4 learnings I got from The Conf
At the end of September 2017, AppProva company sponsored the Web development team to a trip to São Paulo, to participate the first The Conf. This event was conceived and organized by Fábio Akita together with Code Miner and InfoQ and had the bold objective of being the first Brazilian conference directed to the international audience, entirely presented in English, centered in programming and technology topics.
The event opening was an amazing presentation in my opinion. Fábio Akita is a very charismatic presenter and walked us through his history and how emerged the idea of making a conference to show the world that Brazilians are talented programmers, in a language that is more far-reaching then Portuguese. His speech helped both speakers and listeners to feel more at ease when communicating in English, leaving aside all the prejudice and inferiority complex that we, Brazilians, usually have.
The format of presentations was different of what I was familiarized with: two speakers would share the same stage and simultaneously talk, each in a microphone switched on a different channel, and the audience could choose which talk to listen to, using a transmitter with earphones and buttons to sync into the desired channel.
After the initial strangeness and even though the static radio noises would leave us a little deaf sometimes, we were able to enjoy the tech conference in its fullness and take a look at all presentations without losing time moving around! Since I was the only intern at my group and it was the first time I’ve ever been to a large technology event, I’d like to share some knowledge and remarkable phrases I heard during the two days of activities.
Even though you haven’t reached your ideal solution, don’t be afraid of showing what your efforts have taught you and keep trying to find the answer
On the talk How to enjoy WebVR right now, developer Thiago Alves Luiz showed the state-of-art technologies that are used to display Virtual Reality in Web pages, both in mobile devices or browsers. Commercially viable alternatives to VR equipment was shown, and he also explained his progress on the VR mobile phone app he’s developing, which uses the device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to simulate movement.
Why should we bother learning a new programming language?
Although my knowledge in mobile apps development is limited, I was deeply interested in the talk Kotlin: The “New” Kid on The Block! by Walmyr Carvalho. This new language was announced by Google as official for Android development and should replace Java in the near future, as the most used language in mobile applications. With this presentation, I learned we should not be afraid of learning a new skill or language, as the valuable tools and, the more techniques you acquire, greater will be the problems you can solve!
The talk Writing extensible functional code, by Renan Ranelli was one of the most interesting in technical aspects. He showed the differences one has to keep in mind while developing in a functional or object-oriented language, avoiding the creation of a program “disguised” as functional but that works in a worse manner that it would if written in a pure imperative approach. I also learned that the main idea while writing functional code is how you should organize the S.O.L.I.D. principles, which originated from object-oriented development.
Your mission is to deliver value to the company and clients. Understand the game, rules, participants, and consequences.
On the second day of the event, the talk Beyond your daily coding by Emerson Macedo was a great lesson of how you can be more than just a software developer. Big companies are usually more change-resistant, but in I.T. field, languages, architectures, and technologies, in general become outdated rapidly. To introduce a big innovation in your workplace, one should earn the trust of colleagues and leaders first, by doing a remarkable and high-quality work. And you should keep in mind that your bosses won’t be interested in “how cool” a new language is or that your favorite tech guru said that this new paradigm would change the future of your coding. What your employers want is to know that critical change will make the product better, if it will deliver value
Code consistency: when and how to do it, without compromising the team productivity?
Presented by Gabi Stefanini, Keeping Code Style Sanity in a 13-year-old Codebase generated an interesting discussion about code patterns and consistency for a company. Some developers and administrators may not see any essential value in “refactoring” or maintaining good practices when writing code, but Gabi showed us that, through research and interview with her colleagues, having a clean and consistent code base provides advantages on the long-term, such as more flexibility to changes and improvement on the team productivity. These changes shouldn’t be made abruptly but talked over, tested before implemented in real products.
Concluding, I think that watching The Conf 2017 was a professionally enriching experience, which also gave me valuable insights on the behavior of different types of technologies companies.
I would like to thank AppProva for have given me this opportunity! Special thanks to the Culture and People Committee and the great leaders Antônio, Marcos e Cairo.
