It was not long ago, in one of those few sunny days in Hamburg, that we had the opportunity to visit the XConf. At ePages, developers have a great support of the company in terms of further education. The XConf took place on the 12th of July in a cozy place called the Betahaus in Hamburg. This one-day conference covered a broad range of technology topics. Thanks to the great job of ThoughtWorks Renato and I had a blast.
Keynote
James Lewis presented the keynote talking about Lean Software Engineering, LEGO, and Star Wars. Sometimes, when people present processes, they make their presentation too abstract, and might lose the audience on the way.
James presented the keynote in form of a story. With help of LEGO, he and his crew built a Millennium Falcon. At the presentation, he described processes problems that appear during the project construction, and discussed tools and ways of solving them. With such presentation techniques he was able to explain several concepts including cycle-time and throughput, as well as continuous process improvement to people who are not familiar with the topic.
Presentations
Every participant could choose one of the two tracks running in parallel. We decided to visit Track 1 as it included lots of topics where we could get more insights about how other companies deal with specific technologies.
Content of Track 1:
- Containerizing a web shop - Building the microservice platform for otto.de
- Implementing Infrastructure as Code
- A High-Performance Solution to Microservice UI Composition
- Serverless Architecture - Tales from a world without servers
- Alert overload: How to adopt a MS architecture without being…
Impression
In general, all presentations were really nice: well-structured content, experienced speakers, and interesting topics. One good thing I was able to take away with me, was to see that many companies use and apply the same techniques and tools, that we also use at ePages.
It was especially interesting to hear about the experience of introducing microservice architecture on such giant environment like otto.de It is good to know that one of the leaders of the German e-commerce market follows the same principles as we are following in our team.
Another interesting topic was the infrastructure. At ePages, we have a quite sophisticated environmental structure. To manage this, we are already applying many techniques and tools described by Kief Morris in his presentation.
The #InfraAsCode book is out! Ebook now available, Print happening as we speak! https://t.co/hGOxr7T6Fu https://t.co/MB9EuuxMhy
— Kief Morris (@kief) June 14, 2016
It was a nice day at the conference with a lot of input that can make our work more efficient.
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