Web summit workshops

I went to Web Summit! Other than being overwhelmingly huge, it was definitely a memorable experience.

The mass of people was a bit scary at first, but after a day, it already felt familiar. Even though there are so many interesting talks, there is no way you can get to them all. The venue is huge, and the number of people make it hard to move around and get across the whole place in fifteen minutes. I decided to listen to the talks I absolutely loved, and the rest of my time was filled up with workshops!

All of the ceilings were beautiful, so I couldn’t decide which one to use as a cover photo for this post 🙂 I attended three workshops and escaped from two which were self-promotion talks.

The first one was The power of emotion on the (social) web: A journey of data scientists envisioning “mindfulness” for politics. It was very interesting to learn how data mining news articles helped discover emotions certain nations were feeling. The only thing that was a bit off for me was that most of the emotions were negative, but also most of the articles were politics related. And politics is very rarely seen in a positive light. So that would have been an added interesting parameter to take into account.

The second workshop was CX growth hacking. Represented by a Japanese company explaining their processes while optimizing internal searches. It was quite a miss topic for me because it does not quite relate to the things I am trying to learn. But I did manage to find value in the cultural difference and their way of thinking. For example, it was perfectly fine to mention that it is alright for a store to know where you live, based solely on your credit card. That way, the store can send you the goods you buy! While it seems like a good perk, it also wouldn’t really function in Europe without giving 30 different consents.

The last, but not least was the #IamRemarkable workshop: Celebrate your achievements. Which spoke about bragging as a woman. It quite hit home with most of the things, and really left an impact on me to try and do better. An added bonus was that it had interactive elements, so I got to meet several wonderful girls that were very inspiring. A downside was that at least 20 minutes, in the end of the workshop were used as promotional picture taking which got old pretty fast.

In conclusion, I had a wonderful time at Web Summit, and I definitely plan to go again. It is huge, and it is all you make it be for yourself. I wanted to learn new things, so I did, at every opportunity that I got!

Also unnecessary to say, Lisbon was amazing, long live the codfish.