Category: conference

Friday 9am

Keynote: Debug your salary! My winning strategies for successful salary negotiations, by Shirley Almosni Chiche (BUILD RH)
A very good conference, funny, energetic, full of jokes of all kinds to make people laugh about a stressful subject: salary negotiation. Shirley presents a number of strategies for setting out your expectations (know how much you want, how much leeway you’re giving yourself and, in general, don’t feel pressured to justify your request) and counter-arguments to the elements usually given to justify a low offer (the salary scale, equity in the team, ‘we don’t have the finances’, you’re not at the level we expect…).
The entire conference can be viewed here (presented at Devoxx):

Friday 10am

The Hive pattern: a modularisation strategy for your modular monolith or microservices. by Thomas Pierrain (Agicap) and Julien Topçu (Shodo)
A talk on why you need to break down a big thing into smaller things that are easier to refactor, deploy and grow. A solid and entertaining presentation, very well delivered.
The presentation is mainly aimed at consultants who need to structure ideas to convince a client to adopt a different system structure.
Take-away
No surprises for me, apart from the vocabulary. At SECUTIX we are well aware of the problems shown and have adopted a sort of Hive pattern without realising it, particularly in the Platform team. I’ve taken a few names from it to designate some of our practices (API, SPI, adapters, etc.).

I had to leave after that meeting and could not attend the talks of the afternoon.

Mixed notes

I found the attitude of the people attending the conference very pleasant and not showy. Thank you to those with whom I was able to discuss our practices, team structure, deployment or quality processes, etc. The atmosphere was really pleasant.
Three small notes in bulk:

Thanks to Nicolas D for his interesting thoughts on the evolution of the market of IT Service in France, and on the role of the architect: someone capable of going from the cellar of the application to the floors and understanding what’s going on, and capable of communicating with customers and users, of understanding the market.
Philippe Charrière, in addition to his thoughts on non-alcoholic gins, recommended that I see the interesting use of AI made by docker for technical support.
Yu Ling Cheng encouraged me to take an interest in the Playwright testing framework (to do what we do with our old Selenium). Thanks to her also for the very interesting discussions on UX components and their interface, and on the automatic testability of front-end code.
Finally, thanks to the organisers, the conference was a very pleasant experience, in good conditions. IT development is a very cool profession, and I’m happy to be able to practice it! It makes me want to propose a talk for next year

Thursday 2pm

10 useful web features you don’t know about, by Olivier Leplus (AWS) and Yohan Lasorsa (Microsoft)
Interesting presentation on the evolution process of the javascrit language.
As for the rest, I should have read the presentation better: the talk wasn’t for me.

Thursday 3pm

Defying entropy: rewriting applications or regaining control? Alexandre Jeambrun, Octo
A very good talk on the classic theme of our field: should we rewrite? Spoiler: no, not really. We all have to work on old (legacy) systems that are still useful because they’re in production.
Main ideas:
There are three types of complexity: complexity of the business (there’s nothing we can do about it), complexity of the technological layer used (it’s there, it won’t be easy to replace, there’s barely nothing we can do about it), accidental complexity (bad practices resulting from the emergency code fixes, replicated bad design, etc.). We can do something about it).
The entropy of systems is increasing, because people are changing, technology is changing, the environment is changing. No choice, it’s going to get more complex.

Dealing with human change: delegate, give people autonomy and decision-making power over an area, give the people involved space to develop their skills, make the team resilient (turnover is a non-event, people WILL leave), give people interesting things to do.

Coping with technological change: accepting that the design of the system must evolve continuously, that patterns will emerge from production. Have modular systems. Refactoring all the time, and delivering small increments in production.
(I didn’t notice the slides on changes in the environment, other than that it was important to focus on the parts of the system that are differentiating in the economic environment in which it is evolving).
My main takeaway is the need to read the article No Silver Bullet (1986, by Fred Brook).

Thursday 4pm

‘34% of our employees are women, come and join us, we’ll do things for you’, Anaïs Moulin, from Onepoint
A talk by a very young PO on positive discrimination policies in recruitment, placed in their historical context, and on their positive and negative effects as felt by those most affected. Feelings of injustice, imposter syndrome, etc.

In particular, Anaïs encourages people to express their doubts and questions and to make these processes visible, for example by questioning HR departments directly about them, while hoping that these policies will disappear as a result of a future and hoped-for change in mentality, which will make them no longer necessary.

Thursday, 9am

Keynote: Anatomy of a Backdoor: XZ Utils. by Quentin Dunand and Wassim Ahmed-Belkacem, from Viseo
Pure thriller entertainment. The story of the XY backdoor, its discovery and consequences (I knew the story well) and, above all, a technical presentation of the backdoor, how it works, how the code is obfuscated, which layers have been affected, and so on. Wassim went into great detail (pre-compilation, corruption of the makefile, injection of malicious code via the test files, etc.) in a very educational and comprehensive way. Very interesting.
Take-away
Sense of wonder.

Thursday 10am

Stories of vulnerabilities (Paul Molin, from Theodo)
Paul is CISO at Theodo. This talk presented a number of security flaws in different systems (including an amusing story about how to send a letter free of charge in France by hacking the postal system), but above all stressed the importance of recounting flaws and challenges in order to create a culture (in this case, of security). Paul has also written a book called ‘Il était une faille’, with Marine du Mesnil.
Take-away
The importance of communicating, internally, the life of the company and the challenges it faces, in order to create a shared culture and a better understanding of the business and the issues involved.

Thursday 11am

High-performance testing thanks to a realistic dataset 🧪Martin Choraine, Hyperweb.
A detailed and interesting talk on the datasets used to test applications. The importance of realistic data for testing your system.

• for limit case testing (creation of valid and invalid data)
• for non-regression
• for load testing. (creation of a mass of consistent and realistic data)

Reminder of the importance of anonymising data from production. (personal data, bank details)
Martin spoke about his (fairly satisfactory) use of tools for generating test data (information about people, or bank details). He recommends Faker https://fakerjs.dev/
Of course, he mentioned his rather satisfactory experience with data generated via LLMs, but is reluctant to use this technique on a massive scale. The future would some LLMs dedicated to a particular field.
Take-away
To generate a massive set of test data for one of our products based on production in order to validate performance.

Thursday, noon

Short talk: Let’s integrate young devs, help them grow and progress: Best practices and feedback for (old) devs. by Alexandre Touret, at Worldline
A very important subject for me. Transforming an experienced dev into a mentor for younger people is neither easy nor straightforward. Not everyone knows how to mentor a junior dev.
I’ve come away with a few ideas: the first few weeks are very important, and you need to optimise them. The mentor has to be very careful about his attitude and his interpersonal skills. They need to set aside time in their diary (30′, daily) for coaching. Practise peer programming with the junior (essential, for me: see how he/she clicks in the IDE…), base the construction of knowledge on real and immediate problems (empirical acquisition of knowledge). Start with simple, even very simple tasks. Use PR, JIRA, etc. for what they are: communication tools.
Encourage young people to keep up to date, read articles and go to conferences. Remind them that this is part of their job.
And get them to read Clean Code by Robert Martin (I agree).
Take-away
Get the team to read Clean Code.

In the next blog spots, I’ll share a recap of this technical conference.

Snowcamp is a technical conference on IT development that has been held in Grenoble in winter for the past ten years. Most (if not all?) of the talks are in French.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to a conference like this: lack of time, urgent production work and, to some extent, family life. What prompted me to go? One of my Internet buddies, Nicolas Delsaux (senior dev at Zenika in Lille), with whom I share an interest in the profession and a taste for science fiction. ‘You should come to Snowcamp, it’s not far from where you live’. Thanks for the suggestion, mate!

I spent three very cool days there, meeting interesting people and attending relevant talks that gave me ideas for my practice.

Here’s a little recap: what I’m taking away from the conference, and how it could help me/us in my/our day-to-day work at SECUTIX.
(no, I’m not shouting, our official typeface is in CapsLock mode)

Context and organisation of the conference:

Snowcamp takes place at Grenoble’s WTC, a convenient conference centre (located near the train station and right next to the hotel, 15′ from the city centre).

The conference is organised as follows:
Wednesday: universities. Two three-hour workshops, subject to prior registration.
Thursday and Friday: in the morning, a full keynote, then two talks, a 1.5-hour lunch break on site (very good) and three other talks in the afternoon. A Meet & Greet on Thursday evening.
Saturday: optional outing to the snow, skiing (not included in the conference price).

Workshops

Wednesday, 9.30am-12.30pm:
Python royal, by Julien Lenormand and Jonathan Gaffiot, from Kaizen solutions.

This was an excellent hands-on workshop, the aim of which was to present a suite of tools for industrial Python development. In the first hour, we installed the tools and created a very simple mini-application. Then you deploy and activate the code analysis tools, style checker, typing checker, test executions, packaging, and so on.
For me, who has been in the java world for one or two millennia, this is like discovering the equivalent of IntelliJ (=PyCharm, JetBrains), maven (more or less UV), Sonar(Qube), CheckStyle, etc. in the python world.
The keys to this python world are PyCharm and UV, an orchestrator that manages dependencies and environments (like maven, but more modern).
The workshop was very well put together, and the presenters were very approachable, with a wealth of experience of python in production.
Take-away
My team has an internal API overlay project that needs to be written in Python. I’m going to explore the PyCharm+UV options with fastapi to develop them robustly.

Wednesday 14h30-17h30
You too can give style to your data with Grafana, by Thomas Jouve, from Sopra.
Hands-on workshop on using Grafana and discovering its inner workings, its logic and its dashboard-building capabilities. It gave me the opportunity to configure things in Grafana for the first time.
Take-away
A little knowledge of Grafana and ideas for modifying our monitoring dashboards.