co-authored by Fayçal Bennegadi, Alexis Fala, Christian Alonso Chavez Ley

On December 2, 2022, Deezer sponsored the 7th edition of BDX I/O.

If you haven’t heard of it, it is probably the biggest developers’ conference and is held in Bordeaux, France, with 1,000 attendees and 4 to 5 parallel tracks at the Bordeaux Congress Centre.

This was also the first post-COVID BDX I/O conference after nearly three years of absence (2019), and we were eager to be a part of it.

Ten of us from Deezer attended, so we have tried to sum up the three talks that impressed us the most.

Sponsoring

Given that we were one of the event’s sponsors, we had the chance to have our own stand in the dedicated hall.

In order to make the classic “swag grab” a little more engaging and fun, we set up a simple rule at the beginning of the day: if you wanted a goodie, you had to sing a song at our booth following the lyrics on screen. This rule even applied (some would say specifically) to our colleagues.

Singing aside, we also spoke with everyone who came to the booth about our current open positions, our work culture and received feedback on our applications. Overall, we had quite a fun day at the booth!

Syndrome d’imposture, l’arbre qui cachait la forêt

Imposter syndrome — you can’t see the forest because of the trees

Unlike the title suggests, Boris Schapira does not talk much about imposter syndrome itself, nor how to fight it. Instead, he suggests several other talks on the subject, like those by Aurélie Vache, Abeba Ngwe, Maeva Nguyen, and Marine Gandy.

The main postulate of this session is that the number of people experiencing imposter syndrome is so prevalent in our jobs that we need to stop seeing it as an individual problem but rather a systemic problem.

Many of the slides had a strong impact on us:

• We involuntarily put ourselves in competition with each other to master increasingly complex solutions, often on our time;
• We tend to actively participate in social reproduction within companies through practices such as co-optation, recruitment based on “good feelings” during interviews, and the emphasis of “company values”’;
• And many other things we don’t even notice anymore…

Watch the talk here: BDX I/O 2022 — Syndrome de l’Imposteur, l’arbre qui cache la forêt — Boris Schapira

Les sciences cognitives au service de l’accessibilité web

Cognitive sciences for web accessibility

Why has web accessibility become a significant issue for online platforms?

The numbers speak for themselves: 15% of people have disabilities that impact their online experience; 80% of them have non-visible disabilities, which can be difficult to detect for someone who is not affected by such impairments. As a result, 70% of websites are considered “not accessible.”

In this talk, Margot Bouhon, Ph.D. in cognitive science, seeks to raise awareness and gives excellent advice to easily improve the accessibility of our web platforms in order to make the user experience easier, and therefore, more inclusive.

Some of the existing solutions:

• Conducting an audit to improve site accessibility — Silktide offers such services for instance.
• For hearing impairments, in particular, making the text available — for example, AVA provides AI-generated subtitles.
• For neurodevelopmental disorders (like dyslexia), visual impairments or reading difficulties, readapt.ai developed an assistive technology that allows people with these conditions to create a personalized reading profile for digital content based on their unique needs. Thanks to this tool, people can change the font, the spacing between characters, and even the font size.

Watch the talk here: BDX I/O 2022 — Les sciences cognitives au service de l’accessibilité web. — Margot Bouhon

Alice au pays d’OpenTelemetry

Alice in OpenTelemetryLand

OpenTelemetry (or OTel for the cool kids) is a collection of tools, APIs and SDKs, which aims at standardizing how we instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (i.e. metrics, logs and traces).

This talk was one person’s journey, Jérôme Tama from OnePoint, setting it up on a real project, supplemented with gotcha’s and “buyer beware” moments, as well as an overview of the concepts and the requirements. All this was told using Alice in Wonderland as the basis for the presentation.

All in all very fun and informative.

Watch the talk here: BDX I/O 2022 — Alice au pays d’Opentelemetry — Jérôme Tama

Summing up

In conclusion, the 7th edition of BDX I/O was a successful and engaging conference for attendees and sponsors alike.

We really enjoyed showcasing our products to the developers in attendance.

We truly appreciated the diversity of the talks, which were not only “technical” in nature and also the varied panel of speakers at this edition, with 40% of them identifying as women — which is not 50% yet but is still better than most tech conferences.

We really hope to come back again next year — perhaps with some speakers from Deezer this time!

Do you wish to learn and share with our community of developers, and make the Deezer experience a better one? Check our open positions!