GeeCON 2015

So, GeeCON 2015 has finished, but the memory remains. Here are some random notes/comments/things-to-remember from this year edition (which was cool, as usual!).

Talks

Some technologies/approaches seems to be used by everyone who is fortunate enough so he can use them. Spring Boot, Swagger, REST, Spock, logstash/kibana, wiremock. reactive, microservices continuous-delivery/deployment to name a few.

Few thoughts from Andrii Dzynia (Spotify) talk "Applying Testing Mindset to Software Development":

  • testing is all about mindset
  • testing during meetings - before you start coding, have a meeting and discuss "how can we test this new feature?"
  • the earlier you share results, the lower risk of failure.

The best presentations I have seen (but I admit I haven't seen many cause I spend a lot of time at my company's booth playing CS :)

  • Tomasz Nurkiewicz, Hystrix - managing failures in distributed systems - very interesting tool and superb presentation skills :)
  • Peter Van de Voorde, The 7 Evil (Er Agile) Skills you need to Succeed - a nice one, reminding me of some fundamental "rules" of taking care of myself (what should I invest my time into?, playing to my strengths), of relationships with others ("2 eras, 1 mouth", saying "yes, and..." instead of "yes, but..."), my job (taking ownership of things) etc. Really, really nice.
  • Paul Klipp, Improve your communication skills dramatically without saying a word - the thing I remembered most is to shut up and listen attentively which I try to do (and fail all the time so far)

Unfortunately, with so many paths - 5 I think - it always happen that you can't attend all the talked you wanted. During my lightning talk about discussions, there was another one by Radek Lont called "IT office dojo" that I really wanted to see. Well, need to wait for recordings on vimeo.
The cakes this year were totally addictive (and very unhealthy, I bet).

And BTW. AccuREST by Jakub Kubryński seems like an interesting tool for REST client/server testing.

Counter Strike!

Codewise, the company I work for, had definitely the best booth. Our graphic designer - Przemysław Trybuś - has made a tremendous job by creating an exact map of our office for Counter Strike Global Offensive. No surprise there were people playing the game all the time (me included!).

Varia

This is mainly from discussions with other developers.

Before changing company first you need to strengthen yourself. No way to go to interview when feeling down and depressed. So first you need to gain some strength and believe in yourself before you can say your company good bye.
What about Groovy? Will this (really nice & useful language) die? Seems that only Gradleware is interested in its future. Spock is widely used (but not really contributing to Groovy). Grails? - don't know if still popular at all.

About personal kanban (discussion with someone, whose name I don't know):

  • visualization is great
  • it is easy to start feeling guilty when looking at the board - probably too many tasks there
  • interesting idea of using visualization to cut down expenses - worked, pretty well, but made life less enjoyable (no, I can't buy coffee today, cause I'm already near today's limit)

There is no way to be up-to-date with even a small percent of current technologies. No worries, though. All you really need is to have solid basis (e.g. SOLID, testing, DI) and build upon it. After all, every new technology "is like X but differs in Y" so you will figure it out.

 
 
 
This used to be my blog. I moved to http://tomek.kaczanowscy.pl long time ago.

 
 
 

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