Pusher at Full Stack Toronto

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And we’re off to Toronto.. A couple of weeks ago we set off on a trip to Toronto as proud sponsors of the first ever Full Stack Toronto conference. Organised by Full Stack Toronto the conference was held at the Ryerson Engineering Building. The first event of its kind in North America, Full Stack Toronto \[…\]

Introduction

And we’re off to Toronto..

A couple of weeks ago we set off on a trip to Toronto as proud sponsors of the first ever Full Stack Toronto conference. Organised by Full Stack Toronto the conference was held at the Ryerson Engineering Building. The first event of its kind in North America, Full Stack Toronto Conference was aimed to provide the attendees with an insight into the full cycle of web development. And it did. The line up of the speakers was impressive and the workshop style of the talks allowed for a truly interactive experience.

The conference was divided into multiple tracks with a wide range of talk themes, from continuous deployment and APIs to UX and web accessibility. The use of Angular.js, the Internet of Things and micro-services proved to be the hottest topics for discussion.

One of the sessions that definitely stood out for me was a talk by Dejan Glozic called “IBM and Node.js: Old Doge, New Tricks”. Dejan talked about how IBM moved from its traditional JEE-based stack to a crazy new world of Node.js, micro-services, NoSQL databases, RabbitMQ message broker and MQTT protocol. It was very interesting to learn about their new architecture based on Node.js micro-services, their philosophy and some real-world problems a large enterprise faces when attempting a rewrite of this magnitude. The live (working!) demo at the end of the talk gave this session a good dollop of interaction.

Another standout talk, which I unfortunately missed came from David Janes and was titled “Control All the Things with Node.js”. Hamilton though had a chance to see it and here’s what he says: “The title was perfectly crafted to pique plenty of interest and the room was well filled. David’s talk was focussed on IOTDB (Internet of Things Database), which is designed to provide semantics for the Internet of Things. With the IoT sector exploding in recent years David described how he, along with a fair number of others, feels that the data that’s flying around with all of these new connected devices shouldn’t be restricted to being used as 0s and 1s or other abstract values. We should instead be able to interact with IoT devices using the same language that we use in our everyday lives – Celsius and Fahrenheit, on and off, hotter and colder. His talk looked at the motivations behind his work on IOTDB and included a multitude of fun demos of the sorts of things it can let you do. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on for the future because it makes all of these IoT devices not only more accessible but also more powerful, by allowing you to harness them in new and more nuanced ways.”

It was truly inspiring to meet so many interesting people and to get an insight into Toronto’s vibrant developers community.

A big shout out goes to Nael El Shawwa, the co-founder of DevTO, an organisation that puts up inspiring weekly events for developers in Toronto. We were super lucky to be in the right place at the right time and got a chance to join the cool kids at a get-together held at OANDA offices.

Meredith Arnot and Craig Hunter were both fantastic speakers and delivered truly inspirational talks.

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Fascinated by Toronto’s friendly and diverse developers community we definitely hope for another trip soon.