My personal highlights from the 2nd day of GOTO Aarhus:

New linting rules by Kyle Simpson

It was fun to watch this extremely opinionated guy talk about JavaScript and be “undougie” about things, especially about comparison type coercion “best practices”. I also learned a little bit more on how crazy JavaScript can be, and to which extreme lengths some JavaScript developers will go in order to bend the language – e.g. by using try/catch blocks to create a proper scope 🙂

Matias Niemelä on Angular.js 1.3

Matias is clealy a Vim wizard, and it’s always fun to watch someone who can use a computer do some live coding. I had gotten the impression that the talk would be more like “what’s new in 1.3”, but it turned out to be mostly a general introduction to Angular’s features, and only at the end did he dive into some of the new animation and validation features.

Angular is a nice framework in many ways, and it’s actually pretty sweet to work with, but I can’t help to think that it’s becoming more and more bloated. I think I need to take a look at Facebook’s React soon.

Where’s Captain Kirk?

This was a double session where Kevlin Henney, as the host sort of, would introduce Eva Andreasson, Randy Shoup, and Ola Bini, and have them talk about stuff that enterprises, sadly, are apparently still not putting to enough use. Eva talked about the “Enterprise Data Hub”, Randy talked about the cloud and microservices, and Ola presented a polyglot project where they had used Java, Ruby, and Clojure on the JVM to build the system.

I had seen Ola Bini’s “Working on cancer” talk before, which was only mildly interesting from a technical angle, because it was basically a list of involved technologies – as in: “we used Ruby, and we used Java, and then we used Clojure” – so I wasn’t that impressed with his contribution to the talk.

I was more intrigued by Eva’s and Randy’s parts of the talk, and Eva actually made me think about what it would mean to basically archive every kind of information that would flow through the company. Basically that’s what you’re doing when you’re doing event sourcing, so I was thinking that the EDH could be seen as a kind of global event store for the entire company.

Summary

It was nice to be at GOTO again, and the quality of the sessions and the keynotes was generally pretty high. I can’t help to think that the “couple of days, several tracks, 50 minute sessions” format could use some kind of renewal though, and I guess that the GOTO arrangers are beginning to feel something too since the conference has been reduced to two days instead of the usual three.