IN PERSON: Cross language gRPC apps & Moving to Kotlin, powered by engineers

Note: this is an in-person event in Utrecht, NL. If you're looking for the live stream of this event, please don't RSVP to this meetup but sign up for the livestream here: https://www.meetup.com/OpenValue/events/284942149/

After way too many online meetups, we're back on track with our second in-person meetup for this year!
As usual, we'll take care of food, drinks and 2 awesome talks. You just need to bring you ;-)

Jan-Kees van Andel and Robin Trietsch will kick off, talking about the switch they made from RESTful APIs to gRPC for the transport layer of their microservices and the challenges they faced when doing so.
Next, Ali Meshkat will share how a small group of engineers managed to convince a big organization to fully embrace Kotlin for backend development.

Both talks will be presented in English. RSVP now for an evening of learning and fun!

The meetup will be at the OpenValue office in Utrecht (directions: https://route.openvalue.eu), enough free parking spaces available.

Agenda

17:30 Walk in
18:00 Food
18:30 Talk 1 (see below)
19:30 Break
19:45 Talk 2 (see below)
20:45 Drinks

First talk: "Cross Language gRPC Applications" by Jan-Kees van Andel and Robin Trietsch
Next to REST, there are various other ways to interface with APIs, such as GraphQL and gRPC. At STRM Privacy, we have been running gRPC based microservices for over a year in production. In this talk, we'll show our motivation to switch from RESTful APIs to gRPC for the transport layer of our microservices and the challenges we faced when doing so. Furthermore, we'll show our repository for generating code in various languages that support gRPC, while ensuring versions are aligned between these languages.

About Jan-Kees
Jan-Kees van Andel co-founded and is a software architect at JPoint, currently working at STRM Privacy. He is interested in all aspects of software engineering, but mostly focusing on frontend, backend and the intersection of these. He really tries to be as close to the problem domain as possible and deliver maximum value.

About Robin
Robin Trietsch is a senior software engineer at STRM Privacy, and is passionate about software that processes large amounts of data. Kotlin enthusiast, Terraform fan, and always eager to try out new technologies. He likes a technical challenge and focuses on writing clean and readable code that is well tested.

Second talk: "Moving to Kotlin, Powered by Engineers" by Ali Meshkat
About a year ago Rabobank started fully embracing Kotlin.
This change happened due to the efforts of a small group of engineers who thought Kotlin is a fun but powerful language that could benefit Rabobank a great deal.
They had to convince the management, business, architects, security, and other engineers; by showcasing Kotlin's benefits, providing security and development guidelines, and pushing for tooling support. After several weeks they achieved a consensus, Kotlin is there to stay at the Rabobank! Luckily, I could be part of that movement from the start.
The Kotlin Movement is a good example of how engineers can achieve change in a complex environment. This was not possible if there was not enough room for them to express themselves with full support from the management.
Join me! In this non-technical session so I can take you through the journey of the Kotlin Movement! How it started, and how it plans to increase Kotlin adoption in a durable matter within a complex environment that is the Rabobank.

About Ali
Ali is a self-taught software engineer at OpenValue Rotterdam. He likes to share knowledge and helps others to do the same. He is an avid Kotlin user and provides Kotlin workshops to engineers who want to get started with Kotlin. He believes that continuous learning (on the job) can improve engineers’ job satisfaction, hone their skills, and help organizations to grow.