (Gloria Bueno): When I hear about Polymer and Web Components I always want to learn more about it. I should watch this talk when I learn it, because you need to have a knowledge in Polymer to take advantage of the talk.

• Gamification, ¿do you want to play with me? (Laura Muñoz): I used Gamification when I work for a project for BBVA and it is true that people like gamification very much, sometimes too much and someone has to set limits… But it can be very useful for a business to engage their clients.

• 10 gold rules in software development (Esther Sanz): She spoke about not having different departments for each role. It should be designers, frontend, backend developers…in the same department. It was very inspirational talk too.

• Arduino and IoT (Internet of Tricks) (Isabel Cabeza and Carmen Checa): This was the funniest talk today. They did a magic trick and then they explained how they did it with Arduino.

• TDD and hexagonal architecture (Laura Morillo): I have never used TDD but I should try it. You have to do the test first, then the code to make the test works and then refactor the code to make it clean and usable.

• YouTuber, woman and 9 years old, what can end bad? (Adriana Luengo): A 9 year old girl in Women Techmakers? Yes, she explained how she makes the videos about handicrafts in her Youtube channel and the importance of speaking with her subscribers. She writes her ideas to have enough material each week and every Saturday morning she recordes the videos, it can last 3 or 4 hours sometimes to finish them! She was very sweet and an example for all of us. I have to tell my little cousin about this Youtube channel!

• Project and team management (Rita Madariaga): She spoke about how to manage the issues with the clients in a project and how to manage a team in a non agile development.

• Predictive Analytics and be early to your client wishes (Laila El Qadi): Big data can help a business to be closer to its clients, give them what they need, even before they know it.

• Good practices in Angular 1.x and the road for Angular 2 (Ana Belén Medina): I work with AngularJS but I didn’t learn it in a proper way. This talk can help me to use it better (use ‘Controller as’ instead of $scope, avoid $watch and use ng-change instead, use angular.copy, structure folders by functionality). She explains also a little about Angular 2 and the use of Components instead of directives.

• War of the Worlds: designers and developers (Laura Andina and Josefina Pérez): A very funny talk, but very true. I am a developer, but I want to learn about UX, so I would like to be in both worlds, will I fight with myself? They spoke about the importante of the communications between designers and developers in every step of the process (you have to clarify what are the interactions in the design, how the design changes with real text…). Both designers and developers should know more about the work of the other (UX is research, analysis, design, prototype and user testing, not only an inspirational draw). A designer should know the technology where his/her design will end. After coding, a developer should do a demo to the UX to confirm that the implementation is correct, they should be on the same page from the beginning. They also spoke about the tool Zeplin to collaborate between designers and developers, I have to check it out.

So, as you can see, women have a lot of knowledge to spread and this kind of events are very useful to make women more visible. Now it is time to follow their example!