ITkonekt 2019 Overview

When three months ago my friend sent me a link to the official site of IT Konekt Conference and said ‘Uncle Bob is coming’, I felt like a child who was going to meet his superhero in person. I was overwhelmed and thrilled to meet the man whose every lecture I have watched on YouTube. A man who is a pioneer and the strongest advocate of professional practices and principles in software development. I knew that I will attend the conference, and, as usual, Vega IT recognised the importance of this event and organised a two-day trip to the capital for my colleagues and me.

Nemanja, Nenad, Ognjen, Uncle Bob, Milan and Nikola at ITkonekt conference

I went to IT Konekt Conference for the first time. The list of speakers was impressive. A two-day conference focused on two topics - back-end and front-end software engineering.

During the first day, we had a chance to listen to the lectures from the field of back-end development, while the second day was devoted to the lectures from the field of front-end development.

The first lecture on the first day was one of the best lectures at the conference. A performance guru from Oracle shared his Top 10 performance tips on working with a relational database. That was a real master class. He gave an interesting comment that an enabled auto-commit in Java JDBC API was actually a bug. That is why you should always do connection.setAutoCommit(false); and think about your DB transactions.

The lectures followed one after another. Alex Casalboni from Amazon showed very interesting diagrams, demonstrating AWS architectural design patterns as if he was talking about Lego bricks for developers. I believe that AWS developer is a new position in our industry. AWS is a huge set of services and a separate world, and the people involved in it are well aware of this.   

It was interesting to listen about the experience of master project manager from GoDaddy and how they learned from their own mistakes as their business, that is user base, was growing. They learned about how, to be honest, and tell their users when they mess something up and make up for it. That kind of attitude made them more powerful than ever and helped them become the biggest register of internet addresses in the world.

And then, after a lunch break, the lecture that Belgrade had been waiting for started. After a short and impressive introduction made by the organiser of the event, Robert C. Martin got on the stage. Uncle Bob started his lecture with a story about space and the life on Earth which he so vividly explained with the assistance of two organisers (Milica & Milica) that he invited to join him on the stage.

Bob was presenting compelling arguments regarding Clean Architecture for about an hour, as well as about everything I listened to from 100 recordings of his lectures. Except this time he was demonstrating it in front of us. I felt the same way as I felt when I was on the concert of Rolling Stones, except for the fact that the form of the performance was (a little bit) different.

Robert C. Martin at ITkonekt

Bob’s slides about Entity-Boundary-Interactor architecture, and about how good architecture postpones decision-making, that is, how it is measured by the number of “decisions not made”, because its database, web framework, and the choice of some third-party services “secondary items”, made clear to everyone what software engineering is based on.  

After Bob, we were all thrilled by Josh Long from Pivotal who works in Spring team. His fantastic technical skills which he was demonstrating through live coding in Reactive Spring for an hour, was outstanding.

On a second day, we realised one thing: the speakers are in love with Vue.js, and they think that FE library is the best thing that happened to front-end. I hear the advocates of React JS-a and Angular-a 2+ saying “This is Déjà vu” from a few years ago.

Of course, we think that React.js and Angular are also framework masterpieces (some would say ReactJS is a library!) for FE, and as developers, we enjoy using all three technologies for the development of SPA web applications.  

During the conference, we used the breaks to get some hands-on-experience in different physical activities such as rowing with VR mask on a Concept 2 rower, measuring the speed of reflex by touching illuminating push buttons, playing table football and others. Also, it was exciting to talk with the humanoid robot. :)

We took the opportunity to meet Uncle Bob during the first day of the conference so that he would give his autograph on some of our books and share some useful advice like: “Which parts should you test? Well, only the parts that you want to make workable.”

He left a powerful impression on us and gave us the motivation to grow into professionals and leaders who are proud of the things they create.