Speaking

On Thursday, I will be speaking in Milan at WebDay 2023. Mine is a hands-on session on building a reliable and continuous end-to-end testing environment for web apps using Microsoft Playwright. If you attended my introductory Playwright session at WPC last year, Thursday’s session would be the ideal follow-up to that one, as I only briefly touched on CI deployments there. Drawing from my experience doing the whole thing in production, I’ll essentially be live testing a Blazor app, then take the entire thing to remote CI via GitHub Actions. In the process, I’ll show some of the issues we faced, share how we solved them, and offer some practices we adopted. ...

Brian Rinaldi has an insightful post on his blog about the current state of developer conferences, where ‘current state’ means post-COVID pandemic. Brian is well-positioned to reason about this space as a long-time conference organizer. I appreciate that he also takes the time to explain how the developer conference business works. The core of his blog is about post-pandemic conference attendance, which has plunged. independent, in-person developer conferences are hurting. Based on my own observation as well as talks with organizers and sponsors that I have come to know over the years, the average independent in-person event is still down 30-40% from pre-pandemic attendance levels. And often it seems to require massive discounts or even giveaways to get to this level. ...

Yesterday I was at WPC 2022, “the most important Italian conference on Microsoft technologies”, where I presented a one-hour session titled “Reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps with Microsoft Playwright.” Attendance was great and there was a lot of excitement up in the air; it was evident that people were happy to meet and interact in person again. After the forced two years hiatus, it was great to be back at a big on-site conference, let alone speak at it. I delivered my talk to a packed-full room of nodding, smiling and questioning attendees, which felt fantastic. ...

If you understand Italian, the recording of my Playwright session at UGIdotNET’s WebDay 2022 is now available on YouTube1. Playwright is a phenomenal cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-language, single-API, mobile-friendly front-end testing tool. I’m looking forward to giving the same session in English sooner or later, but I should first win my laziness and start looking for exciting events with open CFPs. If you happen to know one, please let me know. A couple weeks later I also presented at DevRomagna, the local meetup I run. [rss]: https://nicolaiarocci.com/index.xml [tw]: http://twitter.com/nicolaiarocci [nl]: https://buttondown.email/nicolaiarocci ↩︎ ...

About seven years ago, I presented the Eve Framework in a very crowded Python room at FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels. If you don’t know about FOSDEM, well, you should check it out. Every year thousands of developers who recognize themselves with the free and open-source movement gather in Brussels from all over the world. And I mean thousands of them. According to Wikipedia, since 2011, the meeting hosts about 4,000 visitors every year. It’s huge, and it’s a one of its kind. ...

I am presenting at two different events in February next month. Given the current COVID situation, that is entirely unexpected. In 2020 I only gave four talks, three of which were virtual. I am not holding my breath for 2021. Conferences are going virtual all year-long. Next year too, most likely. There are some clear advantages in going virtual, but the final result is a net negative. Any conference junkie will tell you that she/he attends for the people first, and only then for the sessions themselves. At these events, the most exciting stuff happens in the corridors, usually during breaks. A little story here. You might know that I run a motorcycle club. Well, the very idea of founding it was actually ignited by a corridor chat, few minutes after I delivered a session. Replicating this kind of in-person interaction online is, well, next to impossible. ...

Il prossimo 24 ottobre sarò a Milano per A Morning with MongoDB, evento ufficiale 10gen nel corso del quale racconterò la mia esperienza nell’integrazione di MongoDB in una Web REST API. Partecipazione e registrazione sono gratuite: cosa aspettate?

La scorsa settimana a EuroPython 2012 ho tenuto un talk intitolato Sviluppare una RESTful Web API con Python, Flask e MongoDB. Mi ha fatto piacere riscontrare forte interesse sia per gli aspetti teorici dell’architettura REST che per la loro implementazione pratica con strumenti quali Flask e MongoDB. In entrambe le sessioni inglese e italiana mi sono state rivolte molte domande, sia in occasione delle Q&A plenarie che nei successivi colloqui informali. Parecchi anche i commenti ed i suggerimenti, davvero utili ed apprezzati (a quanto pare non sono l’unico che, forte di un background .NET, ha compiuto o sta per compiere il salto verso Python e il mondo open source). Soprattutto ho rilevato una forte curiosità su MongoDB, un database non-relazionale verso il quale sembra prevalere un atteggiamento di generale timidezza: “vorrei ma non oso”, insomma. Per quanto riguarda Flask direi che ormai, nel vasto firmamento dei micro web framework, è una stella che brilla di luce propria. ...

La scorsa settimana ho partecipato come relatore alla prima edizione del Ravenna CNA Barcamp sulla cultura d’impresa 2.0. Offline / Online è il racconto di una esperienza vissuta sul campo; un case study su come il mercato del software si è evoluto nel corso degli anni passando dalla classica filiera lunga sul territorio, tipica degli anni ’90 e della prima metà dei 2000, alla vendita online dei giorni nostri. La crisi economica degli ultimi anni si è innestata in un processo evolutivo già in atto e inarrestabile, perlomeno per quanto riguarda il nostro settore: ...

EuroPython è la conferenza europea di riferimento per il linguaggio Python. Si terrà anche quest’anno a Firenze, dal 2 al 8 luglio. Sono in programma molti interventi davvero interessanti, cosa che rende ancor più soprendente il fatto che i miei talk siano stati votati così tanto. Date un’occhiata al sito ufficiale per saperne di più sulla conferenza (in questo momento è ancora possibile approfittare dell’offerta early bird per l’acquisto dei biglietti); maggiori informazioni sui miei interventi tra qualche tempo, quando sarà ufficializzato il calendario dei talk. ...