Date Published: May 16, 2022
Last week, I attended my second-ever, first in-person Stir Trek, a conference held annually in Columbus, Ohio since 2009.
I had a ton of fun and learned a lot at Stir Trek this year! And experiencing the in-person conference was really cool after last year's virtual conference.
I went to a lot of interesting sessions this year, and my notes on the sessions are below. They're mostly for my own reference later, but others might find them useful, so I've shared them here. However, my notes do not do these amazing speakers justice!
This talk was an introduction to principles of unit testing and different ways to make code more testable, and testing difficult-to-test code. The unique framing of this topic in a medieval story of knights and kings and spies was extremely effective, and I learned a lot:
In computer science, a "side effect" is "a change made by a function to the state of things outside that function's scope"
pure functions are deterministic functions with no side effects
dependency injection is like sending in a spy
In this talk, Steve Smith gave an in-depth overview of clean architecture, starting with an explanation of the principles behind it, then going into the specifics of its implementation:
Follow good coding principles
The Core Project is the domain model
Infrastructure project
Web project
Shared Kernel
monolith = having all the code in one place, with every piece interconnected with the other pieces
can use "strangler fig" pattern to migrate from monolith to microservices
This was the first of two talks I attended this year discussing the experience of women in the tech industry. This was a very engrossing presentation, so I didn't take many notes, but here are some of my key takeaways:
While Linden's talk focused more on her personal experiences, Kaur focused more on the statistics and how we can go about making things better.
3 steps to fix the problem:
the only profession coming close to the gender gap in engineering is stand-up comedian
the behavior that gets rewarded will get repeated, so you have to reward the right behavior
steps that work for women in stem - how do we fix the problem?
This talk discussed creating open source libraries and the many, many small but important components of such libraries, such as useful README files/documentation, licenses, robust .gitignore files, and of course the actual functionality of the library
I really enjoyed Stir Trek and learned a ton! It was also a really good experience for me to see just how much there is about software engineering that I had never thought about or never really understood. You don't know what you don't know.
After Stir Trek last year, I wrote:
Previously, I'd only associated Stir Trek with my dad getting to see all the Marvel movies before I did; I'm glad now to have had my own experience with it, though I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of Marvel movies. But that is, of course, more Covid's fault than Stir Trek's! Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, I'll get to attend a Stir Trek in person, Marvel movie and all.
This year, I was really excited to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on opening day, which was really cool, and it meant that I was able to watch the movie at the same time as my dad, rather than having to wait until after he saw it.
I hope I'll be able to attend Stir Trek next year, as it was a phenomenal experience, and I'd love to go again!
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