The code.talks is one of the largest developer conferences in Europe. Each year, it takes place in a cinema in Hamburg - free popcorn included! ePages developers with an office in walking distance are code.talks regulars, appreciating the insights and inspiration. The diverse topics are distributed across ten tracks covering Management, DevOps, Security, Backend/Frontend Development, Software Architecture, and UX Design. It is a good opportunity to talk with other developers from different companies, share work and life experiences, learn something new, have fun, and dance at the evening party.
In the following we’ve summarized the talks that most impressed us.
Software-Qualität === Gesundheit
by Roland Golla (Never Code Alone)
- Focus on good software, good code base quality, not just for your users or professional sake, but for the sake of your health as well!
- Without fun, you cannot do creative work.
- Automation lifts your spirit!
- At the end it is good for business too: less developer turn-over, more deployments, and only prod deployments make money, faster time to market.
- Work together, do not take work home, get into the flow, and have fun!
Service Workers: The Technology Behind Progressive Web Apps
by Felix Gessert (Baqend)
- Learned about manifest.json to configure a Progressive Web App (PWA).
- Learned how to preload website contents using service workers, events and lifetime.
- Learned some restrictions on service workers (current directory scope).
- Learned about service worker cache.
Result: will definitely try to create a first own PWA!
Mit dem Fahrrad gegen die Wand fahren
by Nils Langner (Leankoala) + Marcel Semmler (Bauer Xcel Media)
- Premise: Most projects fail, your projects included.
- Hypothesis: rather fail early and often, then failing late and expensive.
Key findings:
- Pick a good name, that people can find (written the same way it is spoken).
- User usually use only 20% of an application’s features.
- You need problems, not solutions.
- Focus on “jobs to be done” – what are your customers buying/renting your product for?
- Value proposition design, try design sprints
TALK TO USERS! (5 interviews, 30 - 60 min each are enough)
- Try paper prototypes! (might get more honest feedback)
- Start with paper, the move to a wireframe prototype, eventually move over to a click-dummy prototype.
- Crowd test! Try kickstarter!
- “Usability lunch” is a great opportunity to test your idea, receive feedback, AND have lunch 🙂.
Live a happier life with a pull request everyday
by Felix Eckhardt (CTO at RISK.IDENT)
- PR should be small, so that the review could be done within one day.
- Big PR is hard to review, issues can be skipped, and eventually bring failures in the system that hard to reveal.
- Avoid big tasks and split them into smaller ones.
- Small PRs lead to a quick delivery, avoid big amount of merge conflicts, and not to lose track of the story and motivation.
- Small PRs bring self satisfaction: small victory every day.
Summary
As an overall impression, we gained more from last year’s technical and management talks. But it is still nice to meet with the developer community once a year and recognize regulars!
For us the conference was not only an event with interesting talks and tasty food, but it also influenced our personal impression of what we are doing in the company. We are more convinced that we are moving in the right direction by choosing microservices architecture, applying Event Driven Design in the service communication in order to improve scalability and data reconciliation, and using the stack of popular technologies that helped also other companies to improve their business and development processes. It was very interesting to know their opinion and experience and compare with ours. We enjoyed the event and are looking forward to take part again next year.
About the authors
