Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Sharing the fun of DevNexus 2017

1 day of workshop, 2 days of conference sessions and so many tracks to choose from.
This is DevNexus 2017 in Atlanta!
A fun conference to be on πŸ€—
This year I had the pleasure to be invited as a speaker for my talk: the trials and tribulations of a polyglot cross-patform mobile developer.
I also took the opportunities to attend as many conferences as possible. My theme this year was reactive programming.

Here is some miscellaneous notes, mumblings and souvenirs from this edition.

Wednesday was workshop day. I've picked Venkat's workshop on Building reactive applications. As I always said: Venkat is always a good value, you never get disappointed, there is always something to learn. In this workshop, Venkat tells us what functional programming is all about: function composition and lazy evaluation. I did all the exercice with RxJS, the other guys around me used RxJava, it was funny to see how concise is the JavaScript version 😜

Thursday morning starts with Venkat's keynote on Don't walk away from Complexity, Run. It was a very inspirational keynote, one of my favourite quote is: Coding is not a work, coding is an addiction. πŸ‘ πŸ‘πŸ½ πŸ‘πŸΎ πŸ‘πŸΏ
I've been addicted for 20 years and I can't get over it 😜
The next sessions I've attended:
  • Introducing TypeScript 2.0 by James Sturtevant: Great new addition to TypeScript 2.0 is non-nullable type, you can activate the check by adding --strictNullChecks flag to tsc command lien. To read more about non-nullable type, visit this blog post. I like the notion of union type and the easy sugar syntax Type? for optional type (converted to union type) that reminds me Swift syntax. When used with dot operator, the optional type will need to be unwrapped.
  • Promises and Generators in ES6 by Jennifer Bland. I really like Jennifer's biography, a senior developer who was part of Lotus Domino on the AS/400 and is reconverted into JavaScript development. Our job as a developer is a continuous learning exercise.
  • Gradle Worst Practices: Common anti-patterns in Gradle builds by Gary Hale where you learn 10 anti patterns for performance, maintenance, correctness and usability. Useful tip I'll keep in mind: make your build immutable by using use @Input / @outputDirectory annotation rather than using variables.
  • Overview of Webpack, a module bundler by Pavan Podila: one of my favourite presentation for the rich content. I've learnt a lot, I followed Pavan as he went through his step by step github example. Thanks Paven to have added the lazy loading step upon my request! I will write a separate blog post on the topic. If you work with angular2 or ReactJS, you've used webpack, you might use angular-cli or react-create-app that hides its configuration away but getting your way with plain webpack will come handy.


Friday morning keynote was all about dancing with elephants with Burr:

Keynote was followed by my ✨ presentation ✨ the trials and tribulations of a polyglot cross-patform mobile developer. I have great time delivering the presentation, this one was slightly different than the one I used to give: less technical but full of anecdotes and feelings. You can see my hand-crafted slides here. Better than thousand words, it can be all sum up with these drawings:


This is the process a developer as an early adopter goes through ^^^
It's all about about emotions 😭 πŸ˜₯ 😱 πŸ˜‚ πŸ˜‰ 😍
I have no doubts that sharing your feelings with you peer developers at work will make you a better communicator. As been very often the only female developer in a team, I used to think, I’d rather not show I’m a sensitive person. It could be interpreted as a weakness. But looking around me, I see developers (like you), people who can troll flame war on crucial subjects like tabs vs spaces in your IDE and they do it with passion and emotions. In fact, I’ve recently ran into this article from Jim Whitehurst, our Red Hat CEO, where he said that “showing emotion at work is simply a reflection of a person's passion”. I couldn’t agree more with that quote.

Afternoon I've attended Rx.js cleans up the async JavaScript mess by @codefoster where we deep dive the github examples v4 on RxJS and we explore the v5 RxJS repo. Timeflies is my favourite animation. I loves the cool effect and it reminds me Brian Leathem's DevNation talk. In the end, it was a great complement from Venkat's workshop and a good entry point for examples to look at. I might contribute to port those samples to version 5.

Time flies when you have fun, DevNexus 2017 was a fantastic edition, too many tracks and great subjects to choose from. I'll have to come back next year, that's for sure.