More than 1000 kilometers of autobahns behind. Two Code Europe conferences visited. A lot of interesting things learned. Some great connections established. And also time spent in great atmosphere :)

Short version is - it's 100% worth visiting these events :). If you are interested in more detailed review - please keep reading ;). If you'd like to visit one of these next year - keep in mind that a huge amount of people are attending these so better to come earlier if you'd like to get on time for the first talk as you need to pass registration first. I heard that some people are saying that these are more "hire oriented" events, where attendees can find a lot of company stands with job offers. Despite that it's true - there really were a lot of different companies represented on both events, it is still a conference, and I discovered a lot of interesting talks and speakers for myself. So let's talk about them. And as for the companies - well they provided all the fun - games, contests, prizes etc.

So how was Code Europe talks this year? Well let's start with Kraków then! First talk that I'd like to point out was "What's Oracle Doing With JavaScript?!" by Geertjan Wielenga. The talk was about Oracle JET.  I totally agree with the speaker that a lot of problems with javascript comes from an absence of good standardization and that you can find yourself on a project where different approaches are used to solve the same problem. So if you are interested in "Enterprise approach" to javascript world - definitely check out JET.

Next one would be "I just hacked your app!" by Marcos Placona, which was not only interesting and informative but was also a great show! If you are in Android development and how to secure your app, you should check it out. And if you are not in any of those things you should at least watch a beginning of the talk when the recording will be available!

"Solving data quality at Spotify" by Mārtiņš Kalvāns was an interesting real life story of application evolving and about some aspects on data quality, monitoring and validation of data pipelines.

Javascript is conquering new fields and "The web in an era of smart devices" by Kenneth Rohde Christiansen was one more proof for it ;)

Well and then there was a grand finale from Christian Heilmann and his "Preparing for the rise of the machines", it just forces you to think a lot about what are you doing right now and what you should do! It was definitely a good closing talk!


As for the Wrocław I'd like to point out "Building Platforms for Developers" by Dustin Whittle. And probably the best talk of the day "Monoliths to Services with Elixir and Phoenix" by Lauren Tan.
Microservices being probably one of the most used words, with people trying to break everything to microservices without really realizing if they actually need it, or not. This talk was definitely NOT one of those "Hello world highly scalable apps"!

It was more about Elixir a language based on Erlang's Beam, and why using it might be a good idea to write your service, as it explains the advantages of using Elixir over other languages, when considering using it to build a microservice. But keep in mind - there's no silver bullet found yet ;), so you should look for what is most suitable for you problem.

I'm looking forward to see the conference recording as there were a couple of interesting talks that I missed as they were in parallel to the ones I was on.

To summarize it all - I'd say that,  the conference in Kraków was slightly better organized than the one in Wrocław. But in the end having an ability to listen to some good talks and be able to talk to very skillful people is what I'm always looking for on such kind of events. And that's what I've got from both.

So now, it seems, I I'll be thinking about building a Reactive JET and mixing a Microservice Elixir :)

To be continued...