Sometimes when you go somewhere, you just have a feeling that “this is going to be great!”. And that’s exactly what happened in Techorama, a yearly international technology conference in Belgium!
This year we, my colleague Martijn and myself, were present at Techorama! The theme? Viva Las Vegas! In this short blog, I want to give a brief overview of the keynotes we followed, what we found interesting, the joyful events and was it worth it?
We wrote this post after a few days when the storm was calm again. That way, the things that we still vividly remember are the things that made the most impact on us.
Starting with the opening keynote of Martin Derek. I was very happy with the topics he discussed. Not an easy topic… “Pain, Grief, Perseverance and Technology”. He told about his entire life growing up with a mental illness and all the ups and downs that he went through. From trying to commit suicide at age 11 to the success he had developing some application portals in his early career to where he is now. Whenever he pushed too hard to achieve things, it all came tumbling down. It was a very educational talk which he tried to keep very light. He wanted to spread a message that if you think it’s not normal, it probably isn’t and seeking support is the best way to deal with this.
Going forward we had two days worth of sessions! Exciting!
Here are some of my (Jorg) highlights
“Authentication and Conditional Access in Microsoft Azure AD”, a deep dive edition. A very informative talk from John Craddock. CAE coming very soon as default which makes critical events much easier to handle and also much faster. It enables you to check if the authorisation of users is still valid almost instantly instead of awaiting the duration of the JWT token lifetime! Awesome stuff!
.Net Maui (Multi Application User Interfaces) was also very recently announced and is the successor of WPF. Bank VanBreda showed their solution on handling 1997 screens with the framework. They’re rebuilding their entire framework from scratch in Maui in order to be future proof, more performant and more scalable. Maui is looking great, especially because we’re only in v1.0!
Next up: “Security Patterns in Microservices Architecture” by Kevin Dockx! An interesting look on how he handled communication between the services going from “This is ok for our basic business” to the “We’re a bank and need over 9000 layers of security”. So what’s the best way, you might wonder? Like everything in IT, it comes down to “it depends”. You can only have one “aud” in your JWT token for all services, or you can make them all different, add scopes and make use of the “on behalf of” flow (please do this in larger production environments, thank me later). Excellent talk!
A session I was looking forward to was “Becoming API & Cloud-First at the LEGO Group” by Rasmus Hald.
If you wondered how Lego handles their internal working, this was the session to follow! He explained that they work with product groups which all work independently. This means they can work very fast without dependencies. Further, he mentioned the architecture change being in the cloud as opposed to being on-premise.
The final session that I found very interesting was by Peter Himschoot who brought “Implementing DDD with .NET (6)”. A very brief but expansive overview with a lot of technical details on how to use DDD (Domain Driven Design) in a .NET application. Entities, Specifications, Value-Objects, Aggregate (roots), domain events and more were included in the talk. Beginners and more experienced developers and architects ought to have really enjoyed this presentation!
As much as I (Martijn) like Jorg, we didn’t follow all the sessions together. 🙂 There were 3 sessions that left an impression on me
“Automating Database Deployments using Azure DevOps” by Grant Fritchey. A very interesting meeting to convince database profiles to approach the db/data warehouse structure as code. All changes should follow a DevOps way; development on DEV and releases should be done using CI/CD. Definitely an approach I’m going to follow!
“Azure Event hubs – The architect’s cut” by Clemens Vasters. A bit of a mind-blowing session about the current architecture and future architecture of Event hubs. Within months Event Hubs will have all features of Apache Kafka and more. I didn’t know Event hubs were built using the Apache Kafka APIs. Where significant improvements were made by Microsoft.
“Better architecture without architects” by Geert van der Cruijsen. Basically, a session to show that everybody should be able to make architectural decisions that best match their needs. I agree until a certain level, I’m convinced that there needs to be a general guideline/architecture with enough freedom for engineers, developers, and architects to choose the best fit for their needs.
The closing keynote by Richard Campbell. What a guy. Taking a look at the past to speculate what the future might bring. Will it be virtual/augmented reality? Will wearables take over take market without being tethered to your phone? Will we encounter a Terminator-like future where AI will take over and bring the apocalypse over mankind?
From the supercomputer back in the eighties to the first iPad with the same amount of computing power to the now newly developed quantum computers… We actually have no idea what the future will bring us. We can only speculate on consumer products being a big part of our life and take notice of the developments happening in the industry.
We really enjoyed our first in-person event after ‘The happening’ (covid), and loved talking to old friends and making new friends within the assumed Azure community. Looking forward to the next one! 🙂
