Brainfood Talks

The adoption of cloud-native technologies is significantly elevating the complexity of our infrastructure ecosystems. As a result, Engineers working in product teams, have to understand this infrastructure in great detail, to even deploy simple pieces of functionality. This leads to engineers feeling overwhelmed and overloaded by complexity, making software delivery slower and more prone to errors. In this talk, we will explore how building internal developer platforms can help to reduce the complexity of an engineer's daily work and what patterns can be applied to create truly valuable platforms.

As a software engineer, working on various projects for different customers, configuring your working environments to fit the target tech stacks can be a time-consuming and frustrating task. Heterogeneous technology landscapes hard-to-manage infrastructure, and a variety of tools can make the process even more complex. In this talk, I will introduce an alternative approach to streamline the setup process using container-based development environments. By leveraging this trend, developers can reduce onboarding time to just a few seconds with just one additional file in their repository. I will dive into the magic behind development-environments-as-code and provide step-by-step instructions on how to set them up. Additionally, I will discuss potential limitations and explain why container-based development environments can be a viable option not only for IT consultants but anyone in open source space. Join me to learn how to reduce your time-to-hack and streamline your development workflow.

Monolithic legacy systems typically operate on top of monolithic data stores. These datastores exhibit characteristics like their business-logic counterparts: tight coupling and unclear ­­­ownership. When applying *Strangler Fig* to modernize a monolithic legacy, the underlying data store can become a major obstacle. To truly decouple a *Strangler application* from the legacy system, the required data must move as well. In this talk, we highlight the underlying concepts of *data ownership*, *data replication,* and *consistency* and we discuss what to consider when moving data *reader-first* or *writer-first* as well as *uni-directional* or *bi-directional*. By drawing on our experiences from transformation projects we also touch on the organizational implications of data migrations. Taking these dimensions into account turn data migrations from challenges to significant boosts for transformation initiatives.

Backstage, created by Spotify, is an innovative developer portal that brings all the relevant information about software components to one place. It has a powerful templating engine to get you started on creating own components. In this talk, we’ll explore the capabilities of Backstage and learn how it works with existing software supply chains. We’ll also discuss the concept of “golden paths” and how Backstage supports them.

**Design Meets Development: Unlocking the Power of Collaboration between UX Designers and Software Engineers** In this talk, we will explore the challenges and opportunities that arise when working with both UX designers and software engineers. The talk will cover strategies for effective collaboration and will provide real-life examples to demonstrate the benefits of collaboration between UX designers and software engineers and the impact on the final product. It will also provide insights on how to overcome common problems, such as misalignment of design and development. This talk aims at anyone interested in understanding how to effectively collaborate between these two roles and create great products that meet user needs and are technically feasible.

Reactive programming encourages us to structure our applications in asynchronous data streams, thus in an entirely non-blocking environment, enabling us to achieve higher concurrency and efficient resource usage. This talk is aimed at giving you a comprehensive overview of the low-level approaches towards creating such a non-blocking environment.

By releasing Angular 14 earlier this year, two long-awaited features have been introduced to the JavaScript framework - Typed Forms and Standalone Components. This talk will examine how those features can help you improve type safety and code readability. Additionally, you will receive an overview of NgRx - a powerful state management library - and how it can be elegantly integrated with your components while reducing coupling and clearly defining responsibilities throughout your application.

Today’s architectural challenges, especially in IoT scenarios, are often tackled using distributed systems with microservices as significant building blocks. While microservices offer great benefits, they tend to increase the overall complexity of a system. In this talk, we will show how actor frameworks can significantly mitigate those problems, using a long-forgotten paradigm from the early days of computer science.

Are you estimating your software projects? Some say don’t. But why? Let’s revisit the no-estimates movement together and figure out where it does make sense to estimate and when it’s just a waste of time. On our way, we’ll dig deep into real-world examples of organizational structures and their estimates, as well as lean and agile software development.