Java and bicycles: meetup in St. Petersburg

In 14 days, on October 30, an unusual free meetup “Java and Bicycles: When is it worth investing in writing your own tools on the backend?” will take place at the Wrike office.

You can register for the event on the organizers' website . The meetup will be held from 19:00 to 22:30 at the address: St. Petersburg, Sverdlovskaya embankment 44D (BC Leto), Wrike office. If you are unable to attend physically, you can watch the events via broadcast on Youtube . The main topic of the event will be the issue of creating the company’s own products and their distinctive features from custom-made projects. Experienced speakers will describe in detail situations in which it makes sense to invest in the development of internal tools, and in which situations you can be content with ready-made solutions. Speakers will raise the question of when a project architect has the right to experiment with new technologies, when tools can be deployed at the company level, and how much flexibility in choosing technologies depends on the size, age of the project, internal or external customers. The meetup is useful for experienced Java developers, architects, technical leaders and all backend developers with a high level of awareness.

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Program and speakers:

Dmitry Mamonov , Wrike "From bicycles to motorcycles: why developing your own solutions can be better than using ready-made frameworks."

How does the process of developing your own product differ from outsourcing projects from a technical point of view? When does it make sense to invest in development from scratch, and when is it better to take a ready-made solution?

Vladimir Krasilshchik , Yandex “Welcome, or cyclists are not allowed”

In software development, writing your own bikes is treated as the romance of work. Programmers proudly share their bikes and post them on Github. According to the speaker, these are “Hello World” projects with the goal of learning something, or nonsense on the level of “We don’t remember why we invented a billiard ball from which hair grows, but it was hellishly difficult.”

In his speech, the speaker will discuss the questions that a “cyclist” or a “cyclist’s” team lead should ask himself before going to the Tour De France. He will give examples of libraries and frameworks, the appearance of which was justified and dictated by a pragmatic approach, as well as examples of creations, the appearance of which is impossible based on pragmatic considerations.

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Vyacheslav Lapin , EPAM – Hacking the “entry curve”

Inventing “bicycles” is a great teaching technique! Aspiring artists mostly copy the paintings of masters, so why is NIH syndrome considered evil in IT? After all, in order to understand how a library or framework works, it is best to try to solve the problem they solve on your own, usually by writing something similar.

Since we moved to a model of constant, permanent learning (in fact, learning and work have become one, unified process), “bicycle building” perfectly supports us in this, being essentially a practice in learning: we read tutorials, articles, watch speeches on conferences and try to try some of this in our combat projects, thus finding the shortest path along the “entry curve” into a new technology.

However, this is often not the shortest, cheapest and safest way to solve the customer’s business problems, so it is rare that the customer will agree to this. Where should a “poor developer” go in such a situation? This will be discussed in Vyacheslav’s report.