Codemotion Berlin 2019 : Quick takeaways

Just departing to Berlin for @CodemoBerlin with @MaximeSraiki 🚀 @padok_m33 @bam_lab pic.twitter.com/VaZGKNmDKj

— Aurore Malherbes (@AuroreMalherbes) November 10, 2019

The subjects were diverse, from the development of go application to a panel on public speaking. The Codemotion conference area was really nice, you could attend the talks in a cinema lounger! Besides, there was space to chat between the talks.

Here are 6 talks and speakers I particularly appreciated at Codemotion 2019:

3 tech talks at Codemotion Berlin

• Javier Provecho Platform engineer at Telefonica did a hands-on calledKubernetes Tower Defense. He showed us the flaws of the main cloud providers’ Kubernetes managed services, mainly with the misusage of metadata. Very practical, a little scary, but really instructive

• Matt Schallert from Chonosphere presented M3 tool, a monitoring tool developed by Uber based on Prometheus to handle monitoring at scale. The tool seems really powerful, but I think it could be overkilled to use if you don’t have a business like Uber, with a large amount of data and a great need for real-time.

• Tugdual Grall from Redis gave a talk called "Fast Cars, Big Data - How streaming can help formula 1". He explained with a live demo how to use Redis services to handle streams to make decisions in real-time, when you are inside the paddock for instance, or to replay the game after the race.

3 "soft" talks at Codemotion Berlin

• Katrina Owen, engineer at Github, shared her investigation about the culture of the instinct. to become great engineers. She mentioned that even if she is doing great at refactoring she’s often struggling to explain why she knew she had to refactor the piece of code she chooses. It was an inspirational keynote, so there weren’t really any practical tips but I’ve enjoyed being introduced to this way of thinking.

• Euan Finlay, SRE at the Financial Times, shared his experience of a distributed and effective team, from London to Manila. He made quite a performance as he started his talk without his slides cause of a technical issue! The 3 main points I’m remembering from his talk are:

  • “If someone is remote in a meeting, make everyone remote, even if it means to be in several rooms inside the same building, the remote one will be listened to much more”

  • “Create the #random channel on slack to enable people to talk about something else than work, recreate the coffee machine area to help people connect”

  • “Decisions are hard to be taken all together, make decisions without the whole team, but make them small iterative”

• Piergiorgio Niero, Head of engineering at SuperAwesome, took part in a panel about the role of engineer managers and gave a talk about tripling the size of a tech team. You can find his resources about engineering management on this Github page and the key takeaways from his Codemotion talk. Two things I will not forget are that your company culture will change, it’s inevitable, embrace and assist this change. And, be focus on : 

These two days at Codemotion in Berlin were definitely great and I will try to come back next year!

Soon I will publish an article about the talk we gave with Maxime Sraïki about our 6 weeks journey to migrate to the Cloud and Kubernetes. Stay tuned!