Summary - Day Two of Philly ETE 2016

Day Two of the 2016 Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference kicked off with the keynote address by Raffi Krikorian entitled, "How Your Organization is Killing Your Software."

Raffi discussed certain aspects of software development such as speed of development and major rewrites of code by recalling his experiences while working at Twitter.

His five stages of code rewrites are:

• Elation
• Buckle Down
• Oh SHIT!
• Exhaustion
• Relief

One of his main take-home messages was the importance of establishing your team.  He stated, "Setting up your team says more about your architecture than the architecture itself."

This was indeed a very engaging keynote address.

The sessions I attended are summarized as follows:

Session One:
"An Introduction to Web Components and Polymer"
Jeff Posnick

Jeff introduced Web Components and its four specifications:

• Template
• Shadow DOM
• Custom Elements
• HTML Import

He then introduced Google Polymer and stressed that it is not a framework.  Jeff demonstrated how to build a small custom tag and made improvements along the way.  He wrapped up with an introduction to all of the categories of Elements that comprise Google Polymer and how to get started with the Polymer Starter Kit.

Session Two:
"Rust in Production"
Steve Klabnik

Steve discussed four attributes (with source code examples) of Rust that were taken from its definition:

• Systems
• Safety
• Speed
• Concurrency

He then discussed case studies of four companies that have implemented Rust in their product(s):

• MaidSafe
• Dropbox
• Skylight
• Firefox

Lunch:
Lunch was sponsored by IntegriChain and featured chicken and steak along with salad!

Session Three:
"Adventures in Elm: Events, Reproducibility, and Kindness"
Jessica Kerr

Jessica demonstrated the Elm functional programming language by building a "Hello, World" web application and improving it along the way by discussing some of the various packages and Elm's Development Model

She provided a list of "dos" and "don'ts" for using the language along with a summary of how well (and not-so-well) Elm has implemented features such as the compiler, package manager, build tools and test tools.

Session Four:
"Taming the Wild, Wild West of Next-Gen Front-End Apps"
Ari Lerner

Just as with Jessica's presentation in the previous session, Ari started out by stating, "Let's build an app!"

Before getting into the heart of the presentation, front-end apps, it was necessary to quickly discuss the back-end and services and to get them started for building the app.  He chose Feathers as the back end and talked about microservices.

Ari focused on the following front-end development tools:

• Angular 2
• React
• Redux
• webpack

He provided plenty of code examples for each of these.

Ari finished with discussing deployment.  He used Docker as an example.

Conclusion:
Well, that's a wrap-up of Day Two.  As always, it was a wonderful learning experience as this "old dog" got to learn a lot of new tricks!

I look forward to next year's conference.  Stay tuned for information when ETE 2017 will be scheduled!