Backend World

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  Java microservices on Istio

  By Deepu K Sasidharan

  Microservices are not everyone's cup of tea, and they shouldn't be. Not every problem can or should be solved by microservices. Somtimes building a simple monolith is a far better option. Microservices are solutions for use cases where scale and scalability are important.

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  Zooming in on an End-to-End Video Solution: Using Zoom's Video SDK

  By Samantha Greatorex

  The workshop will enable developers to work together in teams and set up the Zoom Video SDK within a React Website. The Video SDK provides video, audio, screen sharing, chat, data streams, and more, as a service. Developers can learn how to build with some of these features to create an immersive video experience between two participants.

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  Concurrency Models Demystified

  By Harish Kandala

  Concurrency Models Demystified" explores the diverse range of concurrency models utilised in programming languages. Delving into traditional threads, coroutines, the actor model, and async/await, this talk provides real-world examples and insightful comparisons to highlight the unique strengths and trade-offs of each model. By gaining a better understanding of these models, developers will be equipped to make informed decisions when tackling concurrent programming challenges.

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  Using MySQL Document Store with Node.js

  By Scott Stroz

  MySQL Document Store offers developers the best features of NoSQL and traditional SQL-based databases. In this session, we will discuss how we can use Node.js to access a MySQL Document Store, create/remove collections, create/update/remove documents, retrieve, filter, & sort document lists, and leverage raw SQL to retrieve aggregate data for reporting purposes.

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  Supercharge your Backend for Frontend with Kotlin

  By Alexey Soshin

  In this presentation, we will explore the emergence of new architectural patterns like API Gateway and Backend For Frontend in the era of microservices. We will delve into the specific challenges these patterns address, which were not prevalent in monolithic architectures. Additionally, we will examine the convenient solutions offered by cloud providers like AWS and explore how leveraging the Kotlin programming language can enhance the advantages of these patterns.

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  Introduction and pitfalls of Java's new concurrency mode

  By David Vlijmincx

  Java 21 releases one of the most anticipated features, virtual threads, and previews structured concurrency. It rethinks the way multithreading works in Java. It was born out of the idea that reactive Java is too complicated and blocking threads has to be cheap. Resulting in the new virtual threads that we run thousands of! The aim of virtual threads and structured concurrency is to have high-throughput lightweight threads and new programming models on the Java platform. In this talk, I will demonstrate virtual threads and how to create and manage them using structured concurrency. Furthermore, I'll provide some practical advice to avoid pitfalls when you start using virtual threads in your application.

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  Navigating a Full Stack Knowledge Architecture from Database to LLM

  By Andreas Kollegger

  Together, let's explore the convergence of data, language, and wisdom within a Full Stack Knowledge Architecture. We'll model our way up the stack as data becomes information, creates knowledge, and guides us toward wisdom (aka business insight). Then we'll combine the expressive power of an LLM with the deterministic precision of a query language to reach back down the stack. Along the way we'll identify new access patterns for querying and navigating data: outside-in, inside-out, pattern matching and analogies.

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  Harry Potter and the Elastic Python Clients

  By Iulia Feroli

  We will create a search application by indexing the Harry Potter books, and enrich it with vector search, embeddings and NLP techniques. Does the search engine browse the books better than the ultimate fan? We can then set up observability to monitor the activity and health of our application, and see if users manage to break the search engine. All of this using the python clients for Elastic. This demo will go through data cleaning and ingestion into Elasticsearch and show how to do type mapping and index your documents. Then we will explore different types of search queries and how to leverage the Python Client to create requests. We will use NLP models and embeddings to create a vector search application on our dataset, and show how to create free-text searches. Finally, we can set up monitoring for the search application and see the performance of our Python code. This gives a great overview of all the ways you can use Python together with the Elastic stack.

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  Elixir: Happy Developers and Scaleable Backends

  By Sanne Kalkman

  According to the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Elixir is the second most loved programming language, and its web framework Phoenix takes the number one spot in most loved frameworks. Not only is Elixir a joy to work with, it is also an excellent choice for highly scaleable and fault-tolerant backend systems and is an important part of successful tech companies such as Discord and Podium This talk will highlight the main ways in which Elixir differs from other commonly used backend languages like JavaScript or Ruby. Then, it will give developers from other languages an introduction into OTP, the underlying framework that makes it almost trivial to build concurrent and highly fault-tolerant systems in Elixir (and Erlang). Lastly, I'll highlight some of the specific ways in which Elixir and Phoenix have allowed CodeSandbox to grow and move quickly with a very small team of backend developers. The overall aim of this talk is to introduce otherwise experienced developers to a language and ecosystem they are not yet familiar with, and hopefully inspire them to give Elixr and Phoenix a try for their next project.

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  Migrating to Success: Unleashing the Power of Django Migrations

  By Denny Biasiolli

  Django migrations are an essential aspect of building robust and scalable web applications. They empower developers to manage changes to the database schema over time, ensuring data integrity and seamless updates. In this talk, we will delve into the world of Django migrations, exploring their purpose, mechanics, and best practices. We will start by understanding the fundamentals of migrations and their role in maintaining database consistency. Next, we will dive into the practical aspects of Django migrations, exploring the migration files themselves and the various commands available. We'll cover topics such as creating, applying migrations and rolling back changes. We'll also discuss the powerful features provided by Django's migration framework, including data migrations and customizing migrations for specific use cases. By the end of this talk, attendees will have a deep understanding of Django migrations and be equipped with practical knowledge and tips to effectively manage database schema changes in their Django projects.

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  Clean Code, is it really worth it ?

  By Jonathan Vila

  As developers, we participate every day in our software life cycle adding new logic, adapting it, and integrating with services or platforms. But, do we put the same effort into making software robust, maintainable, consistent, secure, clear, and tested? In this session, I will show the need for good practices in Clean Code along with the issues of not using it, showing concepts like Clean As You Code (CAYC) using free and open-source tools. Clean Code goes beyond the produced software and its programming language. Is part of a developer's role growth no matter the language and the company.

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  Fusion development: How low-code and full-code play together

  By Albert-Jan Schot

  Developers still rule the world! But with Low-code platforms emerging as a popular tool for accelerating development cycles it makes sense to have a look at what is possible nowadays. In this session, we explore how Fusion development - the combination of low-code and full code development - can help teams balance speed and flexibility to deliver high-quality applications at scale as well as enable the business to adapt to the ever changing requirements of customers.

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  Modern C#: A Dive into the Community's Most Loved New Features

  By Louëlla Creemers

  Are you tired of using outdated features and techniques in your code? Do you want to keep up with the latest C# development? Join this talk to discover new features in the C# community, that you can include in your future projects. In this talk, we will dive into Records, Pattern Matching, DateOnly, TimeOnly, and Switch Expressions.. We will discuss their benefits, and how they can help you improve your code in ways you never thought possible. By the end of this talk, you will have a clear understanding of why these new features are essential for C# development and how to incorporate them into your own projects. You will leave this talk ready to take your coding skills to the next level and keep up with the latest C# features.

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  A Brief History of Python Web Frameworks

  By Quazi Nafiul Islam

  How did we get all the way to FastAPI? In this talk, we start from the humble CGI script and see how Python web development has changed over the decades.

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  The case for Rust on the backend

  By Luca Palmieri

  Rust truly embodies the idea of a general purpose programming language. It spans the entire stack, from Linux drivers to web development. It isn't the perfect language for most domains, but it's a damn good language for most domains. This flexibility is what makes Rust so compelling: you need to invest time and effort to master it, but you're rewarded with a tool that can support you successfully in most of your endeavours. The return on investment is huge. Over the next decade, I expect Rust to become ubiquitous. Every developer will be working with it, either directly (by writing Rust code) or indirectly (by using libraries in other programming languages that wrap a Rust core). API development is the next ""big"" frontier for Rust: this talk will walk you through why that is the case and what you can expect to see in the coming years in this space.

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  Why are Python and Ruby slow?

  By Grigory Petrov

  Twenty years ago our world was a simple place. We had Python, Ruby, PHP which were ""scripting"" or ""interpreted"" languages. Opposite to them, there were C++ and Java as ""compiled"" and ""fast"" ones, hundred times faster. Now, in 2023, C++ solves the ""n-body problem"" only marginally faster than JavaScript. But Python and Ruby are still a hundred times slower. This is not fair and there are lots of talks on how to make things faster using PyPy, Numba, CPython, etc. But my talk focuses on the ""why"" question. It's about compilers, bytecode, ceval.c, virtual machines, native extensions and all the reasons why we still hear ""Python is slow"" or ""Ruby is slow"" even if it's not true or doesn't matter.

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  A design pattern goes to the supermarket

  By Kaya Weers

  Everybody knows the term design patterns. Some know the patterns and correct implementation by heart. Others vaguely recognize the pattern names but don’t recall the details. This talk is intended for the latter group. I’ll dive into a couple of design patterns using real-life examples. What would a design pattern look like in day-to-day life? We’ll follow Bobby and Billie and discover how a design pattern would behave in a non-digital environment: a supermarket! With the help of drawings and code snippets, this talk will give you a solid understanding of design patterns, so you won't have to look them up ever again!

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