Highlights from ReactiveConf 2017
ReactiveConf a conference of modern trends in web development, which brings the world-renowned speakers to Slovakia. 2017 was the third year of the conference.
This year I attended the conference thanks to Johnny who for my luck couldn’t go.
First Day in Bratislava
I flew to Slovakia day in advance and had a chance stay overnight with a friend, Slovak sound artist and craftsman Jonas Gruska. His sound experiments, field recordings and instruments are well known (His latest album Spevy got also mentioned in the latest release of Wire magazine.)
Good job! You can listen online some of his recordings released for example on Bandcamp - Luky.
We eat pizza, played Go and listen to some pieces from his music collection.
The conference couldn’t start better.
Out of the Tarpit, Revisited - David Nole
Wednesday morning, the first speaker on stage David Nolen shared ideas from Ben Moseley and Peter Marks paper - Out of the Tar Pit (2006), advocated for a simplicity and shared examples of the use of Datomic database.
When considered next to testing and reasoning, simplicity is more important than either. Given a stark choice between investment in testing and investment in simplicity, the latter may often be the better choice because it will facilitate all future attempts to understand the system attempts of any kind.
But I had also my personal reasons to be excited about the second year appearance of David at ReactiveConf besides of his talk. We had some business to do and a picture of two of us was captured and shared by conference organisers. :D
RON: Replicated Object Notation - Victor Grishchenko
The second technical talk to mention was Victor Grischenko’s presentation where he made arguments against overuse of JSON as an exchange format between nowadays applications.
Some of his points:
- JSON is well readable by humans but not so as well understandable by computers
- is bloated
- weak (missing UUID, versioning..)
Alternative? Replicated Object Notation
Distributed data serialization format. Implicitly, formats like XML or JSON assume a lump of a state being delivered from a server to a client – once and in one piece. RON aims to synchronize replicas by delivering a stream of changes – continuously and incrementally. With RON, even an object’s state is seen as a batch of compacted changes, with more changes coming.
Secrets of the Glimmer VM - Tom Dale
The third, favourite talk, brought very unconventional and interesting idea of breaking the general view how a web application works by removing the middle part of “Download, Parse, Execute” stack.
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Extracted from Ember as independent project, Glimmer is a flexible, low-level rendering pipeline for building a “live” DOM from Handlebars templates that can subsequently be updated cheaply when data changes.
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Build in TypeScript, compiling to bytecode.
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The Glimmer VM: Boots Fast and Stays Fast - blog post by Yehuda Katz
Ethereum Meetup at Progressbar
Thursday evening had unexpected complications, when a driver of the last bus to my hometown, decided not to take any more passengers and I found myself standing at the bus station, with free evening and with no particular plans for the night. Fortunately, the situation had happy end thanks to Matej and Ivanka and I was also lucky to attend a very interesting meetup at local hackerspace Progressbar about cryptocurrencies and investments.
Friday Workshops at FIT
On Friday the conference moved to a new location for a day full of workshops, discussions and screenings. I went to a workshop on Reason language which together with talk day before (Reason: JavaScript-flavored OCaml - Jared Forsyth) give a good reason why I can recommend to keep eye on this language.
One may get lost so to summarise:
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Caml (originally an acronym for Categorical abstract machine language) is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language which is a dialect of the ML programming language family. Caml was developed in France at INRIA and EN.S
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OCaml (Objective Caml) - implementation of Caml
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BuckleScript - A backend for the OCaml compiler which emits JavaScript.
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Reason - an alternate syntax (interface) for OCaml that uses Bucklescript compiler backend to output JavaScript.
Surprise moment was when I met in one of the conference rooms my cousin whom I haven’t seen for over five years so the
conference becomes also a place of the family gathering. :)
Post Conference and After Party
But the day wasn’t over and time between official conference end and after party I spent in local tea-house meeting another local Go friend. The special twist of our game was brought by the presence of Pavol Lisy (1p) First Slovak professional of the game of Go and one of the top players in Europe!
Then came after party which prepared also some funny moments. As every attendee received tokens for free drinks I headed to the bar and my discussion with barman follows:
Me: What can I get for a token?
Barman: Beer, Wine, Vodka, Whiskey
With a smile, I asked: Which of that is non-alcoholic?
Barman: None
Me: Can I get sparkling water instead?
Barman: No, for the token you can choose only from Beer, Wine, Vodka, Whiskey or buy other stuff with your own money..
Me:
To solve the puzzle, I asked for wine and glass of tap water with it which I got without a problem. :D
With drink with my hand, I met and chat with some familiar faces from the conference and workshop. One of the last funny moments of the conference was meeting with Rebecca and Sean from Manchester. We talk bit and later that night we found that their conference ticket number was 20 and 21. Mine was 22 which can be considered as proof that nothing happens as a coincidence! :D
That was my ReactiveConf 2017 and I would like to thank organisers, speakers who came, friends and family who made the time spent in Slovakia special and great.
Thank you and hope to see you again in 2018!
Date:
2017-10-24 - 2017-10-30
Location:
Bratislava, Slovakia
Website:
Met:
Laila, Juraj B., Wao, Palko, pht, Ivanka K. Aoik, Jan G., Milos, Zuzka M., Radka G., David, Rebecca, Sean, ?, ? …