microCPH – The Microservice Conference in Copenhagen

Copenhagen

2018-05-15 08.18.08

I had the unique opportunity to attend µCPH 2018 in the wonderful city of Copenhagen this year.
The relatively small community conference was a great mix of high-level and hands-on talks.
Hosting a single track of talks did not jeopardised me to pick from a variety of presentation titles. Instead it felt like the order of talks was perfectly aligned to guide you from the eagle’s perspective (keynote on coupling by Michael Nygard) to Microservices and patterns of Domain Driven Design, down to the hands-on experiences of an actual move to a dockerized system of Financial Times, closing with some great remarks of a framework for breaking up the UI monolith (mosaic from Zalando).

One of my favorite presentations: _Microservices: Patterns and Antipatterns_ by Stefan Tilkov (slide deck, video). Many talks take the motivation for microservices either for granted or put scalablity, fault-tolerance and moving agile through independent release cycles upfront. In this talk however, Tilkov focuses on actual problems and how they have been solved in the past without the label micro service and how you shoot yourself in the foot by blindly applying conference-motivated architecture.

Another great talk by Dmitriy Kubyshkin explained how Zalando deals with a micro-service infrastructure and their front-end (slides, video). Many times micro-services talks are about back-end systems, and left the front-end out of discussion. At speedledger we also have the problem, that we somehow have to combine UI components with their back-end counterparts that are served through micro-services. Mosaic – the framework that Zalando developed has some great inspirations on that topic.

Ben Stopford with his talk on Kafka Streams (video, slides) gave some great ideas how you can turn services inside out and use advanced Kafka features to distribute the state of your system to avoid letting services turning into a database with a REST interface.

µCPH was a very well organised conference with a great schedule that gave plenty of time between the sessions to exchange with other attendants and to network.

I highly recommend to attend µCPH, if you have the chance to do so 🙂
– Tobi

Speakers dinner

flatMap Oslo 2018

The first day most of the sessions were on a very high level and there was a lot of talk about Free Monads, Tagless final and category theory. Upcoming news about Scalaz 8 and cats and what they have learnt along the way there. It was obvious that you should already be familiar with monads, monoids, applicatives and the monadic laws to get the most out of the advanced sessions.

The second day the sessions were more focused on how you can apply beautiful functional concepts to improve your code with state monads and cats validation.

Good discussions on what can be learnt and applied from other languages. It feels like the Scala community has matured and started experimenting with more advanced things now that there are more people familiar with the language.

I felt that my workshop on Scala for Java developers was well received. The attendees had a little or no experience of Scala since before but all of them saw opportunities to use it at work. I get the feeling that Scala is becoming more popular and accepted even in enterprise environments where Java has been the only choice before.

It’s great to see that my feeling that functional programming languages is getting more popular is also reflected in surveys. The industry is slowly going towards less null reference exceptions and code that is easier to parallelise.