Last week we attended meetings of our six technology communities, and we can safely say that these were hours of intense work and interesting discussions. Wondering what it takes to make a technology community around a technology grow? We bet on our values: openness, collaboration, commitment and efficiency! We look for solutions to our problems together, share skills and ideas. We show off recently used functionalities and solutions.
In addition, collaboration within the communities gives us an opportunity to come into contact with technology practices that we are not familiar with on a daily basis. This is the best opportunity to understand and deepen our knowledge in an area that interests us.
Frontend Community
During the Frontend Community meeting, Jaroslaw Hajduk (Frontend Developer at RST) covered two topics. The first one was about the Javascript language itself. We broke down how the "this" keyword works. We carefully analyzed what value Javascript substitutes in place of "this" depending on what a given function is called. We also learned what happens ‘underneath’ when the "new" operator or the "bind" function are used.
The second topic was about solving a programmatic problem. Jarek presented some code with duplicated API calls and the goal was to implement a temporary cache to optimize the number of requests to the API. Brainstorming continued during the meeting and the participants worked together on developing a solution.
DevOps Community
At the DevOps Community meeting we discussed Knative, a solution for handling serverless workloads on the kubernetes platform. Pawel Grecki (Senior Developer at RST) talked about an open source project that simplifies working with applications running on K8S (kubernetes). It defines a set of objects as Kubernetes custom resource definitions (CRD). The set consists of three components, which we discussed in turn during the meeting: Serving, Eventing and Functions.
Knative Serving defines resources for controlling the load of applications running in a cluster. It also provides scaling based on actual needs, including scaling to zero when necessary. Knative Eventing enable an event-driven architecture. Additionally, it takes care of orchestrating the delivery of these events to the selected application. Finally, Knative Functions enable you to easily create, build and deploy stateless, event-driven functions as Knative services. We focused our attention on these three components.
Backend Community
This Backend Community meeting was led by Jakub Wierzchosławski (Solution Architect at RST), who proposed the topic: API Management - Marketplace and development. The purpose of this workshop was to demonstrate the capabilities of API Management class tools using the WSO2 vendor as an example, with a particular focus on the components: Marketplace and Development Portal.
We also considered how such tools could help in the development of New Business areas, in particular software delivered in the SaaS model. In addition, we discussed solutions already implemented in RST to support API development and maintenance.
React Native Community
Bartek Lechowski (Frontend Developer at RST) presented a project that he works on every day and requires him to track changes in two applications at the same time (the driver's application and the passenger's application). Bartek showed us how this need forced him to find a golden solution that could facilitate his work on this task.
We were able to see in depth how the Reactotron debugger he used works, which allows to connect and track LIVE changes on multiple simulators/devices simultaneously. At this React Native Community meeting, we focused on the basic functionality, configuration and use of Reactotron.
Product Design Community
The meeting was conducted by Robert Służaly (Senior Designer at RST), who works in the DASIE (UX/UI) team on a daily basis. Together we continued to expand our knowledge in Figma, focusing on enriching the project with motion design. We learned about the capabilities and limitations of the Prototype and Interactions sections.
We also discovered the basic functions and variants of Smart Animate, and finally prepared an animated component and created an interactive Frame. The Product Design Community meeting was dedicated to every person in the organization who is close to the issues of animation and interaction in the design process.
Testers Community
Within this community, we focus on current projects with one-on-one consultations. Our main goal is to expand our knowledge of automation and IT support. The upcoming topic, which will be covered by Arek Kwiatkowski (Software Tester Lead at RST), is oriented at expanding the knowledge of building gitlabci yaml in terms of automated testing and properly preparing teams to run automated tests called in gitlab.
We look forward to future meetings and keep our fingers crossed for the presenters. We appreciate the commitment and willingness to share knowledge with others! You can find the latest news from the heart of RST on our social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram.