Talking code
The last days of September had a special highlight ready for the dev community in Hamburg. It was time for popcorn, nachos, and code again. This time even larger and at a different location. code.talks outgrew the Cinemaxx Dammtor and went for Kampnagel this time. Thus one of the biggest developer conferences in Europe could welcome 1.900 guests instead of 1.500 in the previous year.
As usual for code.talks the organization was near perfect, although the guests did not really benefit from the additional space. There was rather more queuing for popcorn, drinks, and food than last year.
Highlights
The Return of Sanity? (Die Rückkehr der Vernunft?)
The conference started with a real highlight on the main stage in K6 - Lars Jankowfsky and Johann-Peter Hartmann gave a talk about “The Return of Sanity?” (“Die Rückkehr der Vernunft?”). Actually the talk was rather a play than a talk. It was a discussion between the two about which technology stack to use for their imaginary startup canab.io. They started going through a lot of hot technologies only to bash them all. So pure entertainment on the main stage.
Pures Entertainment #codetalkshh 🚀💯 pic.twitter.com/V86LhW3qdU
— Mathias D (@zaddo) 29. September 2016
The point Lars and Johann tried to make was actually a serious one. They argued that developers often choose technologies because they are interested in learning them and not by experience and profound knowledge. This is a very selfish pattern for decision making that can have a serious impact on a project.
The project sponsor often has different goals. The chosen technology should scale and it should be possible to find skilled people on the market. Also fast time to market is more important than a fancy technology stack.
So their appeal was to choose technology more scientifically and not based on hype - they asked everybody to decide as if one has “skin in the game”. Which technology would you choose if the south Italian investor captured your family and will only release them if the project is delivered in time?
Developing more efficiently with Functional Programming
Michael Sperber from Active Group talked about functional programming. He took an example based approach to show how useful the main principles of functional programming are. Particularly his very creative examples are unbeaten.
Funktionale Programmierung mit überfahrenen Klapperschlangen auf texanischen Highway. Brutal aber unterhaltsam. #codetalkshh
— Oliver Trosien (@otrosien) 29. September 2016
He showed how pure functional programming can actually be applied in the wild:
- functional UI development using Reacl - a ClojureScript library for programming with the React framework.
- functional dependency injection
Effizient entwickeln mit Funktionaler Programmierung: talk by @sperbsen at @codetalkshh pic.twitter.com/BPDCJ9jo2M
— Teresa Holfeld (@TeresaHolfeld) 29. September 2016
The party
After the first day of talks everybody was invited to have fun at the code.talks After-Work-Party, which conveniently took place at Kampnagel as well. And because it also started to rain it was even more attractive to stay and continue with networking while having some drinks. All the speakers where supplied with a batch of vouchers for free drinks and happily gave them out to the thirsty community. There was not only a DJ responsible for the perfect mix of music, but he was also accompanied by a live saxophone player who received a lot of cheers.
Our talk “Schneller in die Cloud mit modernen Java Frameworks”
Just before lunch on Friday it was time for Oliver and Jens to give their talk on modern Java Frameworks. The Alabama Cinema at Kampnagel served as their stage, and although it was a bit separated from all the other conference rooms it was still well visited. The talk was delivered as an amusing discussion between Bob Operator and Joe Developer while live on stage implementing a new feature into an existing online pizza shop based on Java microservices. Showing best practices and introducing a number of useful Open Source libraries was very well received by the audience. Source code for the epizza project can be found on the ePages GitHub account. The presentation ended with lots of laughter when a real pizza delivery boy carrying steaming hot salami pizza entered the cinema and asked who ordered it - proof that the implementation really worked 😉.
Bob & Joe at #codetalkshh "shared code is evil" ... es sei denn es ist Infrastruktur-Code cc/ @jensfischerhh @otrosien pic.twitter.com/uolOVUqcr5
— harm (@netzfisch) September 30, 2016
The aftermath
Compared to last year’s topics it seems like many teams already use Docker on a day-to-day base. Also the hype for microservices is still present, but this year more companies could tell from their experiences from actually moving to this kind of architecture. Continuous Delivery Pipelines and full process automation are becoming more and more popular. What was a lot more prominent than before is the general interest in Functional Programming using different platforms and programming languages.
Once more code.talks where able to deliver on their slogan “biggest class reunion of the developer community”. Congratulations to the organizers and see you next year!
Klasse Talks, viele Teilnehmer, tolle Party – wir sagen DANKE #codetalkshh! Slides findet ihr in den Talks unter: https://t.co/auKkHGh0GF pic.twitter.com/Pma1ywdwi8
— code.talks (@codetalkshh) 6. Oktober 2016
About the authors
