Some of you might not know but there are few free software conferences in Poland. By free
I mean that you don’t need to pay for a ticket. One of them is organized in Warsaw: Confitura. It’s a java
/jvm
related conference that’s getting bigger and bigger with every year. And as you might imagine I went there as usual to check what’s new in Java world. I also went there with hopes of seeing some presentations about Android / Mobile but unfortunately there were none. I guess enterprise java is the most dominant.
As usual the conference was held inside the campus of Warsaw University. Its 3rd time Confitura is there, big rooms that can accommodate quite a large number of participants + air conditioning which is very crucial in the summer.
I’ve started learning Scala few months ago, so I thought its a good idea to go on a Scala related talk. To be really honest with you I was lost around halfway thourgh but I came to a conclusion that there is a hell lot of Scala for me to learn ;-)
The talk was about Type Driven Development
, this term alone made me wanna go a watch the presentation. So what have I understood from it all?
var length : Double @@ Meter
// ....
sealed trait Meter
Some(null)
type driven development
you should use shapeless library for ScalaRegarding the speaker, it looked like he knew what he was talking about. Also you could see his passion for Scala / functional solutions. Although I didn’t get exactly everything it was still a good choice to hear his talk.
I think this presentation was the biggest disapointment for me. I hoped for a nice Android developer related talk and I got a more or less an advertisment of a not yet finished product.
I can’t say anything bad about the speakers, they were really prepared. They made a live demo of the product and showed a sample project. But still it was an advert.
I almost forgot, they are looking for a seed capital.
Refactoring is something really important in our daily work, this is why I always love to hear something new about it. Even if I already know some of discussed aspects I still stay as its good to consolidate your knowledge.
I was really disappointed with this talk. I had an impression that it was speakers first time at such a large audience.
Topic introduction was too long and too boring for my taste. Later speaker just used the first chapter of a great book by Martin Fowler called “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code” and used its code samples for a live refactoring session. As you can imagine I was bored to death by that moment.
Last part of the presentation took me a little by surprise. We were shown the “seven habits of highly effective people” taken from the book with the same title by Stephen R. Covey. Long story short book is teaching about self-mastery, to be proactive, begin working with end in mind etc. I guess code refactoring may be compared to a self improvement. Still I was hoping for something else from this speach.
I rarely go on a “enterprise” related talks, but I thought the topic sounds nice and maybe I could use the knowledge there in Android environment.
Speaker promised us a real life example, how he and his company had to change their current architecture to a micro service oriented one. And the example was there at least sort of.
So what is the example you might ask? The example was data processing done at night. Tomasz told us that one of their services was doing one thing through the day and another completely different at night. This was the first sign that a monolitic architecture could and should be changed to a microservice oriented.
So what else did I learn? Did I hear how should a microservice be constructed? Not exactly but I learned a lot of enterprise technology / library names:
sinatra
implementation from RubySo what is a microservice? Microservice is a service composed of three elements: client, model and service logic.
And this is it. I would love to hear more about the architecture that is behind the idea of microservices in the future.
This was a really really really – did I remember to say really? – nice talk. Jakub showed all the problems that occur in projects:
Lord of the rings pattern
- one class to rule them, one class to find them and in the project bind them ;-)So what is the main cause of this? Probably projects are estimated to optimistically.
Overall a very nice talk, each example with a joke. It was time well spent.
Last presentation of the day, I would say that they left the best for last. Sławek gave a very good speech as usual. It was a mix of programming techniques, applied psychology and good design. Ofc if you heard one of Sławek’s talks about Domain Driven Design
this talk wouldn’t be revealing to you, but still it was a very good idea to go and listen how we should design our code.
We left home around 6 in the morning to get to Warsaw and it was well past 22 when I got home yet it was time well spent.
Some good talks, some bad. I had a chance to talk with people I don’t know about their view on the industry.
It’s good to sometimes leave your dark room full of screens and talk with real people ;-)
Ohh and I’m waiting now for next years Confitura.