DEV Community: Kristian Lentino

My thoughts about Functional Scala 2022 - London

Kristian Lentino — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 18:50:42 +0000

Some months after my first big conference in Italy (Codemotion) here we are, moving into London to attend the biggest Scala conference, the Functional Scala conference.

For those who doesn't know (and in Italy there are a lot of people which doesn't know it) , Scala is a programming language which many people calls "java in the right way". It's a language which like his predecessor runs on JVM and here in Moneyfarm our services are built entirely with this language.

The conference was held in a really prestigious and cool venue called Royal Geographic Society , here there are also some art exhibitions and it's also close to the biggest park in London . It was quite a good venue, also the cathering was not very bad, especially the second day that they gave a lot of spicy food which I love.

It was a quite intensive program, there was almost no rest from a speaker to another (I would have preferred less talks and more pause between each other to let the people rest and think about what they've just seen).

Also some speakers IMHO were not very good at public speaking and could not entertain the audience, losing our attention after a short time. On the other hand there were some other speakers that were very engaging and knows very well how attract the attention and spark passion into other peoples.

After one full day of conference I was very tired and exhausted by the amount of informations, I was a little bit like this:

The fish instead was me after the conference:

Tapir + Armadillo ... an interesting duo

I had also the chance to meet one of the creators of Tapir, a library to define http endpoint which automatically allows to generate OpenApi Docs out of the box. I really like this library because it's well made and very easy to use and read/understand.

During the conference it has been presented also a new library called Armadillo, mainly focused on represent json-rpc endpoints . I liked the way the author decided to be inspired by Tapir since the json-rpc is the evolution of the classic http endpoints (and so also Armadillo in a certain way "evolves" Tapir)

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

Furthermore I had also the chance to talk a lot with a lot of colleagues from different parts of the world (United states, Lisbon, Poland,etc...) and hear their stories and their opinions about Scala and many other things. Networking is absolutely my favourite part of a conference, sharing thoughts about tech and non-tech topics is always stimulating and helps me to understand new things or reflect on things that I thought I already knew.

Thursday program

Friday program

Zio... Zio everywhere

Like you can notice almost from the photos above, every talk is directly or indirectly linked to this Scala framework , ZIO.

Zio is a Type-safe, composable asynchronous and concurrent programming for Scala created by Ziverge , and since they're also the organisers of this conference, this is probably the reason why every talk was about that. To be honest I would have liked to have more talks about different topics, for example cats and in general the typelevel-stack.

So did you like it or not?

If I have to rate it from a scale between 1 and 10 I would probably assign a 7.5, below a list of the reasons why I give this score:

The organisation was a bit lacking (I would have liked to know the agenda before , they announced it too late in my opinion)
It was too much ZIO-focused (even if it's understandable since it was organised by its founder)
Some speakers were not very good at presenting and they didn't spark any passion or interest in their topics
I would have preferred less talks and more time between one talk and another to give people time to relax and assimilate what they've just saw
In general it was a good experience and also helped me to improve my English knowledge and explore in a more deep way the Scala's ecosystem.

Were you at the conference? What do you think about this conference? Do you think that it was useful? if not, why? I'm really curious to hear a lot of different point of views!

We're blessed to work as Developers 🙏🏻🙏🏻

Kristian Lentino — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:18:33 +0000

Hi guys, I'm Kristian Lentino, 23 years old at the moment I'm writing this post and in these 2 days I was at Codemotion, the biggest Italian conference for developers where there were some really important speakers as the creator of Redis Salvatore Sanfilippo(Woooowwww the Redis's creator is Italian what an honor 😍😍) and more than 1k of super nerd devss!

Today was the last day of the conference and when I was driving back home I was reflecting about how we're lucky in our jobs, yes lucky!
We have a lot of communities, tools for free made by passionate people who want to give their contribution to the entire world, speakers who introduce to you a lot of really interesting topics and help you to familiarise with them. Maybe the developer is the only job where you can find such a community, it's amazing to see how many passionate people you can find out there, both online and in conferences. I spent a lot of hours talking to total strangers discussing how I work, what I think is important in a company and also dispensing some tips from my previous experiences to help other people to not redo my same mistakes.

It was my first big conference about the devs world and it opened my eyes on how we can help each other and how our job is "open-source".

I really think that this aspect of ours is really important, we love to each other and help or just contribute to create new things because we are really curious people and we always want new stimulations that gives us the curiosity to put ourself in the game

What do you think about the conference world? Do you think that they're useful? if not, why? I'm really curious to hear a lot of different point of views!

Like some old anime's character said , after this conference I'm all fired up !!!

Here some cool faces that were talking about GitOps, Docker, KS, Scala and many other topics

A useful tool to start in the programming world

Kristian Lentino — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 20:02:16 +0000

A few days ago on a telegram group , I've found out this interesting resource (https://roadmap.sh/).

Basically it's a website where you can view roadmaps divided by macro-sectors of programming (eg Backend, Frontend, Android etc ...). for each offers a roadmap containing topics and resources useful to undertake that path, what a great tool!

Do you know it? It seems to me an excellent starting point to refine their skills.

Trying out RabbitMQ

Kristian Lentino — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 07:18:00 +0000

Recently, on colleagues's advice, I found myself trying out this tool called RabbitMQ(https://www.rabbitmq.com/),
A "message broker" that manages and transmits messages between a client and a server that is usually used to manage "queues" of operations to be performed (an example could be the massive sending of emails).

To put it simple there is a "Publisher" that sends data to a "Consumer"

Publisher

this is an php's example of a publisher , it will send Hello world in the "hello" channel

Consumer

this is an php's example of a consumer , it will receive messages from the hello channel and then when it's called it will send the message in the $callback function

Trying it out I realised the great potential it has as a tool for managing "heavy" operations that can be run in parallel without blocking the main thread (especially for applications) such as video processing, image and video optimisation, emailing and many other applications.
Do you use it? If yes, for what?
From what I've been told it is also widely used in microservice structured systems to connect them.

A very useful resource about Design patterns

Kristian Lentino — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 13:27:51 +0000

For the past few weeks I've been delving into the topic of Design Patterns through a very useful website called refactoring.guru .
This resource has proved to be of great quality, the examples are very simple and easy to understand being all taken from real cases in addition to the way of explaining is very clear and concise, i suggest it to every beginner to start to learn programming.
So I decided to buy the book of the author of the website: "Dive into Design Patterns" by Alexander Shvets.
Reading that I recommend to all programmers who want to deepen this important aspect of programming (also the site provides everything you need, but in the book obviously deepens).
Has anyone read it? Opinions?

My 2022's goals

Kristian Lentino — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 14:50:58 +0000

This year I've made up my mind to share with the community my goals (both personal and as a developer) :

[x] 🚬 Stop smoking (i've already stopped 3 months ago)
[ ] 📕 Learn Node Js + TS
[ ] 🚀 Learn and start to use Laravel or Symfony
[ ] 🐰 Learn and start to use Redis and RabbitMQ
[ ] 🏋️‍♀️ Lose 10kg by go to the gym
[ ] 🧑🏼‍💻 Learn and study design patterns ( i think that they will give me a broader vision when developing)
[ ] 🛩 Work from some Europe country at least for 1 week
[ ] 📆 Join and attend some Meetup and workshop
[ ] 💪🏻 Improving both professionally and personally

What are your goals? Are you trying to achieve them?