GOTO Amsterdam 2022

From June 12 to 16, the “goto;” technology event was held in Amsterdam, the first to be held after COVID. In addition, this year they have provided virtual access to the talks with a large investment in audiovisual production and a real-time streaming broadcast. Undoubtedly an opportunity to expand the event beyond the Netherlands and be accessible globally. My most sincere congratulations for this initiative.

The event brings together experts and companies that have shared their vision on technological immersion in development processes, commenting on what problems they have encountered and what technologies or techniques they have chosen to reduce friction or eliminate them. The program covers industry conferences, essential techniques and technologies to address Web3 or how to approach a deployment using Serverless architecture.

The event also featured a wide range of high-level speakers, some of international renown, others from the private sector. The organization allotted each speaker 40-45 minutes to present his or her talk, most of them in parallel sessions in order to distribute the demand for knowledge and optimize time.

As my interests are focused on the development and deployment of scalable platforms, I organized the following agenda to be able to enjoy such content:

Monday, June 13th:

• Rediscovering Humanity in Tech, by Eric Johnson

A talk masterfully conducted by Eric Johnson who not only has demonstrated his level of experience in events of this type, but with his naturalness and approachability, breaks down biases and emphasizes a fact that should be our maxim as software engineers: technology should be used by and for the benefit of mankind.

• Economy of Speed, by Dave Farley

Here Dave Farley gives us a talk on how highly productive development teams should be where automation and the use of pipelines should be the way for every team to become more productive, effective and efficient.

• The Pipeline Driven Organization, by Roy Osherove

I did not know Roy Osherove and it has been a real discovery. Not only for shedding light on how to organize teams and focus on what he calls Pipeline Driven Organization, but also for having made a pleasant, complete and didactic talk.

• The Zen of Programming, by Sander Hoogendoorn

In this talk Sander Hoogendoorn tells us about his experience as a software engineer with a vast professional career developing and traveling. What he has learned in this time and what should prevail beyond the de facto paradigms and standards in the development industry.

• How Serverless Technologies Accelerate Our Digital Transformation, by Erik Ammerlaan

Here Erik Ammerlaan tells us about his experience as CTO of Nationale Nederlanden carrying out the migration of development teams to Serverless, what changes and efforts had to be made for the teams to adapt not only a new technology but also that the different teams could rotate between projects with this technology being the new standard.

• Testing in Production, by Talia Nassi

In this talk Talia Nassi exposes us the need to do testing in production environments and how we can approach this practice from the development team itself. A presentation focused on the use of Feature Flags as well as adopting good practices on testing. Although it was not a purely practical talk, it was appreciated that he presented a use case and explained each deployment phase in detail.

Tuesday, June 14th

• #FAIL, by Kevlin Henney

Here Kevlin Henney deploys his experience and experience in giving talks to remind us of the importance of testing in our industry, using everyday and current examples. A didactic lesson on how to deal with failures and how to create resilient projects by learning from those mistakes.

• A Developer’s Introduction to Developing in Web3, by Roy Osherove

In this talk Roy Osherove gives us an introduction to Web3, what knowledge and qualities should have those who are interested in this new reality of smart-contracts. Where it would be interesting or ideal to apply it, with which frameworks or programming languages he considers that they are easier to implement? Again, he did not disappoint.

• Flirting with the Public Cloud: Challenges of Regulated, Large Enterprises in Moving to the Public Cloud, by Madhu Sivasubramanian

Here Madhu Sivasubramanian exposes aspects that go beyond the merely technical to take or discard the adoption of a Cloud infrastructure. Aspects ranging from legal regulations to privacy policies applied by certain countries. And he reminds us that, although the Cloud is becoming easier to adopt, not all projects must-can adopt this type of infrastructure, and that this decision should not fall solely on the technical team.

• The Psychology of UX, by Fabio Pereira

This talk by Fabio Pereira has been totally unexpected and with a radical change to what we had been seeing the attendees at the event. On this occasion Fabio told us how companies devote huge amounts of resources to exploit our biases and condition us in our day-to-day decision making, inside and outside the digital world but using technology as a link between the two worlds. A talk that I didn’t enjoy very much, all said and done.

• Thinking Serverless: From User Request to Serverless Solution, by James Beswick

Here James Beswick tells us how AWS provides anyone with a set of technologies specifically designed to address a Serverless infrastructure. How to leverage them and how to combine them to meet virtually every need.

• Explainable AI Explained for Developers, by Joop Snijder y Willem Meints

In this talk Willem and Joop show us the potential of AI with real use cases, and how this technology has evolved to the point that it requires virtually no programming, using standard infrastructures and models. An introductory and well focused talk.

Wednesday, June 15th

• Is Software Engineering Still an Oxymoron? (live streamed), by Alan Kay

Here Alan Kay makes a presentation of his very long career in the development industry and makes a reflection on what is a software engineer and if the products we make today, are comparable in terms of quality and durability, with the products or services developed by engineers in other sectors. A deep and dense reflection in which surely sooner or later we all come to have.

• Microservices from the Trenches. Concepts, Design, Architecture, Code, Testing, by Sander Hoogendoorn

As a continuation of his previous talk, here Sander Hoogendoorn makes us rethink the adoption of microservices and questions the need to adopt such architecture in most projects and how we keep trying to solve scalability problems at too early stages, which causes, in most cases, an increase in technical complexity and the project itself -and the development team- to suffer as a result.

• Structure and Interpretation of Test Cases, by Kevlin Henney

In this talk Kevlin continues his previous talk and advises us to pay attention to how we approach testing in our developments, from concepts as basic as naming conventions to the choice of test data. And such attention should be considered in detail and relevance, as important as the development itself. In fact, development without testing should not be considered complete. Both aspects should be considered as a single indivisible entity.

• From Monolith to State-of-the-Art Banking, by Flavio Deroo

Here Flavio Deroo presents the challenge of creating a banking entity from scratch. Apart from the regulations, permits and legal and financial certifications, there is the challenge of addressing a scalable service by nature, global and uninterrupted as an eBank explaining how their way has come to Event Sourcing and that this paradigm fits perfectly with this type of projects and that, although each part of the business model requires particular needs, they have been able to migrate from a legacy platform to one based on microservices, Event Sourcing and CQRS. Another introductory talk that was not enough.

The goto; has been a great experience, with a diversity of topics and on-demand Masterclass sessions. Well organized and, although there have been technical aspects to improve, the most remarkable thing has been its global approach and offering streaming in real time, all thanks to the great effort of the promoters and collaborators. La goto; it is also an opportunity to learn and evolve and, although my attendance was totally online, they have provided ways for us to interact with the speakers and even other attendees of the event.

Many thanks to Apiumhub and VYou for actively supporting this type of event and for inviting me to attend.