On 27 September 2018, we joined forces with Picnic – the first app-only supermarket based in The Netherlands – to kick off our first ever IWOMM (It Works on My Machine) Amsterdam event. And what a turnout it was!
Our CTO, Odhran McConnell and Head of Client Partnerships, Jamie North opened alongside Daniel Gebler, Picnic’s CTO to a fantastic crowd from across the industry, including
engineers from Anva and Booking.com. It was a great opportunity to connect with people working in the Dutch market and a good place to start building The Netherlands branch of the IWOMM tech club.
With a focus on scalability issues and how to deal with them, Philip Leonard, a Backend Engineer with Picnic, gave a very open and honest talk reflecting on his team’s journey facing the peaks and pitfalls of RxJava. As an app-only company, he revealed that the environment they were in restricted their options when it came to using reactive micro services. While SpringReactor has shown recent emergence, working with RxJava has been a steady success; they have experienced high level growth and disrupted the grocery market in the Netherlands and Germany.
Philip’s talk was followed by 101 Ways’ Tech Lead, Erik Schmeigleow who gave a fascinating talk on non-blocking architecture, particularly AKKA streams and how they can be used to assist systems built using RxJava.
Following the presentations, everyone came together to chat and network, and it was great to see the foundations of future relationships happen in the same room. Because that’s what our tech communities are all about; learning, interacting and developing.
The next IWOMM Amsterdam will be held on the 14th of November, with a talk given by Sander Hoogendoorn, our Netherlands’ Director. Details will follow soon, but if you want to be the first to hear then email Sanneke@101ways.com to reserve your place.
