Monday Links: NDC Conference

10 Jul 2023 #mondaylinks

This is another episode where I share the talks from NDC Conference I watched and liked. This time is about JavaScript, History, and Design.

How JavaScript Happened: A Short History of Programming Languages - Mark Rendle

This is a journey from FORTRAN to ALGOL to LISP to JavaScript. It explains why we still use if for conditional, i for loops, and * for multiplication. Spoiler alert: It’s because of FORTRAN.

Apache Kafka in 1 hour for C# Developers - Guilherme Ferreira

Clusters, Topics, Partitions, producers/consumers? This is a good first-time introduction to Kafka. The presenter uses kafkaflow and confluent-kafka-dotnet for the demo application.

Keynote: Why web tech is like this - Steve Sanderson

I found this one on r/programming (before the Reddit blackout) Informative! It feels like time traveling through operating systems and tools to create a Web page.

Pilot Critical Decision Making skills - Clifford Agius

The lesson from this one is to come up with a list of things that could go wrong and prepare and train for that. Follow TDODAR approach: Time, Diagnosis, Options, Decision, Assign, and Review.

Intentional Code - Minimalism in a World of Dogmatic Design

I like the idea that “software really is literature.” Not in the sense of literate programming but in the sense of a narrative to express idea where every line of code matters. I like the example of how a piece of code improves by only removing a few blank lines.

Another idea I liked is: “You don’t want everything to look the same.” We don’t want all applications to use Domain-Driven Design with Event Sourcing and microservices. Often architectural patterns only add to cognitive load and extra complexity.

The presenter suggests: “sitting and looking at it (at a piece of code) and working out how it makes you feel. And then when you feel something, try to understand why it feels that way.”

Voilà! Another Monday Links. What tech conferences do you follow? Do you also follow NDC Conference? What are your favorite presentations? Until next Monday Links.

In the meantime, don’t miss the previous Monday Links on Personal Moats, Unfair Advantage, and Quitting.

Happy coding!