Last Friday I was able to attend to a day full of inspiring impressions. We started at 8:30 AM at ergon in Zürich with some coffee. Like at the big SoCraTes conference, there was no schedule and the attendees built up a schedule with multiple tracks and each talk with around 45 minutes.

Docker

This session was more an introduction for the people who never worked with docker and the challenges that this technology starts. However, there was a really nice discussion how an application has to be built to run in a docker environment and stay conform to the ideas of docker. The 12 factor app show twelve points that should be considered if you plan to build your application in a docker environment.

One more takeaway is the fact that you can build your images by using the docker hub images, but only for the base images. Everything else should be under your control in your private docker image repository. And these baseimages have to be rebuilt and patched on e regular bases. Furthermore the apps have to be rebuilt often to include the latest security updates from the latest baseimages. This requires a highly automated system for building and deployment of docker images. The time went out, so that kubernetes was not discussed anymore. Hopefully I get a chance to discuss this topic next time.

React / Redux

I could attend a nice talk about react and the redux framework. This is quite an interesting approach of building an application. I’m new to this topic so I have to do a lot of research. Besides, it looks ok and I understand the points of implementing it the way it is, but I think there is to much plumbing code to write by hand. This is ok for small examples, but for larger apps, this looks a little bit like a big bloat of code. This is just my first impression and I will take a look at it as soon as time allows it. Probably I will change my opinion.

Testing 20Mio Lines of Code

In this session we discussed how to test 20 Mio lines of code built up over many years. This showed me that often we should ask why do we test to get the way how to test and what to test in a big system.

The discussion drifted a bit towards lean manufacturing where software has to be configured to fit the given hardware.

In addition we discussed the 5 Whys to ask if something goes wrong. This can be used to find the root cause of an issue or situation. This is a nice input to make the way to the real issue and not fixing symptoms instead of the problem.

One nice input focused on the effort put into testing a given solution. Building up a QA pool to support different projects at different stages could improve the quality of the solution and keep the costs at a lower level. I personally like this approach to get the QA and QC started even without a large QA team.

Personal conclusion

I had a chance to learn a lot during the day. But at the same time I had the chance to bring in my experience at any time and it was welcome even from a SoCraTes “newbe” like me. All were there to learn and getting better in their current work. It was a great group of people and I will attend another SoCraTes day for sure. If possible I’ll attend next year at SoCraTes CH :-) Thanks to the SoCraTes team for organizing this day, thanks to all of the sponsors and finally a big thank to isolutions for letting me attend.