Last Thursday I attended nodeday, the first conference of a year that is going to be full of events, and it was awesome.

Sponsored by nearForm and IceMobile, the money we paid was refunded at the entry, so it was a free event for about 150 node enthusiasts, at the old gas house in Amsterdam and perfectly organized, making it truly enjoyable.

Before getting into the highlights of the talks, Emily Rose deserves a special mention because I’ve never seen such a funny host, making jokes, poems and even songs all the time, thus giving a different vibe to the event.

Monolith to Microservices

This headline could be the summary of the day, because if with the front-end we are seeing the switch to components, with the back-end there is a change of architecture that lead to break old monoliths into small services a.k.a microservices.

During the opening keynote Richard Rodger gave a good overview of this architecture and how to communicate microservices using messages with a tool like Seneca. Followed by Ahmad Nassri who continued on the topic although more oriented towards the use of Mashape products.

It was also really interesting to listen Ben Fleis on how Uber uses Ringpop to coordinate more than 25 real time services. And in the same manner to see Maciej Małecki on how the npm registry is built using the right tool to do the job and where everybody do (or at least understand) ops.

Inspiring talks

It’s getting popular to fit non-technical talks in technical events and they are usually awesome.

Jean-Charles Sisk got the difficult spot after lunch and turned it into the best talk of the day with beautiful slides focused in the process and the culture, building trust, considering optimism, and assuming that people is good.

Before lunch it was Alaina Percival of Women Who Code because diverse teams perform better and we need more women in tech. In this sense I feel proud of being a Toptal Global Mentor committed to diversity in tech.

Performance, profiling and postmortems

Michael Paulson created a funny icon for Benchmark.js, took a selfie on stage, and talked about Falcor, flame graphs and the performance of closures versus objects. While Luca Maraschi, who loves core dumps, closed the day with some stories (or nightmares) about the day after production.

Besides the enriching talks during the after-party, where I really got the benefit of the event was the day after, during the seven hours workshop by Matteo Collina and David Mark Clements.

It’s amazing the amount of knowledge these two guys have and they shared with us some theory but a lot of practice using flame graphs, the node-inspector, benchmarking, inlining, getting dirty with the v8 optimization killers and finishing with an overview of autopsy.

Conclusion

Attending conferences is always the means to gain knowledge and meet awesome people. Therefore I hope this event comes back to Amsterdam next year.

I can only finish congratulating Kerim Satirli and the rest os the IceMobile‘s team for the organization. And thanking the sponsors for contributing and O’Reilly Media for the free ebook.