We just had our first Dev Talks of 2022! 🎉 It felt so nice to be back in person with our audience and learning from our talented Vincit developers on two very important topics. We welcomed guests from Vincit and the local Irvine tech community for an in-person and virtual event on Zoom. In case you missed it, here’s a rundown of the night’s event and a chance to watch it for yourself whenever you please!
The night started off with drinks, snacks and networking. Then, everyone settled down in the Irvine Spectrum Center WeWork office for the main event. Ville Houttu, Vincit USA’s CEO, and Valerie Helmholz, Vincit USA’s People Operations Coordinator, both gave the audience a warm welcome and introduced Kirsten Schmedes, the Community Lead at WeWork. After the introductions, it was time for the main event! Ville then announced the first speaker of the night, Jari Laari, a software developer at Vincit USA.
In his talk, Jari spoke at length about microservices and spaghetti. While this analogy may seem non-correlated at first, Jari framed it in terms of comparing monolithic vs. microservice architecture as spaghetti to donuts, respectively. Jari stated that monolithic architecture is like a plate of spaghetti, where every component is tightly coupled and all changes must be pushed at once. This option makes continuous deployment difficult. On the other hand, with microservices, developers maintain and improve new services independently, which Jari equated to individual donuts. Each donut is a different component and they influence one another in order to complete a single task. For instance, in Instagram, one donut could represent a story, another for a post, another for a user, another for media, etc. for the simple task of deleting a user from the database. This then creates hundreds of needed donuts or microservices in order for one change to be made in a large project. He noted that while microservices are often used for scaling a business, which is why many clients see them as the optimal architecture choice, they are also an investment and work best if there are a plethora of developers available to work on that one project. For smaller development teams, monolithic architecture can be a better option, as the plate of spaghetti serves its purpose as one whole unit, not individual services or donuts. Wrapping up the analogy, Jari equated monolithic architecture to a plate of spaghetti that’s all over the place, while microservices was akin to a more organized plate of spaghetti.
Next up, Ville introduced the next featured speaker, Jody Lecompte, also a software developer at Vincit USA. Jody’s topic was on hot takes about automated testing. This topic posed to the audience if there is a better way to evaluate if automated testing is the most effective method. In his speech, Jody introduced 5 hot takes about automated testing, ranging from the common saying that one doesn’t have time for manual testing to reaching 100% of test coverage shouldn’t be the goal to the absolute best way to handle bug reports is with testing. He then discussed why these hot takes should be questioned and how ultimately, being mindful of both the return on investment and various developer constraints will help developers ask what they can do to make things easier on themselves and get the final product shipped out faster.
After their respective speeches, both speakers answered questions from the in-person audience about their topics. As the night wrapped up, Ville and Valerie thanked the guests in attendance and on Zoom for their participation. Valerie also announced Vincit’s current job openings to any interested parties and the night’s event concluded.
Did you miss the event? Don’t worry, you can still watch it below for each speaker. Stay tuned for our next Dev Talks event!
