Conference trip to Devternity 2019 in Riga

Devternity is a one-day conference held in Riga, Latvia every year since 2015 with the day before given to workshops. Touted as the top 3 international software development conference in Europe turning developers into engineering leaders with free beer afterward. Code Nomads went there for the second year in a row, that must mean something! These are the talks you must not miss, according to Vasco.

LEAN CODE, BY KEVLIN HENNEY

Kevlin is a very pragmatic person and so is his advice. Everyone is free to choose whether to follow it or not, but it is sound advice. In this talk, he established a connection between the ages-old original principles of Lean and the details of writing code. Thus code should be robust, useful and only after that beautiful. In order to be useful, code needs to be maintainable and needs to have a well-defined life cycle. This way it can be deleted when it is no longer in use. It must also be connected and mean something to the persons who write and maintain it, of course.

UX FOR DEVELOPERS, BY JEANNE JUL JENSEN

Users… Who needs them? A developer’s life would be much easier without users. And a UX’er life would be much easier without developers. Seriously though, the experience users have when interacting with the applications we develop has always been important. Today, with the multitude of applications and services competing for every user’s attention, it gains even more relevance. Let’s learn what UX really is and why it really takes a village to create a great user experience.

FINDING YOUR SERVICE BOUNDARIES – A PRACTICAL GUIDE, BY ADAM RALPH

All of us have one day woken up to look at our beautiful, lowly coupled, well thought set of services tied up in a knot. Now they are intermingled and becoming dependant on each other. It has been proven that strings will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots, so maybe the same holds for service connections. However, there are techniques for organizing classes and services according to their cohesion that will help to delay or prevent those knots from forming. Adam describes his.

INTEGRATION TESTING WITH DOCKER AND TESTCONTAINERS, BY SERGEI EGOROV

We all know that there is more to testing than unit testing. Integration testing is important to ensure that the conversations our application has with the real world are working. However, it isn’t always possible or convenient to have a frozen test environment ready for this at a moment’s notice. One good solution is to orchestrate an appropriate set of containers with the external dependencies our application needs in order to make them available while tests are running. This comes with its own challenges though, which are not easy to overcome with classical solutions. The Testcontainers library solves most of these problems and all the orchestration is easily expressed in code! Sergei talks us through the challenges it solves and the way how it does it.

SCALING YOURSELF, BY SCOTT HANSELMAN

Everybody in this slice of the world is getting more and more information delivered to them every instant of every day. Information workers like us feel it a bit worse because we already have our own professional information feeds. Scott discusses his strategies to reduce information overload with a nice dose of humor.

CONCLUSION

A day packed with information, a welcoming atmosphere and a comfortable venue. No vendor marketing just talks relevant to our daily job. Another year, another great Devternity! Oh, did I mention the free beer afterparty already?…