It’s sad that there are no good programming conferences in the South of the Netherlands and especially around the Eindhoven area which is considered very innovative and has a strong university. Fortunately, NextBuild is an exception.
2016 was the second year of the NextBuild conference. I missed the first one so I can’t comment about it, but I can say a few things about the 2016 version. First of all it’s important to stress that this is a free (gratis) one day conference, which is not the usual case when it comes to conferences (Dutch Clojure Days was another good exception). And even though NextBuild is free, we were offered free coffee, juice, cookies, sandwiches, and beers. Not bad…
But let’s move one to the interesting parts: the actual content. The agenda was full of parallel talks so I had to make my choices. But the first keynote was common. Pini Reznik talked about Cloud Native Applications and Post-DevOps. Pini obviously believes in software automation since he said that:
Autonomous software is as inevitable as autonomous cars and planes
Pini’s ideas involve self-healing and auto-scaling cloud software. Not only I agree with those ideas, but as an operating system fan I would like to see them be supported not only in cloud software, but in all software, including operating systems.
The next keynote I joined was Coding the Next Build by Niek Palm. This keynote focused on using Docker for everything, especially on stuff that are usually not version-controlled, like the build system’s configuration. I have not even played with Docker yet, but what I see is that people are very passionate about it. This is usually a bad sign (think of XML), since geeks are not subjective about a technology when they get very excited with it. In general the war between package managers, virtual machines, and containers is a mess. Although I see the point behind Docker, it is generally accepted that it needs more mature tooling and that it is not the solution for all problems.
Next, Joost den Boer talked about Gettings started with cool IoT stuff. What I liked about this keynote was that Joost did not talk about Arduino or Raspberry Pi, which by now everybody knows about (or at least has heard of). Instead he showed alternative (and actually cheaper) platforms that can be used for IoT development. Particularly, RedBear Duo and PINE64 look very interesting. But for now, I’ll stick to my (nowadays old school!) mbed LPC1768 microcontroller :)
Matthijs Groen spoke about SpeedLazer: Lunch break game development. Developing a functional game during lunch breaks is remarkable. But apparently it is possible using modern frameworks like Phaser. Brian Hogan wrote a nice article in June’s pragpub about Making a 2D Game in Phaser. It’s available for free, so download it and have some fun!
In the next talk Yegor Bugayenko mentioned the Seven Deadly Sins of a Software Project. If there’s one thing that should be kept from this talk is:
The history of commits is as valuable as the source code
Indeed the commit history is very important and that’s why we should not create a monster out of it. So this advice goes hand-by-hand with How to Write a Git Commit Message.
Next, I joined the keynote Service Discovery in a Microservice Architecture using Consul by Jos Dirksen. I haven’t heard of Consul before so it was good to see some demos about how it can be used in a microservice based architecture. No further comments…
Marcin Czenko’s talk was about Fast prototyping with React and Firebase. Firebase is yet another tool that I didn’t know about. I am aware of React but I have never used it. The nice thing about Firebase is that it supports many languages (including Swift) and many platforms.
The last presentation of the day was Modern JavaScript: Object-oriented thinking in a functional world by Egbert Teeselink. Egbert talked about immutable-js which is a soft way of introducing support for immutable, persistent data structures in JavaScript. It’s nice to see that JavaScript is trying to follow the examples of the functional programming languages that I like, namely Clojure and Scala. I’m still busy with how to write proper modern mutable JavaScript code, but when I’m passed this stage immutable-js is something to consider. Although I have the impression that ClojureSript is a better approach.
See you next year NextBuild ;)