Build Stuff Odessa

On 8–9 of July I’ve attended Build Stuff Odessa. My friend told me he was going and shortly after looking into more information about the conference I’ve decided to come. And that was a right decision! Turns out this kind of conference was exactly what I needed. By “this kind” I mean NOT only about tools, programming languages, etc., but about how to build stuff, literally, things like architectural approaches, DDD, microservices, over-engineering (h0w to NOT do it).

Of course there were some technology-specific talks and workshops, which weren’t particularly interesting for me (Java, .NET). But here’s another thing — the conference took place on the beach!! So whenever anyone felt like taking a break, they just went swimming in the pool/sea, or just chilling in chaise lounge.

The core idea was to combine 3 things: get more knowledge, hang with cool people and just chill. Organisers really nailed it!

Here are some talks highlights from me:

Greg Young had an opening keynote on the first day. I really enjoyed his talk “Stop Over-Engineering”. Over-Engineering is a great problem in our line of work. It’s much easier to avoid doing it working on brown-field projects, then on the green-field ones. In any project you always need to evaluate efficiency cost of any feature, before development: “It may sound crazy, but we can use humans as services!” (about redirecting edge cases to the manual work). Always deliver solutions to end users ASAP, otherwise the fail is inevitable. I highly recommend watching the recording of this talk.

Kristoffer Rolf Deinoff had a talk “Build living stuff”. It was very interesting for me even though I was never good in biology in school. Kristoffer told us about Cello — the first programming language, which compiles to DNA. He also shared some theories how all this stuff may evolve, made a prognosis that in 10 years we will be programming for first bio-chips. Compared current period of bioengineering with 1950th for programming languages. I’m going to follow this topic from now on.

Greg had a cool workshop about PrivateEye — a great profiling tool, really worth looking into. It’s now available for .NET and is in production for JVM.

Michael Feathers had an opening keynote for the day two with a topic: “Strategic Code Deletion”. The talk felt very much as a continuity of Greg’s talk about Over-Engineering. I just recommend watching both of those talks as soon as they become available on youtube.

Sander Hoogerdoorn gave a talk “Thirty months of microservices. Stairway to heaven or highway to hell?” I really liked that he mentioned several times that a key for separating microservices is to properly separate bounded contexts. I’ve rarely heard about it in the microservices talks from the Ruby World, and I think it’s the reason behind the amount of “fail microservices stories” in our community as well.

And there were also great parties!!! I hope to see you all soon :)

Cheers!