Recently, it was again time for popcorn, nachos, and code. Code.talks is back on the big screen at Cinemaxx Dammtor after they tried Kampnagel last year. As a result, code.talks had to shrink to 1.700 people from 1.900 last year, which is still 200 people more than two years ago.
And yes - again it proved that a cinema is a pretty neat location for a software development conference. It seems that cosy seats, popcorn, and nachos are things that most of the attendees seemed comfortable with.
Highlights
Here are our highlights of this year’s code.talks edition.
10 tips for failing at microservices
Two years ago, microservices was one of the main topics of the code.talks. Everybody talked about it but very few actually had production experience. Now the microservices hype cycle passed the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and we are seeing a more realistic picture.
David Schmitz (@koenighotze) chimed in here and provided us with a very sarcastic talk about “10 Tips for failing at microservices”. It was great infotainment. In his talk David touched many topics that are really hard to get right in a microservices context like polyglot services, build automation, shared code, domain modeling, and team collaboration and told us how to mess up.
Hey #codetalkshh, you can find my slides about #failing at #microservices here: https://t.co/gA07TMWHYR Really awesome audience.
— 👑Der Schmitz💾 (@koenighotze) 28. September 2017
If you liked David’s talk you might think about seeing him again at the JUG Hamburg giving a talk about painless object functional Java with Vavr.
An introduction to Kotlin by example
During the second day of this year’s code.talks Dmitry Kandalov gave a very practical introduction to JetBrain’s own programming language Kotlin, which just recently was announced as an official Android language. With basic live-coding examples, he demonstrated how simple Kotlin can be integrated within existing JVM based projects and how easy it is to use libraries from the Java ecosystem in Kotlin which rapidly speeds up development.
“Kotlin is what Java 9 should have been if it was written today from scratch.” - This quote from the talk description pretty much summarizes the tone of Dmitry’s talk. It was an entertaining quick tour to get to know Kotlin that made me look forward to getting hands-on Kotlin and maybe introduce it to our JVM-based microservice architecture some day.
Die Monade und Du (The Monad and You)
Who always pondered how an application that runs over animals on the Texas Highway could be ideally structured will be able to find answers to that question in Michael Sperber’s talks. In his contribution to the code.talks 2016 “Developing more efficiently with Functional Programming” Michael already talked about functional programming and how useful its main principles are.
Again impressed by how lightweight and easy to understand functional programs can be. Thx @sperbsen for this talk on monads #codetalkshh
— Timo E aus E (@timo_e_aus_e) 28. September 2017
This year he focused his talk “Die Monade und Du (The Monad and You)” on the abstract construct of monads. Showcasing entertaining examples in Haskell he explained what exactly a monad is and how it naturally emerges in software when applying functional programming principles.
Building a scalable CSS-only slideshow in 1024 Bytes
Back in the days, memory was a precious good. Nowadays it’s cheap. This circumstance must have inspired Matthias Reuter when submitting his talk, or let’s rather call it code challenge, Building a scalable CSS-only slideshow in 1024 Bytes for code.talks 2017.
In his presentation, he explained how he built a CSS driven slideshow, with only bare minimum use of javascript which he afterward manually morphed into the most minified version possible. Minification measures he took included dropping whitespaces, optional colons, making use of language defaults and interpretations, the smart grouping of CSS-styles, and even optimizing calculation algorithms to shorten the required lines of code.
The slides of my talk "Building a scalable CSS-only slideshow in 1024 bytes" at #codetalkshh are available at https://t.co/CRz6TTSRuN
— Matthias Reuter (@gweax) 28. September 2017
The result wasn’t exactly an example page from the clean code book, but it was an entertaining demonstration of what is possible to achieve when you know your language inside out and focus on a specific goal. The talk ended with an open GitHub challenge to everyone who feels challenged to do better or in this case smaller than Matthias. And of course, the tool used for the presentation was the same CSS slideshow the presentation was about - How meta is that?
Wrapping it up
Again the code.talks team did a great job organizing the conference. The talks covered what the industry is currently talking about but here and there also included topics that are not mainstream. Eight different rooms offer a great choice but the amount of possibilities to choose from can also give you a headache. Apart from that, the Java crowd felt a little underrepresented with just four talks on the Java track.
The move back to the Cinemaxx was a good choice but the additional 200 people were problematic. Compared to 2015 there was a lot more queuing and waiting involved.
But all in all it has been a great conference. Thanks a lot to the code.talks team and see you next year!
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