Astrix đ€ Reco R&D meetup
Originally posted on recolabs.dev.
We set up an R&D meetup with our good friends at Astrix Security, and weâre sharing the highlights with yâall!
A Shared Journey of Individual Paths
The engineering culture in Reco is derived from our companyâs culture. We value our joint journey, but never lose sight of our team membersâ individual pathways. Other than the day-to-day activities, a great way to demonstrate these values is by attending professional meetups, where everybody gets to take in top-notch lectures, network with others, and experience a change of pace. The Go meetup we attended recently is an example of exactly that.
So, when Amit Trivizki from Astrix came to visit for lunch, the idea of arranging a meetup came up, and we couldnât drop it!
If you havenât heard about them already, Astrix is a cloud security startup providing first access management solution for third-party app-integrations â helping organizations unleash the power of automation and app integrations while keeping their ever-expanding web of third-parties under control.
We met on Recoâs office rooftop. Like every meetup, this too began with some mingling, beer drinking, and snacking. Next, we fired up our laptops and began the first session:
Session #0 // learnchromedev.tools workshop by Miryam Oren
Front-end developer Miryam Oren, who works on Recoâs team, created an entire workshop specifically for using Chrome Dev Tools. In a quick introduction, she discussed the advantages of using development tools for almost all R&D tasks, including front-end, back-end, and even operations.
She then walked us through a few Dev Tools functions like inspecting network calls, editing cookies, and replacing images on news websites with pictures of cats đ±. One of the interesting questions introduced to Miriayam was how to use the Chrome V8 debugger to debug local Node applications.
After the introduction and Q&A, we moved on to the workshop, where participants competed with each other to see who could solve the game first. Here you can see the Astrix team members furiously trying to get to the finish line firstâŠ
The winner (perhaps unsurprisingly đ) was Tal Skverer!
Miriyamâs workshop about Chrome Dev Tools is both open source and free. Check it out here: https://learnchromedev.tools.
Pizza Break đ
Session #1 // Concurrency !== Parallelism by Amit Trivizki
Amit is a core team member in Astrix. He gave us a deep-dive into the meaning of Concurrency VS Parallelism. His main message is: concurrency is NOT parallelism.
Concurrency is about dealing with a lot of things at once.
Parallelism is about doing a lot of things at once
- Rob Pike
To explain the meaning of the quote: Concurrency is an abstract, high-level, and normally useful concept. Itâs when multiple tasks can run in overlapping periods. Itâs an illusion of multiple tasks running in parallel because of a very fast switching by the CPU. Two tasks canât run at the same time on a single-core CPU. Parallelism is when tasks actually run in parallel on multiple CPUs.
We also discussed how to conceptualize concurrent solutions in Go and Node and the surprising and non-intuitive timing results of different concurrent designs. The results were surprising â many patterns that feel like should be the same have wildly different execution times!
Session #2 // Black Holes by Amit Levin
Amit is a core team member in Astrix. After the first two Tech sessions, Amit gave us something different by teaching us science! He educated us on the physics of black holes in a fascinating talk.
We spoke a little bit about the math behind it, why black holes appear so weird, how science fiction movies always get it wrong, the Doppler effect, and basically just had a great time geeking out trying to wrap our heads around this extreme notion.
Summary
Overall, it was a great meetup. We want to thank our good friends at Astrix Security and our amazing Head of People Operations Noa Bergman for making this happen.
Thank you friends for your time, great lectures, cooperation, and even helping with recycling the beer bottles and soda cans â€. Weâre already thinking about the next meetup, where we can discuss more specific experiences and compare the development challenges weâre all facing.
We aim to keep evolving as part of our engineering culture; be it meetups, networking, retrospectives, pair-programming sessions, writing reading materials, and more. This is our strategic way of winning!
If this culture seems like a place youâd fit into, and even help evolve, hit us up â weâre hiring talents.