YOW! Online 2020
14 December 2020
Notes from a two day developer conference held 8-9 December 2020.
The conference was broadcast via YouTube Live chat, with comments turned off, and Slack was used to host the online community. This was done really well and ensured that YOW! remained interactive rather than being just a bunch of webinars strung together. There were separate slack channels with each of the speakers for Q&A sessions, virtual sponsor booths, a tech-support channel and an all-important banter channel.
What surprised me was that YOW! was much more academically geared than I had expected. I had thought it would have a practical focus and was pleasantly surprised at the high calibre of research being discussed. I have a very loooong list of new concepts and reading material to work through but, mostly, I want to research more about microservices and testing APIs. Also keen on joining a local code reading club, if such a thing exists.
Some recurring themes and concepts I noticed were:
Key Takeaways
Day One
- Inside Every Calculus Is A Little Algebra Waiting To Get Out - Erik Meijer:
- zoom is much harder than mathematics
- Tune in to C# - Mads Torgersen:
- C# has a new way of dealing with Null Reference Exceptions: Nullable Reference Types
- Launching an Internal Developer Community - Mark Birch:
- People are not programmed to be alone
- How to improve Developer Productivity - Jez Humble:
- Never measure productivity at the individual level
- People need to be connected to the consequences of their actions
- In complex systems failure is inevitable
- How to Read Complex Code without Getting a Headache - Felienne Hermans:
- We don’t teach reading code but developers spend 58% of time reading code
- Start, or join, a code reading club!
- Ends in Data - Joe Macleod:
- The internet doesn’t like data endings
- Data lakes turn into data swamps
Day Two
- Jepsen 13 - Kyle Kingsbury:
- Define values as lists, with an append operation, not as single numbers
- Hiding the Lead - Sam Newman:
- Backwards compatibility is key
- Code that changes together stays together
- Scaling Your Architecture With Services and Events - Randy Shoup:
- No one starts with microservices
- At a certain scale everyone moves to microservices
- Solving Problems like a Game Designer - Jennifer Scheurle:
- Perception is more important than reality
- Science of Queues: Performance Monitoring for Themes Parks and Distributed Systems - Mike Minutillo:
- Disneyland is a great place to study throughput
- Building Adaptive Systems For a Fast Flow of Change - Susanne Kaiser:
- When cognitive load is exceeded is becomes a delivery bottleneck
- Organization - A Tool for Software Architects - Eberhard Wolff:
- defining teams roughly equates to defining the architecture
Further Reading