QCON 2014

Herkese merhaba,

QCON 2014 için çalıştığım şirkete bir blog yazısı hazırladım, burada sizlerle de paylaşmak isterim. İngilizce olduğu için kusura kalmayın. : )

QCON London conference is one the real general purpose developer conferences(and maybe enterprise software conference) of Europe and as Monitise MEA, we attended with two engineers this year to the event.

QCON 2014 had two days of training + workshops and three days of conference(and since it was in London, five days of drinking). Topics of both training and conference was selected wisely according to today’s needs in software industry. Training topics ranging from Functional/Reactive Programming to Refactoring Large Scala Software Systems were really useful to today’s software engineering profession. Erik Meijer’s training sessions was really special and it opened our eyes to the fullest in Functional and Reactive Programming. But we still can not understand the following: “Contravariance is the Dual of Covariance Implies Iterable is the Dual of Observable”.

The same unfortunately can not be said for the keynotes. Damian Conway did a very fun keynote, showing interesting topics, but it did not make any strong topics about anything(but his CS presentation about Regexes was quite good actually). The only interesting keynote was from Gunter Dueck, he cleary stated the world’s movement to McDonaldization, and warned the software developers about the upcoming dangers. Tim Bray also did an entertaining presentation about the world going mobile and the browser’s future in this.

The sessions of the conference that started on Wednesday had clearly shown us where the software development industry is headed. The functional paradigm of previous years for example, is now a common issue that we all need to use it as much as we can. Fault tolerance is the new hot topic since the purchase of WhatsApp. Inventor of Erlang, Joe Armstrong gave a very clear presentation of what fault tolerance is. We have seen from numerous presentations that in fact fault tolerance is a very clean technique but it is not practised as it should have been.

Java was one the main points of attention in the conference. Every sane developer understands its importance, its vast library of JDK and the new work that’s sitting on top of JVM like Scala, Clojure,Akka, RxJava and numerous frameworks like Spring, Dropwizard, Play, Grails and etc. So instead of just cursing Java, sessions were presented to deal with the issues of Java, to give details of its capabilities and such. If only someone can fix the garbage collection issue and reduce the compile times, the world would definitely be a better place: ).

Scalable architectures was another point of interest in the conference, we had a very clear presentation from Twitter about its non-blocking usage of Scala, and a very good presentation from Sadek Drobi, about blocking threads in Reactive programming. Reactive programming has shown its power, but with great power, we again saw that great responsibility is needed.

Devops, cloud technoloqies, integrated web applications and big data architectures all have proven their worth and all had their own tracks in the conference. QCON was again a reminder of what is going on in the industry, and what people are working on this year. It was a relief that in Monitise MEA, we actually deal with a lot of the issues discussed in QCON. I wish that I could say the same thing for Turkey’s sofware industry as a whole.