Nearform tech experts attended Codemotion 2024: Read about their experiences

Upon arrival, we found ourselves at the Milano Fiera, a new venue for the event. We were delighted: spacious and comfortable rooms, with opportunities to grab a coffee and engage in excellent networking with fellow attendees.

We had the opportunity to spend time with other speakers, sharing diverse opinions on a range of topics. As you might expect, AI was a recurring theme in many discussions. Unfortunately, some conversations were curtailed due to NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), but we enjoyed ourselves nonetheless.

The conference commenced with a keynote by Luca Mezzalira, Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, who emphasised the importance of modularity in the software industry. The main stage was an auditorium with 1,800 seats, filled with attendees eager to kick off this remarkable two-day event. Over the following days, we experienced ten parallel stages and numerous community activities.

As you might expect, we attended all the JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js sessions. At Nearform, we love and are dedicated to everything in the JavaScript ecosystem.

We began with Marco Ippolito, Senior Security Engineer at HeroDevs and a former Nearformer. He discussed strategies for maintaining large codebases, such as Node.js, and the automation processes underpinning them. Marco explained how a Node.js release is shipped and all the work needed to reach one million users on a huge number of platforms.

Next, the first Nearformer took to the stage: Matteo Pietro Dazzi. It was his first time addressing such a large audience, and he rocked. 🚀

More than 200 people attended his talk on 'Why Multi-Architecture Docker Images Matter?', and he captivated them.  Matteo demonstrated how software can be deployed across multiple platforms to expand potential user bases with minimal effort, thanks to Docker, which has become the de facto standard for packaging and deploying software.

However, as the world becomes increasingly diverse in terms of hardware and operating systems, it's important to consider how to build container images that can run on a wide range of architectures.

In this session, Matteo explored the world of multi-architecture Docker images and why they are important in today's landscape. He examined the key concepts behind multi-architecture images, including how to build them and the tools used to do it.

Afterwards, Matteo Collina, Co-Founder and CTO at Platformatic, and Paolo Insogna, Principal Engineer at Platformatic, (both former Nearformers) delivered a talk on Node.js worker threads, which provided a valuable refresher on the topic. We also learned how to utilise them to enhance application performance by optimising server resource usage.

The rest of the first day proceeded smoothly, jumping from one stage to another and engaging in conversations with other developers about technologies and their experiences.

Ludovico Besana, one of our Nearformers, supported attendees with his expertise in testing, accessibility and UX design.

His experience sparked a lively exchange of ideas as he shared best practices and addressed real-world challenges. Many were particularly interested in how we manage our Open  Source projects and the behind-the-scenes workings of our largest initiatives.

The second day started with a cup of coffee in the speakers' room, where all of the Nearform presenters gathered to kick off the day — we needed to be in top form as it was workshop day!

We started with 'The Days Before Writing a Vector Database' by Michele Riva, Co-Founder and CTO at Orama (and former Nearformer), where we learned about the technical challenges encountered when developing this specialised type of database.

Next, it was time for the workshop, led by Matteo Collina and Paolo Insogna. They had prepared exercises to help participants gain a deeper understanding of the problems they discussed the previous day. It was the perfect opportunity to explore those topics in detail.

Following that, Luciano Mammino, Senior Architect at fourTheorem, demonstrated why Rust is an excellent language for writing highly optimised Lambda functions, not only for its minimal cold start times but also for its impressive speed.

Immediately after, Nearformer Manuel Spigolon gave an insightful talk on the internals of Fastify. During the 'Fastify Exposed' talk, Manuel discussed how the internals of the Plugin System, the Decorators and the Hooks are implemented.

The aim of the presentation was to show how Fastify does not reinvent the wheel but instead bases these features on JavaScript's prototype inheritance, highlighting the source code that performs the trick to create this unique web framework.

Around 100 attendees gathered to hear Manuel’s experiences and learn from him. His talk generated significant interest, and many questions came his way at the end. Thank you, Manuel, you were outstanding as well. 🚀

To conclude the day, Nearform senior speaker Luca Del Puppo guided us through the key refactoring techniques that can enhance the performance of JavaScript code, demonstrating how to optimise without the need to hastily rewrite everything in Rust.

Luca's talk delved into comparing different operators and structures in JavaScript that can either speed up or slow down code execution. The main focus was on code performance and optimisation, highlighting not architecture or best practices, but specific tricks and common pitfalls JavaScript developers encounter.

Often, we choose certain operators simply for convenience or because we enjoy syntactic sugar, which may not impact performance much with small data sets. However, as data volumes grow, these choices can slow down an application. Performance issues might not become noticeable until months into development, leading us to suspect the server or database when the real culprit could be the code itself.

Luca walked us through examples of code that can be optimised and showed us how to make those optimisations. His insights help save time, speed up JavaScript code and keep our precious main thread from becoming a bottleneck. His session attracted such a large audience that it was assigned to the auditorium. Very impressive! 🚀

The closing keynote was delivered by Francesco Sciuti, CEO of Devmy, and Gabriele Santomaggio, Staff Software Engineer at VMware. Their talk was anything but conventional: they discussed how developers should simplify an application’s complexity while also playing and dancing with a T-Rex. 🦖 It might sound unusual - and it was - but it’s all true. 😃

Then it was time to wrap up this incredible experience. We spent two days with many inspiring individuals, sharing our experiences and gaining numerous insights to reflect on and improve upon. We were able to spread the Nearform culture throughout the conference, with our now famous “Open Source Is Art” t-shirts standing out in the crowd. We participated in one of Europe’s largest events, showcasing Nearform's commitment to the developer community!

Thanks to everyone we met and who took the time to chat with us — remember, our social channels are always open to your messages!

We hope to see you again next year.

Cheers. 👋

A big thank you to all the Nearformers who took part in this incredible event: Ludovico Besana, Matteo Pietro Dazzi, Manuel Spigolon, Pietro Marchini, Alberto Francesco Motta and Luca Del Puppo.