For the fifth time about 1,500 developers gathered for the yearly code.talks conference in Hamburg:
on September 29 and 30, a dozen ePagees went to the Cinemaxx Hamburg Dammtor to enjoy two days fully packed with lots of talks from 13 different tracks.
Each track focussed on a specific theme like E-Commerce, IT Management, Startups, New Technology, Big Data, Mobile, DevOps, Scaling, Infrastructure, UX/Frontend, PHP, JavaScript and Java - the latter also being sponsored by ePages. Talks from these tracks where held in parallel at eight movie theater rooms. Each talk was 45 minutes long, with a small break afterwards plus a longer break for lunch. Watching these talks on huge cinema screens while sitting in cozy chairs and eating popcorn with nachos is a very special experience!
Due to the huge amount of different talks, there was almost always at least one interesting session for everyone - more often than not it was a tough choice between two or more competing topics being presented at the same time. Between the talks there was time for meeting and networking with other visitors to exchange impressions and ideas. All the times there was more than enough excellent food and drinks provided; not only water, coffee and tea, but of course also 1337 mate 😉.
Those not already too exhausted by the intense first day had the opportunity to attend an exclusive party in the evening, also with vouchers for free drinks. At breakfast the next day you could clearly tell who had a tough night, but judging from the full conference rooms only a few visitors slept in.
The talks
I started the conference attending talks highly related to my current project at ePages: Microservices, Docker containers, Consul, Mesos & Marathon are technologies my team evaluates during our daily work. The amount of relevant input from these talks was so intense that I had to switch to other topics in the afternoon. Choosing the very entertaining talk about creating PDFs using JavaScript for printing out websites was a welcome alternative and recharged my batteries to focus on e-commerce topics in the afternoon.
On Wednesday I started the conference with Microservices and e-commerce talks. Again it proved to be a good choice to regain some energy by joining a more entertaining talk covering elephants and squirrels before diving back into e-commerce and Docker again. The biggest pleasant surprise for me that day was the talk about monkey testing with genetic algorithms, though: finally the speaker managed to explain to me how mutation and crossover can be modeled in Software while still maintaining an entertaining talk and showing the applicability to tedious testing chores.
Of course ePages also contributed a presentation to this year’s code.talks - Oliver gave an interesting overview about documenting and testing REST APIs in a microservice world - Documented and Tested Microservices For Fun And Profit.
The talk provided a good overview of types of REST APIs, introduced HAL and Spring Data REST as a framework to implement a HAL-based REST API.
Oliver also did some live coding showing how to use Spring REST Docs to document REST APIs.
This showed an elegant way to include the API documentation into the integration tests of a project and thus keeping the API up-to-date.
I really enjoyed the diversity of talks, which allowed me to switch focus based on my cognitive capacity. Of course different talks had different levels of complexity and quality, but my general impression was that most speakers knew their topic pretty well and were also able to deliver their talk in an interesting fashion. And meeting old and new contacts from our development community in a friendly and relaxing environment is always something to look for.
Slides and presentations
About You, the organizers of the code.talks, are going to publish material from the talks as the speakers submit their slides and presentations.
About the author
