icapps traveled to Amsterdam from February 29th to March 1st to participate in the DevWorld Conference 2024, a key event for developers. The lineup covered various topics, from Front-end and Backend to DevOps and AI. But you had to pick your battles wisely with back-to-back sessions and small stages requiring headsets. After overloading our brains with insightful presentations, it's time to reflect.
Did you miss this event? Or are you in need of a quick recap? Then, this blog is for you; we sat down together and listed our key takeaways from this year's DevWorld!
No, you don't know everything about Git
You might think you've got Git all figured out, but the Git talk reminded you that there's always something new to learn. Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, kicked off Friday morning with his session 'So you Think You Know Git? Part 2' on the main stage. It's unbelievable how everyone uses Git, yet there's always room to refine the basics or find ways to work smarter.
Take, for example, `git switch -c` instead of `git checkout -b`. Sure, both get the job done, but doesn't the first make more sense? You switch from a branch and create a new one. And who has yet to be guilty of not fixing pull request comments and adding a new commit message? Well, with `git commit –fixup`, that headache is taken care of for you.
Interested in more? Look at the slides from the session to uncover even more Git tips and tricks.
Inspiring mobile development of ING apps
IT Area Lead Marcin Pakulnicki from ING shared valuable insights on how they scale mobile applications across multiple countries and teams. ING organizes projects around contributions, with each team taking ownership of specific app modules. They follow a one application = one repository approach.
The organizational structure includes product-oriented teams responsible for coding, testing, and merging changes and platform teams handling post-release operations. ING focuses on creating a modular technology platform, utilizing standardized modules and widgets for global customization.
Beyond development
Will Scougal, a former employee of Snapchat and Twitter, sparked a more profound interest in the role of Augmented Reality (AR) in advertising. While there are already some impressive AR ads out there, he convinced us that there's potential for greater use and impact. We were shown intriguing examples and a fascinating museum filled with AR exhibits.
While most talks focused on development, the lineup included some insightful "personal development" sessions. Marek Kiszkis, from Netflix, centered his talk around taking a step back and looking at the big picture in an everyday rush. Rachel Lee Nabors taught us how to Be an Adult in (Professional) Relationships.
First glimpse of SolidStart
The creator of SolidJS, Ryan Carniato, is working on a new exciting project! During Dev-World, we were lucky to see a first glimpse of SolidStart, which is currently in beta testing. This new tool is a meta-framework built on top of SolidJS. Ryan Carniato gave us a 20-minute demo highlighting the ease of use and performance gains. Curious to know more about this new meta-framework? Check it out on the SolidStart website.
Low-code complements full-code
Low-code platforms are gaining traction, and Albert-Jan Schot, CTO at Blis Digital, told us how low-code and full-code approaches can complement each other. His methodology accelerates development cycles while maintaining agility in responding to dynamic business requirements.
The first live demo of JSR
The day was highlighted when Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js and Deno, entered the main stage. The agenda hinted at a talk about Deno, but to our surprise, he unveiled JSR - a package registry tailored for modern JavaScript with native TypeScript support. We were privileged to witness the first live demo on the same day. JSR doesn't aim to replace NPM but rather to complement it, enhancing the experience of publishing modern TypeScript packages. In an era where package publishing can be challenging, JSR promises to simplify the process.
DevOps & Cloud
Another topic well covered on this second day of the conference was DevOps & Cloud. We were less intrigued by the sales pitches for niche databases like ScyllaDB, Aerospike, or CouchDB - which could be interesting in particular architectures. More captivating was the talk of Loïc Carbonne. During his talk, he gave an excellent historical overview of how software architectures evolved through time, building up to the main topic of his speech: compostable architectures, advocating the importance of structuring your infrastructure into reusable and replaceable building blocks.
Toma Puljak gave another fascinating talk about Standardized Development Environments. He gave a sparkling talk about simplifying the setup of development environments and how to ensure consistency throughout the development cycle. He nicely demonstrated Dev Containers (Microsoft), Devfile (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), and nix-shell (NixOS) with excellent coding examples and clear pros and cons.
While there were many great speakers and fantastic topics, with only half an hour at their disposal, some talks felt too concise. The limited time slot resulted in topics being left untouched and clarification needed. Despite a few logistical snags, like the scarcity of headsets in smaller venues, DevWorld 2024 was a hit. Here's to raising the bar even higher next year!
