QCon London 2020
I just returned home from QCon in London. This was my first year in attendance and honestly, I did not know what to expect. I was excited about some talks and there were time slots where I did not know what to choose. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised.
Here is a list of my highlights.
Monolith Decomposition Patterns
This was the first talk I attended and I was really surprised by the quality of the speaker. Sam Newman was very funny and knowledgable. I liked the idea of the talk, monolith is still a good solution, modular monoliths and guide about how to get to microservices. The talk ended in the middle of the presentation (time reasons). I highly recommend to go and seek some of his talks on this topic.
This video is not from QCon, but contains the whole talk 😊
To Microservices and Back Again
I liked everything about this talk. It was basically a story how a company started with monolith, moved to microservices and then moved to monolith again. The presenter was great and clearly understood every step of the process and decision making.
And as a plus, there was a fire alarm in the middle of this talk. What more do you need?
Quarkus
Maybe I am late to the party but I discovered Quarkus at this talk. We normally use Spring Boot for our applications and we are happy with it until we want to use it in AWS Lambda. The startup time of Boot application is that high that we would never use it in lambda.
I would not be afraid to use Quarkus there. The startup time of a REST endpoint application that is connected to a database via Hibernate can be 17 milliseconds. How amazing is that?
Moving Beyond Request-Reply: How Smart APIs Are Different
This was a great session talking about how to correctly build distributed systems and long-running transactions. Asynchronous communication at least in the backend, simulating synchronicity via polling. When the user sees a loading animation, they should always be able to reload the page without losing any progress.
I liked everything about this talk.
Rethinking How the Industry Approaches Chaos Engineering
Multiple times I heart about how Netflix is running experiments in production, that are basically killing some portion of life traffic to figure out how their system would behave.
The Speaker of this talk was one of the authors of this.
Insight into this process was really interesting and I learned a lot.
The example of questions we should be able to answer about our systems before even running any sort of chaos experiment was very insightfull.
Tesla Virtual Power Plant
To be honest I was not planning to attend this session, based on name or brief description I was not really interested. Then on morning keynote, this was hyped as one the most anticipated talks. I reluctantly decided to go.
And I was lucky so.
This talk was describing the software architecture at Tesla. Not just the car part, but the battery management part as well. It’s fascinating what must be done to trade on electricity markets when you are running a distributed network of batteries.
There were few other excellent talks and from what I heart from my colleagues I missed some great talks by being on a different track. I will watch videos of those later.
To summarize things, QCon London 2020 was a really good conference and I learn a lot of things.
