SoCraTes Crete

@socrates-crete.org

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An Open Space Unconference on Software Craft & Testing - in Crete! Join us 22-25 Oct 2026! https://socrates-crete.org

A session hosted in the outside space with the church. The setting has on the background and left a church, cobblestone pavement and a stone bench and a big tree on the right. The tree is casting a big shade and 8 attendees are having a session in this outside space, with one attendees standing up hosting the session and the rest either sitting on the bench or on the floor.
A group of people is seated in a circle arrangement of chairs inside a well-lit room. Only one person is standing and is near a whiteboard, actively presenting or leading a discussion. The rest of the group are listening attentively, some with relaxed postures, indicating an open and informal atmosphere. There’s no podium or stage—just peers sharing ideas. The setting reflects a collaborative and participatory environment typical of an unconference.
Three big white canvases aligned horizontally side by side on wooden stands, creating one big long horizontal canvas. It is filled with a lot of big colorful sticky notes that have text inside. It is meant to split event in time slots and conference rooms and let people know what is happening in each room during each hour. On top row column it has times from 9am to 1pm split into 50m slots with coffee break in between. On first column on left it has the locations: Megas Alexandros, Hercules, Achilles, Platanos, Beach. The first events of the day are at 9:30-10:40 and cover all locations including the beach one! On Megas Alexandros there's the kid friendly "Dance Session". On Hercules there is a discussion called "GraalVM: Static Java Compile". On Achilles there is a combined discussion of two topics "Autonomous Self Managed Teams - ORG Model(s)" and "How to build and scale teams". In the outside area Platanos there is topic about "Procrastilearning: learning instead of doing" and lastly in Beach there is a session on "Azure DevOps CI/CD takeaways". Some of the sessions for rest of the day and locations are: "Elephant Cappacio Kata" a user story slicing game, "Monitoring: what is it, expectations and formal and informal types", "Time Zones".
All the participants are seated in a circle arrangement of chairs inside a well-lit room. Only one person is standing in front of a series series of whiteboards that are filled with big sticky notes. The setting reflects a collaborative and participatory environment typical of an unconference and this photo specifically is of when the initial to the introduction to the unconference is done.
Screenshot taken out of a video call, showing the 7 members of the org team from top left to right Yorgos, Dimitris, Michalis, Mary, Nassia, Iraklis and Tilemachos all wearing Socrates Crete t-shirts and smiling for the photo.
Open hotel area surrounded by palm tress and green bushes. The sky is blue and clear and most of the view is covered by a big pool. In the far end and on the right all along there are wooden chairs and tables with people enjoying the warm weather.
Photo containing the names of the logos of the sponsors of this year's event which are Epignosis, Fairlo and Logicea.
Group of people gathered in a circle dancing traditional Greek dances inside a room. Around the room there are people standing or sitting watching them and holding drinks.
A group photo of all the participants which are around 50 with the hotel and palm trees as background in a sunny setting.
Sandy Beach with a calm sea
Time space matrix with topics for discussion
Conference hall with some people siting in a circle in chairs, on the far side there is a big line of people holding big sticky notes waiting for their chance to present, and at the start of the queue there currently a person holding their sticky note facing the crowd and presenting their suggestion for a session.
The space-time matrix with all the sessions for day 2.
Queue of participants waiting to propose sessions for the Open Space.
A long white canvas with big post-it notes attached to it, on the horizontal line we have the time slots and on the vertical there is the rooms. They are waiting to be filled with sessions from the participants.
An empty room with arranged chairs in a circle and notes and pens in the middle. In the center there are boarding aligned with timeslots and rooms waiting to be filled by the participants.
A sunny outdoor scene at the hotel waterpark. Several large blue water slides twist and turn — some are swirly and winding, others are straight and steep. The slides stand tall against a clear sky, giving a fun and vibrant atmosphere.
A big white sheet pinned to a white canvas with tape. It is the sheet containing the first part of the harvest of an unconference on session titled "Performance and Profiling". It contains two lists the first titled 'Why is it important?' and the second 'How or what to measure?'. The first list 'Why is it important?' includes: stakeholders, clients, business cost and profit, operational cost decrease, security needs timely code,UX is more enjoyable, scalability, spike tests, environmental footprint and CO2, user expecations. The second list 'How or what to measure?' includes: spikes, scalability, response query vs throughput which has comment that it depends also on number of people and time period, lighthouse score for web applications , time to first interaction, distribution of input and output, CPU or RAM or Storage or Network usage, power efficiency, data skewness, accuracy, error rate.
An outside area of the hotel, the one used for coffee breaks during the event. The weather is sunny and area is covered by wooden roof while also allowing some sun in. There are tables setup with refreshments and snacks for the attendees. A lot of people are gathered in different tables, grabbing their coffee, a cupcake or simply chatting with their fellow participants.
A big white sheet pinned to a white canvas. It contains a list titled 'Continuous Integration Pains'. The list includes: waiting in queue, slow pipelines, flaky tests, runners that don't run, race conditions, pipelines that only work on a single branch, needing to push a commit to trigger build, not running on latest head, timeout after hours, too many tests in one pipeline, stuff disappearing from the internet, github actions deprecating old jobs, being forced to update, being forced to implement CI/CD, caches or no caching, zipping and unzipping, relying on pre-installed dependencies, big download sizes, debugging them and having to connect to a runner to do it, host or self-host outages, runner cleanup and legacy pipeline code!
A group of people is seated in a circle arrangement of chairs inside a well-lit room. Only one person is standing and is near a whiteboard, actively presenting or leading a discussion. The rest of the group are listening attentively, some with relaxed postures, indicating an open and informal atmosphere. There’s no podium or stage—just peers sharing ideas. The setting reflects a collaborative and participatory environment typical of an unconference.
A big white canvas on a wall. It is filled with a lot of big colorful sticky notes that have text inside. It is meant to split event in time slots and conference rooms and let people know what is happening in each room during each hour. On top row it has rooms: Megas Alexandros, Hercules, Achilles, Elsewhere. On vertical first column it has times from 9am to 5pm split into 50m breaks with coffee break in between. The first events of the day are at 9:50-10:40 and cover all rooms except the Elsewhere one. On Megas Alexandros there's is discussion called "Refactoring legacy code based on approval testing". On Hercules there is a discussion called "Frontend and Backend or Full Stack?". On Achilles there is a discussion on "What pisses you off about your CI/CD process" and its meaning to be a venting discussion because it has "Vent" as comment.
Open hotel area surrounded by palm tress and green bushes. The sky is blue and clear and in the far end we can see the beach and shore. In the middle there are empty wooden chairs and tables and bars of the hotel.