Astrix 🤝 Reco R&D meetup

We set up an R&D meetup with our good friends at Astrix Security, and we’re sharing the highlights with y’all!

A Shared Journey of Individual Paths

The engineering culture in Reco is derived from our company’s culture. We value our joint journey, but never lose sight of our team members' individual pathways. Other than the day-to-day activities, a great way to demonstrate these values is by attending professional meetups, where everybody gets to take in top-notch lectures, network with others, and experience a change of pace. The Go meetup we attended recently is an example of exactly that.

So, when Amit Trivizki from Astrix came to visit for lunch, the idea of arranging a meetup came up, and we couldn’t drop it!

If you haven’t heard about them already, Astrix is a cloud security startup providing first access management solution for third-party app-integrations – helping organizations unleash the power of automation and app integrations while keeping their ever-expanding web of third-parties under control.

We met on Reco's office rooftop. Like every meetup, this too began with some mingling, beer drinking, and snacking. Next, we fired up our laptops and began the first session:

Session #0 // learnchromedev.tools workshop by Miryam Oren

Front-end developer Miryam Oren, who works on Reco's team, created an entire workshop specifically for using Chrome Dev Tools. In a quick introduction, she discussed the advantages of using development tools for almost all R&D tasks, including front-end, back-end, and even operations.

She then walked us through a few Dev Tools functions like inspecting network calls, editing cookies, and replacing images on news websites with pictures of cats 🐱. One of the interesting questions introduced to Miriayam was how to use the Chrome V8 debugger to debug local Node applications.

After the introduction and Q&A, we moved on to the workshop, where participants competed with each other to see who could solve the game first. Here you can see the Astrix team members furiously trying to get to the finish line first…

The winner (perhaps unsurprisingly 😉) was Tal Skverer!

Miriyam’s workshop about Chrome Dev Tools is both open source and free. Check it out here: https://learnchromedev.tools.

Pizza Break 🍕

Session #1 // Concurrency !== Parallelism by Amit Trivizki

Amit is a core team member in Astrix. He gave us a deep-dive into the meaning of Concurrency VS Parallelism. His main message is: concurrency is NOT parallelism.

Concurrency is about dealing with a lot of things at once.
Parallelism is about doing a lot of things at once

- Rob Pike

To explain the meaning of the quote: Concurrency is an abstract, high-level, and normally useful concept. It's when multiple tasks can run in overlapping periods. It's an illusion of multiple tasks running in parallel because of a very fast switching by the CPU. Two tasks can't run at the same time on a single-core CPU. Parallelism is when tasks actually run in parallel on multiple CPUs.

We also discussed how to conceptualize concurrent solutions in Go and Node and the surprising and non-intuitive timing results of different concurrent designs. The results were surprising - many patterns that feel like should be the same have wildly different execution times!

Session #2 // Black Holes by Amit Levin

Amit is a core team member in Astrix. After the first two Tech sessions, Amit gave us something different by teaching us science! He educated us on the physics of black holes in a fascinating talk.

We spoke a little bit about the math behind it, why black holes appear so weird, how science fiction movies always get it wrong, the Doppler effect, and basically just had a great time geeking out trying to wrap our heads around this extreme notion.

Summary

Overall, it was a great meetup. We want to thank our good friends at Astrix Security and our amazing Head of People Operations Noa Bergman for making this happen.

Thank you friends for your time, great lectures, cooperation, and even helping with recycling the beer bottles and soda cans <3. We’re already thinking about the next meetup, where we can discuss more specific experiences and compare the development challenges we’re all facing.

We aim to keep evolving as part of our engineering culture; be it meetups, networking, retrospectives, pair-programming sessions, writing reading materials, and more. This is our strategic way of winning!

If this culture seems like a place you’d fit into, and even help evolve, hit us up - we’re hiring talents.