25 jun Involved @ Techorama – Learnings
Techorama Belgium 2019 was just great. On May 21 and 22 in Kinepolis Antwerp, about 100 speakers delighted the 1700+ attendees. Of course Involved was there too. If you want to know how we experienced this year’s Space Edition, do continue reading.
@ the booth
Robin looks back at the event with quite some enthusiasm: “I had the privilege to represent Involved at our booth. Can you imagine anything better than talking shop with bright peers? Well, neither can I 😉. The weeks leading up to Techorama Lucas, Tim and I crafted a nice coding challenge. At the conference, we tried to lure as many people as possible to our booth to ‘ignite’ massive competition.”
For our sales guy Tanguy, it was his first time at Techorama: “What a great experience! When I entered the venue, the Cronos corner immediately caught my eye. At our booth, it was a pleasure to see how many attendees took the dare to solve our coding challenge. I reckon our presence at Techorama has not gone unnoticed.”
Our favorite speakers
“A top session!” That is what Yassine thinks of David Berry’s talk about ‘Building Enterprise Grade Web APIs in ASP.NET Core’. “I chose his talk because I often come across ‘exampleware’ code that barely helps me build APIs at an enterprise level. Just like I’d hoped, David Berry showed concepts and design patterns that I will be able to use in my future projects. It was a very fascinating and instructive session.”
Also Seppe and Elwin enjoyed their time at Techorama. They both rate the presentation of Rainer Stropek as one of their favorites. It was titled ‘Web Development Revolution with WebAssembly and ASP.NET Blazor’.
“At last Microsoft developed a new alternative to create a single page application”, Seppe explains. “Blazor is actual C# code being run on the frontend using WebAssembly. This brilliant feature is currently still in preview, bundled in .NET Core 3. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised when Rainer Stropek started coding right away with a demo application, very much focusing on the ‘how’ of it all. He actually showed us what Blazor currently is. I truly hope in a near future we’ll be doing full-stack C# with a nice Blazor frontend.”
Elwin was glad with Rainer Stropek’s focus on .NET developers and an alternative to JavaScript based solutions in the web client aimed at them. “The pace and hands-on approach of the presentation and the demos was really good. Rainer skillfully fed us with just enough details about the underlying technology without losing our attention. The most promising feature of the new WASM-based Blazor is the ability to build your frontend based directly around your .NET backend application. I look forward to trying out this technology in the future.”
Seppe continues: “Of course, the first thing I did when I came home after visiting Techorama was download the new .NET Core preview and play with … Blazor! For those who’re interested, here’s the repository https://github.com/rstropek/StarshipTraveler.”
Somewhat less pleased was Rob about the session ‘Communication in a Microservices World’ of Lander Verhack & Diedrik De Mits. “I expected to learn more about doing communication right between microservices, and how to deal with things like unreachable services. The intro of the session was okay, comparing synchronous communication with asynchronous communication. But what followed was not as in-depth as I’d hoped, and I didn’t really pick up much information that I did not already know. Luckily, the Outbox pattern we saw at the end partly satisfied my hunger for information on guaranteed delivery.”
Bruce was satisfied with Jason Alba’s talk on ‘Seven Soft Skills At Least As Important As Technical Skills’. “Most of us developers can’t really pinpoint what soft skills exactly are, and why they are important, let alone rank them in terms of importance. That is why I was curious about Jason Alba’s session.
Not surprisingly, the title was a cleverly disguised curve ball. Alba clearly articulated the most important component of what makes a soft skill relevant: context. Not only do your current position, company and responsibilities greatly influence which soft skills are relevant to you. But even more importantly, your personality is the key factor in the soft skill equation. Nobody can be everything all of the time. So play to your strengths.
Alba laid out a clear battle plan to improve your soft skills. He suggested to make a list of which soft skills you judge as most important for yourself and your current situation, pick one at a time, clearly articulate the level of mastery you want to attain and how you’re going to accomplish this, assess your current proficiency in the chosen skill, and get cracking!
So, whoever came to Alba’s talk hoping to get a ready-made answer about which soft skills he should cultivate, came out with a call to self-exploration and reflection. Maybe not the answer most of us were seeking, but quite possibly the answer we actually needed.”
Lucas’ number 1 of the list of speakers was Kevin Dockx with ‘An in-depth look at HttpClient’. “To my surprise and joy, Kevin Dockx’ presentation was about the HttpClient in C# and not about the one in Angular. I’m sure I will be using this in the near future, so I really enjoyed the session. Kevin told us how to use HttpClient in C# properly, what to avoid and how to write clean solutions for multiple usages of the HttpClient. I know now that I saw a lot of bad practice examples on the internet. I’m quite happy that – thanks to Techorama – I won’t get myself into such situations.”
CU next year?
At the end of two exhausting days, the Techorama attendees had the opportunity to enjoy a closing keynote by Astronaut André Kuipers on ‘Technology and Innovation’. We learned that the ISS is the largest, most complex, international technological structure ever made by mankind.
Tanguy is already looking forward to the 2020 edition and also Robin is clear about it: “I’m definitely hyped to represent Involved at the next Techorama!”
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