Software Crafters Barcelona 2021 — Event Reporting

The non remote events are back, which is great!

I had the opportunity to attend for the first one (for me) after the pandemic and I did a little summary to share my thoughts about it.

I am Borja Pernía, a Venezuelan software developer who has lived in Barcelona since 2012. I have been working at ManoMano since January 2020 and I like to assist to different events related to software development.

The talks

For personal reasons, I only could assist the first day during the morning and this is the summary of the talks that I assisted.

Coding with dinosaurs: 5 tips about using functional programming patterns you might want to know

In general

• Speaker: Erik Torres Serrano (@ertorser)
• In English
• Duration: 40 minutes

Summary

• He uses scala now, and all the examples were done in that.
• He mentioned @newtype wrapper utility
• He explained 5 tips (I only listened/took notes about 4)
  - Connascence of position
  - Meaningful naming
  - Smart constructors
  - Phantom type parameters pattern
• Other tips included in the previous ones:
  - Try to return information useful for the next steps of the executions
  - Avoid monads
  - Try to find the way that the compiler helps us to code, which could be good, even for onboard new people into a team.
  - To start to use functional programming: Do not return null / Do not use exceptions
• Reads that he mentioned during the talk:
  - Railway Oriented Programming (Scott Wlaschin) explanation
  - Evidence pattern post of Alexis King

Entiende tus sistemas con OpenTelemetry

In general

• Speaker: Carolina Zhou Lin (@carolinazslin) and Xavier Belloso (@xavibel)
• In Spanish
• Duration: 40 minutes

Summary

They talked about the necessity to use OpenTelemetry

• They mentioned his stack: oracle db, monolith app, logs on each server…
• The traceability in those conditions was really difficult to achieve

Important concepts in observability

• This allow to us to have “more ownership” of our code and systems
• Three pillars: metrics, logs and traces
• A trace is an structured log with context
• The monitorization could do that intuition play a roll (because intuition cause that we don’t ask what is happening before start to try to solve it)

First steps into the Voxel implementation

• Start to use graylog (a logs aggregator)
• Create structured logs (to search information inside a context)
• Add correlation IDs into logs
• Create alarms for things that previously happened (more reactive than preventive)
• Create dashboards in grafana (to see real time behavior)

What is OpenTelemetry?

• It uses an instrumentation standards to allow include observability

Demo time!

• Done in .net
• They showed how to (easily) instrumentalise an app with OpenTelemetry and show information in Jaeger and Grafana

Questions & Answers

• Somebody asked about an example of benefit of observability
  - They mentioned an attack that they suffered several times and how with observability the response times were better.
• At the end of the talk I asked them about how they decided to use OpenTelemetry instead other tools (like Datadog, for example) and they explained to me that it was to avoid to be tied to a paid product that, maybe, don’t follow instrumentation standards and it is not open source.

Data Engineering: Building your BI infrastructure from scratch

In general

• Speaker: Estefania Rabadan Martinez
• In English and speaker in remote
• Duration: 40 minutes

Summary

Quick overview of data disciplines

• Data engineer
• Data analyst
• Data scientist

The infrastructure for handle data in Hotjar

• What they had and what they want to achieve
• What was in place?
• How was this executed?

About data quality
Important: accuracy, consistency, completeness, timeliness, validity, uniqueness

Lessons learned

• Always question the current state
• Follow a north star but not to run towards it
• Be mindful of the time and people-power you have while planning
• Extra: not introducing Streaming too soon

To conclude

As a summary, the talks that I assisted had interesting topics that could help us to improve our day-to-day work in several levels (to know several ways to have a better functional programming experience, to understand how to monitorize our applications in a correct and simpler way or starting to build a BI infrastructure based on the experience of somebody that already lived it).

I enjoyed coming back to a face-to-face event with a great set of speakers, , and a good mood among the crowd. I hope to attend next year’s edition too :)

If you want to continue the conversation about this or other events, contact or chat with me on LinkedIn.

General Information of the event

• Web: Software Crafters Barcelona 2021
• When: October 23–24, 2021 (from 9am to 7pm approx.)
• Where: BAU Barcelona
• How did I know about the conference and how I got the ticket?
  First, I’m an active follower of Software Crafters @bcnswcraft!
  Secondly, ManoMano Tech Team the company where I work for, is growing a lot in Barcelona and supports the local tech ecosystem, through sponsoring.
• How was it scheduled?
  It consisted in two tracks:
  - For keynotes, all of them of 40 minutes of duration
  - For workshops, all of them of 2 hours of duration
• When will the talks be available?
  All the talks are available on this YouTube playlist.

As usual in this kind of events, the opening was a moment to present the team involved and thanked to the sponsors (ManoMano included! \o/ ). Something that was new for me: the post-covid protocol during the event (use of masks, leave the rooms at the end of the talks, etc.) and the presentation of two organizations (BCN women who code and Codebar).