My first talk [Mistä Nyssetutka on tehty]

I had my first talk! Juhuuu! Very nice. Super. Great feeling. And what’s best, from the feedback I received I’m pretty sure the audience liked it 🙂

I presented a 30-minute talk about the architecture of my child of 2017, Nyssetutka.fi. The presentation was part of the now annual Tietotekniikan yö, IT-night, organised by students of the Tietoteekkari guild and our lab, Pervasive Computing. You may find a summary blog posting of the whole event here (also, check out previous Tietotekniikan yö blog postings here and here). The evening was filled with interesting talks from a couple of companies (Futurice, SWD, Solita) and both our own and Signal Processing lab’s staff. IoT, PC++, CI, AI, ML, ethics of programming, ASICs, side-channel attacks, the story of maksalaatikko and so forth.

I went through both the server and client-side architecture of the application and discussed the various optimizations I’ve done in order to make the experience smooth for the user (caching techniques for the server, batching DOM work, splitting computations etc.). I also talked about the MV of the MVC and the usual one-way data flow you find from current modern JS frameworks. Moreover, synchronous vs. asynchronous work was discussed and what needs to be done in order to make the app responsive when you’re dealing with single-threaded JS engines.

In addition to learning some new things, I hope at least a part of the students in the audience got a good grasp of the importance of little (and not-so-little) side projects. I think they’re very important and one should every once in a while hack and tinker with something that’s not given by the teachers or employers. It doesn’t have to be big, just exploring new things will make you better at everything. I always want to learn more.

The diagrams here are from my slides. I used them for high(ish) level architecture illustration. As you can see, they don’t follow any formal spec. But you get the idea.