Socrates Day 2 |
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30 January 2026 - Ilanz
Up at 5:59 today because that's just how my brain works. I feel like I recognized like half of the people here at dinner last night, so this morning I looked at the conference spreadsheet and did a tally: 37 out of 64. Although there was a networking activity last night where I met some more, so my original estimate was probably pretty close.
This is one of those two name towns as this in an area of Switzerland where Rätoromanisch is still spoken. So while the Socrates conference is at Kloster Ilanz, last night I ran on the Via Glion trail. It's definitely not confusing.
One of the Kloster's nun leading a morning prayer with a Tibetan music bowl
After breakfast, the first talk I went to was Ixchel Ruiz's discussion of "Humans in Times of AI". Different metrics in different domains often leads to miscommunication. Is any human communication good now? AI tools democratize writing software, but also threaten the jobs of many.
Then it was on to play Pierre Neis' "59 min" scrum game. It was an interesting game of receiving a poorly defined list of requirements and then self organizing and iterating.
Lunch gave us more time for conversations and networking, followed up by Frank Prechtel's "Walk and Talk". We opted to head west a down the Via Suwarow along the mountainside. Much of the conversation involved comparing Europes various national train systems.
Next up Simon Schrottner demoed a game called joust mania for the purpose of demonstrating a observability setup. The joust game is an open source creation for playstation controllers that involves keeping one's controller from accelerating too might while accelerating others'. The game was fun, but unfortunately Simon couldn't get the observability working during the session. He did get it working later that evening though.
This was followed by the more serious activity of Peter Gfader, who walked us thorugh an "Inauthenticity Gap" exercise he runs at companies. It was interesting, but didn't really work because we all came from different workplaces.
After dinner Frank gave a talk analogizing the history of computing to archaeology that was interesting, but less about archaeology than I'd hoped. And then is was time for the developer's pub quiz followed by boardgames that kept me up past midnight.
