Michel Weststrate: After a Conference, I Usually Want to Dive into 10 Different Technologies at the Same Time ReactiveConf Follow Oct 4, 2015 · 2 min read

Reactive Conference is bringing you an interview with one of our speakers Michel Weststrate.

What’s your personal elevator pitch?

Life is all about balance and nuance, and so is programming. As programmers we need a certain level of pragmatism to be able to justify our decisions from a business perspective. Sometimes we may believe some tool to be an universal problem solver. Each time we discover a fancy new hammer we suddenly consider all problems to be nails, while we might be served better with an old-fashioned screwdriver. For each problem we should consider which technology serves us best. React or JQuery? Mutable or immutable? RDBMs or NoSQL? Streams, async / await or promises? The answers to those questions depend on many factors, both technical and non-technical.

How did you end up being a web developer?

I debated between studying psychology and computer science. I really like the analytical way of thinking in both fields. There are symptoms and you have to deduce where the root problem lies, often while working with too little or too much information. I like web development because it is one of the most innovative areas in our industry.

Is there any issue in web development world that should be fixed asap?

Good support for async / await. All those callbacks are often hard to explain to people coming from, for example, Java. Yet working on a single thread is actually pretty awesome most of the time.

What is the most important project you’re currently working on?

At Mendix I’m currently working on a project that moves an offline application consisting of maybe half a million KLOC to the web and which needs to be maintained by several different teams.

What will you speak about at Reactive 2015?

I will tell a bit about the journey and design principles of the above project. I will also elaborate on how we solved the data flow problem using the Mobservable library which I am currently open sourcing (I’ll try to wrap that up before the conference).

What do you expect from the conference?