Full Stack Feast is an internal mini conference in Telia Norway, that aims to bring together developers, designers, product owners and anyone else involved in software engineering in our company. To accomplish this, we want to cover a broad range of topics, such as UX, backend, frontend and DevOps, allowing us to share our knowledge and learn from each other.
Motivation
We have a developer happiness session, which is a lean coffee style meeting for developers, where we have had lots of discussions about how to better organise our internal meetups, as well as how we bring our developers and designers closer so they can learn from each other and boost their knowledge, consequently improving Telia engineering. We concluded that if we combine all the current, small, separate events into a great one and have it regularly, such as every month, it would be more beneficial and could hopefully increase developer happiness and productivity as well.
When did that happen?
On thursday 25th of April, we ran our first ever full stack feast successfully.
About 70 participants were present during the event, all representing different skills, teams, brands and parts of the organisation. And of these 70 people, 8 were ready to have an interesting presentation for the rest of us.
Conference Program
Our program was scheduled for 2 hours with 5 talks:
1 - Serverless API in Go, with AWS Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB by Mohamad, Length: 20mins
- What are we building?
- Whats and Whys.
- Implementation and testing.
2 - Design collaboration by Bjørn Even and Christoffer Bogsti, Length: 10 mins
Review of a collaboration tool that is called Abstract. The tool handles all the design files in the cloud, which makes it easier for the designers to work together on a joint project. Developers can also look at the design files through Abstract to be able to read the specs around the design, and other people who participate in the project have the opportunity to look and comment.
3 - Integrate React Native into existing native app by Mohamad and Wenlu, Length: 30 mins
To enable other vertical teams outside the app team to ship their “feature app” in Telia Appen, we are looking for a way to modulize the app. We choose to use a URL-based routing library JLRoute to decouple the dependency and navigating between “feature apps”. It doesn’t limit the choice of program language when developing “feature app”. Because of the high demand, we started the experiment on ReactNative first. We have built a framework for integrating a whole ReactNative view into the existing Telia Appen. Further more, we also support to add ReactNative table view cells into existing table view.
4 - GetService by Pernille and Dag, Length: 15 mins
GetService and GetSales are two applications developed to help with the digitalisation of the customer journey at Get. They will help with automating the process from when a sale is registered for a customer until the installation is completed at the customers home. They are developed using Kotlin and Spring Boot in the backend and React + Redux in the front end.
5 - Cross Team frontend architecture by Jakob and Majid , Length: 30 mins
In a large organization like Telia there are many teams and many code bases - but it should be one look-and-feel for the end user. As an attempt to solve this problem Telia has created a styleguide which is a CSS library and an React view library. We are now researching the next step for cross team frontend collaboration and we see that web components have big potential.
In this presentation we talk about how web components can be written once and be used in many different code bases with very little work for integration. Web components also do not set a requirement on a specific frontend framework because it's a new w3c standard.
We walk through the fundamentals of web components and present a real demo of how the team "Min bedrift" integrate a webshop completely written with web components.
Mingling
After the event, pizza and drinks were served and we had a great time, being able to chat with each other and get to know our colleagues from other departments within Telia.
Conclusion
Even though this was our first time ever Full Stack Feast, the results were great! It has been an event that helped us share knowledge within the organisation, and at the same time it allowed us to get to know our colleagues, especially giving us the opportunity to talk to and get closer to the people working in other parts of the organisation, that we don't necessarily interact with on a day-to-day basis. We are looking forward to our next Full Stack Feast!
Pictures
