Crafted Design with Sandro Mancuso

Enjoy the following series of interviews with the speakers, top-notch software crafters from across Europe, joining  I T.A.K.E Unconference, Bucharest, 11-12 May. Discover the lessons learned and what drives them to challenge the known path in their field.

Alin Pandichi, Software Developer at MozaicLabs and facilitator of the monthly Coding Dojo meeting that is part of the largerBucharest Agile Sofware Meetup Group, will share during his talk at I T.A.K.E Unconference more about Covariance and contravariance.

#1. Please share with us 5 things you did that helped you grow & become the professional you are today

I’ll answer this with a little bit of story telling about how I became a software developer. The first two things that helped me were attending the computer science oriented high school and college. There, I learned the basics of computers and programming languages. I also noticed how effortlessly I was solving CS related problems, so maybe I was onto something.

Number three: I got my first job straight out of college, developing a Swing rich client application saving data with JPA. This put me face to face with real world problems. I was faced with the fact that continuous learning is a must in this industry.

Therefore, number four on the list is learning. For the first few couple of years, I kept devouring every Java-related article I could find on DZone. With each one, I found out something new: a useful tool, a Linux terminal command, a development methodology, etc.

Last, but not least, is getting involved with local software development communities. I started attending meetups such as The Bucharest Agile Software Meetup Group and the Bucharest Java User Group. Gradually, I became an active member of both, giving a helping hand in organizing their events. On top of that, I also got involved in the wider community of Global Day of Coderetreat. My talk at I TAKE 2017 is one of the occasional opportunities I get to share what I know.

#2. What challenges will the participants find solutions to during your session at I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017?

They will find it easier to understand the concepts of covariance and contravariance, and how they are applied in the world of programming. In my experience, it was very easy to forget what these two words meant. Not anymore.

#3. Recommend for the participants 3 sources you find inspiration from and would help them better understand you

I dream big, so my biggest source of inspiration is science fiction. My first serious SF encounter was with Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Out of the contemporary authors, I enjoy Neil Gaiman’s work very much.

Whenever I get a chance, I tune into Nick Francis’ podcast called Quiet Music. It is a blend of low beat music of various genres: electronic, jazz, instrumental, folk, light rock, and so on.

Cinema is one of my other hobbies. I am very much interested in following every film festival happening in Bucharest. Also, the Romanian cinema of the past two decades has offered many gems so far, and it continues to do so.

Want to join Alin and ~300 software crafters from around Europe?

Register now for I T.A.K.E Unconference 2017!

The first day of I T.A.K.E Unconference 2016 was a great success: 18 speakers from 8 different countries shared insights and latest trends on 5 different stages.

Live coding sessions, the talks & workshops received an excellent feedback. Also, everyone got involved during the Open Space, Lightning Talks, Product Development Track & Kata Lounge. In the evening, the event continued informally at Dinner & Coding with a stranger.

You can watch the videos from the event here. Find below the slides from day one. Slides from day 2 are here.

Developer’s Life

Franziska Sauwerwin – Raising the Bar 

Houssam Fakih & Borris Gonnot – Metrics for Good Developers

Claudia Rosu – Developer experience to Testing

Alastair Smith – Express Yourself!

Monica Obogeanu – How We Use BDD to Keep our Developers Smiling

Software Design

Ionut G. Stan – Let’s write a Parser!

Microservices

Tim Perry – Microservice Pipeline Architecture

Yegor Bugayenko – Microservices as Chat Bots

Cristiana Voicu & Cristian Andrei – Openstack in the Enterprise and you get your money from it

Condoiu Iuliana – Microservices-what tools do we use

Continous Deployment

Philipp Krenn – Automate all things AWS with Ansible

DevOps 

Phillipp Krenn – Painfree object-document mapping with Elasticresearch 

Autotesting & Design

Nicolas Frankel – Mutation Testing to the rescue of your tests

Alastair Smith – Test-Driving Your Database

Andreas Leidig & Robin Danzinger – Who is testing the mocks

A few thoughts from the participants

• First of all, I want to congratulate you for the organisation (…)  You can be proud of your work. I spent an amazing time and the return on the invested time is 5/5
• Open talks were excellent for networking and ideas exchange
• The Product Development track was a useful and pleasant experience

James Lewis, keynote at I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015, has a valuable contribution on Microservices Architecture.

Sneak peak:

“In short, the microservice architectural style [1] is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.”

If interested in this topic, read the full contribution, jointly created with Martin Fowler.

Join I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015 to hear more in his talk: Microservices – Systems That Are #neverdone.