Mark Wubben spoke on Distributed consensus using Raft, Node, and fuzz testing, as a way to help servers within distributed systems agree with each other on their state. Mark discussed distributed systems, Raft, and Buoyant, a framework for implementing servers using the Raft consensus algorithm. Mark also cover how fuzz testing is used to increase confidence in the implementation, with a demonstration showing how fuzz testing helped find an issue with a demonstration application.
After the first keynote, I delivered a talk on some of the benefits Dojo 2 has received from working with ES6 and TypeScript in our development efforts over the past two years. The talk looks past the basics of leveraging the new language features, and shared examples and patterns that have emerged in our work and how we have benefited in our efforts.
We met many engineers looking to leverage the benefits of ES6 and TypeScript, and had engaging discussions in the hallway after the talk.
After lunch, there was a round of lightning talks. I really enjoyed Guy Nesher’s talk about how to improve the hiring of engineers. We follow many of his suggestions at SitePen, but it also provided some ideas for how we can be even more effective.
The afternoon was filled with workshops, ranging from Angular 2 to building interesting demos with Tessel and Espruino devices.
SitePen CTO Kitson Kelly gave a talk on the 7 habits of highly ineffective developers, a fun talk about the things engineers may do that make them less effective within an organization.
Thanks to Skills Matter for organizing this event. They’ve created an excellent venue at CodeNode that offers a great environment for tech conferences.