Last week NTR’s developers went to Code Fest X, one of the greatest developers gathering in Russia beyond the Urals. It took place in Novosibirsk, the capital city of Siberia. Three thousand developers in one place. That’s a lot of developers! It is the conference everyone in the IT sphere knows as the best conference in our area to attend. It was really useful and worth the time/cost, so we decided to share. We bought live streaming video of the conference, so the rest of our Tomsk office could watch it.
After the conference we had a Skype meeting to share impressions and experiences. We asked our developers: what have you learned, how can you use it, which speaker’s experience you found useful, what would like to implement?
NTR @ CodeFest X
Roman Velikoselsky, Java Developer:
This was my first CodeFest and in general, I liked it 🙂
I learned in more detail about using Apache Kafka, the speaker lucidly spoke about the pros, cons, rakes. I would like to try to use on our projects.
I was impressed by the report of Yaroslav Shuvaev on the design of products based on AI; the subject of authorization of an operation on a person’s face is interesting, convenient in terms of paying for purchases, and especially in using loyalty cards.
The Data Science section remembered the report on Conversational AI (developing a bot that speaks like a human). A report from the category that I would like to try myself in some personal project.
It was interesting to talk with Ivan Panchenko on the meetup, as well as to listen to his PostgreSQL tuning report (even though the report was evident:))
On the second day there were a lot of topical reports on backend topics. Unfortunately, not everything worked out because they happened at the same time. I was interested in the report on the translation of Spring Boot applications in Java 11. The topic is relevant because Oracle stopped supporting Java 8 and it’s time to start preparing for the use of a fresh version (although there is enough of a rake there, judging by the report:)).
It was also very interesting to listen to the JVM developer with a fairly simple, but at the same time complex, topic of translating a switch into java-bytecode.
I liked the whole atmosphere, met old friends, met new people. Liked the tasks / entertainment at the sponsor stands. In general, it was fun and productive.
And, of course, it is worth mentioning the after-party, in which a group of IT people performed with a soloist who sang, hmm, how to call it, the covered covers of famous performers on IT’s theme. It was fun. Well, after-after-party with colleagues was great, too, team building well done! 🙂
Andrey Platunov, Java Developer:
I will briefly try to describe the topics of the reports that seemed to me useful, interesting or close:
1) Localization testing, as well as some localization development principles.
2) MBT – model-based testing; the methodology for building testing processes. It is applicable when you have a lot of tests and you want to reduce the time spent on implementing tests for new features (unfortunately, I think applies only to huge product teams. ) ;
3) “Engineering chauvinism” – about how to get out of development when you become managers and not to have destructive feelings about the fact that you stopped writing code. Just a report that quite specifically describes the movement of the developer horizontally or vertically and the problems that arise.
From what seems interesting, but where I couldn’t get to and what I’ll see when the video comes out: a report on Kafka, a report on testing CCP, “Three cockroaches …”
From what you can try / apply: statically the code analyzer from PVS-Studio (it is screwed to Jenkins or SonarQube, integration with Intellij Idea is also announced, I didn’t quite understand what form it was). Unfortunately, the product is paid.
According to the organization: everything was fine, half the merit of the Expo Center, half – the organizers (I think). There were also fun activities on the stands of different companies.
Of the minuses I have noted: too much attention in the Future section, which generally indicates the focus of the conference – less specifics, more abstract topics. Developers, I think, still need to look towards specific conferences in their stack.
Roman Prokhorov, JavaScript Developer:
The presentation “Make a fly out of an elephant” by Vadim Makeyev was quite interesting. He specifically focused on the graph, and specifically, prohibits the use of gif as an insert from the video, in this case is better than WebP. I also went through the use of CSS properties in the example using the “hamburger menu,” which later drew using SVG, and the CSS Paint API; gave quite a few interesting examples.
There were a couple of boring presentations. A presentation about the “Analysis of the vulnerabilities of the authentication process” made me think about the simple things that you usually miss.
The same interesting presentation was from the section “Data science” about “how to make a bot that speaks like a person.” The presentation of Ilya Klimov, “Framework Wars: Episode 2019,” was well-presented information, as well as the disadvantages and advantages of the three main frameworks: Angular, React, Vue.
Martin Hochel presented “Ultimate React Component Patterns with TypeScript.” I was pleasantly surprised, not by the fact that, like some others, he held live coding session, but that he showed the use of some of the new products from React, which I had previously heard in another presentation.
In general, of course, the conference is interesting.
Ekaterina Sokolkova, Analyst:
What have you learned?
There were many interesting reports in fact. Despite that some developers were saying out loud that there was nothing deep…
Before CodeFest I had many questions regarding my work, or how others work, how product development works. I did not receive answers to all my questions, of course, but most of them were covered. There was a lot of information about project management and communicating with colleagues on the team.
Another huge plus was that almost every speaker gave a list of references for studying the issue in detail.
How can you use it?
Our colleagues said that there were talks about product team experience and software development are quite different… But I think that if you learn competently, re-read all your notes, communicate personally with the speakers and analyze all this, you can apply these tools to our company. The main thing here is to have initiative and constructive dialogues with teams and with management in order to build everything competently.
Speaker’s experience you found useful.
I was inspired by the report and meetup with Roman Kvartalnov (from ZephyrLab). He is the founder of this company and also the manager. He constantly tries to improve the work of his company, team work. He tries to build processes so that the team works more efficiently, while spending less resources. I liked some of his ideas:
– The manager should have: Personality; Knowledge; Experience.
– The project manager should be able to: plan; to understand the plan / fact analysis; to communicate.
– Practice presenting your work. Write yourself on the phone so that the message was no more than 30 seconds.
– A long project is an opportunity to develop a product using new opportunities.
– It is necessary to observe people at meetings with the customer to identify key persons.
– Responsibility cannot be delegated, it can only be taken.
I have also discovered meetups. Although my idea of them was somewhat different. There was no heated discussion, but there still were discussions. There were no reports on analytics, so for myself, I chose the meetup “Is it possible to turn the creation and support of documentation into a process, or what is DocOps.”
The basic idea was that working with documentation is also a process, and it has a similar structure and life cycle with the development of software products, features, etc. I learned a lot of new and useful things for myself that I plan to study in the near future. I want to figure out how to build the process of working with documentation so that it has good quality and is completed within a reasonable time.
What would you like to implement?
I’ve got a lot of improvement information. I would implement the following:
– exchange of experience between employees (both the same areas / technologies and related);
– development of employees (for example, once every two weeks someone makes a report on the studied technology, a book read, a viewed report, etc.). If you can find many conferences for developers, even visiting ones near Tomsk, it is quite difficult for analysts to do; there are few conferences in Siberia, mostly in the Western part of the country, it would be great to buy online broadcasts from such conferences;
– communications (e.g., 1-on-1 conversations with a colleague to help, if they are stalling, also to give feedback);
– work planning (daily) not only that the managers plan their work and celebrate progress in the evening, but the rest of the staff does it, too.
Summing up, I would like to say that such conferences are absolutely necessary for both personal and professional development. They give a push and a vector in development. Communicating with new people, professionals is always useful for sharing experiences, acquiring new knowledge. I am grateful to the company, which makes it possible to attend such events!
Viktor likes collecting the stickers exhibitors hand out; he has a very large collection.
Image source: Expo Centre
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It seems our Java developers were impressed most or they are just better communicators / writers, because they shared their thoughts and impressions for our blog first. Our company has many other teams.
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