The Road to BaselOne – Stop 9 – Basel

The final leg of the BaselOne tour began very early in the morning in Geneva as we prepared ourselves to visit CERN. We arrived just before staff, employees and visitors rushed into the place. We'd like to thank Manuel Álvarez and Pablo del Castro for organizing the visit and taking the time to explain us the mission, history, technical details and discoveries made by CERN. Our first stop was the workshop where the magnets arrive, get serviced and tested, then shipped to the tunnel. The following screenshot is of one of the test beds used to measure the performance of every centimeter in each dipole, in other words, it's a big rig for running unit tests.


Like in software, running unit tests was not enough, the first time the LHC was turned on there was an incident in two segments caused by faulty connections. It turns out all unit tests were "green" however what was missing was an integration test, which in this particular case could only happen once all pieces were assembled at their right locations, that is, running integration tests on production. The engineers were able to fix the damage and prepare for any further eventualities. Goes to show, do not skip unit and integration tests ever, hmmmkay? 😉


We had a blast (pardon the pun) spending time at CERN. I can't describe the feeling you get by being at a place where real science is made every day, where people from all around the world come together and collaborate regardless of their background and preferences. Despite what the media and some groups constantly attempt to show us, we are one race, one soul, one humanity that can rally together and work in harmony for the better good of all mankind and the very world we currently inhabit.

We then embarked on the last train ride of the tour, towards our final stop: Basel. Once we arrived to our target location we were quickly joined by Dmitry Vyazelenko, another familiar face from JCrete and colleague from Canoo. Dmitry gave a thorough review on JMH's goals and some of its history; he later showcased some real world scenarios where he and his team were faced with performance issues and how they found solutions to these problems thanks to setting up JMH benchmarks.


Sebastian came next, explaining CQRS and Event Souring to an enthralled audience. The more I hear about the subject the more I recognize places where an Event Driven Architecture may come in handy with some of the current customer facing projects I'm working on at the moment. Exciting times indeed.


Finally I modified the talk for the evening as attendees were not really familiar with Gradle. Instead I explained the reasons why it may be a good idea to migrate a multi-project build from Maven to Gradle. I used Sebastian's Scalable Coffee demo as starting point. Tips such as installing Maven/Gradle via SDKMAN, setting the Gradle wrapper, using Gdub, initializing projects with Lazybones and other more also made an appearance as well.

At the end of the evening we caught up with Dominik Berger, current lead of the Basel JUG, member of the umbrella Swiss JUG. As he explains on the video, he's one of three responsible parties for coming up with BaselOne, the other two being Canoo Engineering AG (my current employer) and Matthias Cullmann from Baloise Insurance.

Alas all good things come to a close, we finished the tour with a high note in Basel, and we're left eagerly awaiting October 19th when the BaselOne conference takes place. There still time to join us, we have a great lineup of local talent and professional speakers coming from outside Switzerland, come join us!

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