Today, I attended the Stress Less, Talk More: Meet & Greet Brno! meetup. The event was hosted by the company ShipMonk, and it was their second ever event in Brno. In the future, we can expect more of those, and I am happy to share my thoughts and impressions with you.
ShipMonk
Let’s first introduce the organizing company ShipMonk. ShipMonk is a technology-driven fulfillment and logistics company that provides e-commerce businesses with a full range of services to help manage their order fulfillment and shipping operations.
ShipMonk’s services include warehousing and inventory management, order processing, picking and packing, shipping, and returns management. The company integrates with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, making it easy for online retailers to manage their orders and inventory across multiple sales channels.
In addition to its core fulfillment services, ShipMonk offers a range of value-added services to help e-commerce businesses streamline their operations, such as kitting and assembly, labeling and customization, and quality control inspections. ShipMonk also provides real-time data and analytics to help its clients optimize their supply chain and improve their overall operational efficiency.
SOC 2 Certification done simple!
Speaker: David Pavlik (LinkedIn, Twitter)
David is the CTO at ShipMonk. Throughout his career, he has worked for a variety of companies, such as Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, and SpaceX. After returning from the States, he was the CIO at Kiwi, and now he empowers ShipMonk R&D to be the best version of themselves.
In his talk, David explained how ShipMonk was able to leverage the product of the company Vanta in order to become SOC 2 compliant and ensure that they will stay compliant even in a rapidly growing and changing business. Nowadays, adhering to some of the standards and regulations (such as SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, etc.) matters much more, and using automated tools is a must. After the talk, I was able to talk to David, and I am impressed by his pragmatic approach towards cybersecurity, as we both believe that security should bolster the developers effectiveness instead of slowing them down.
Observable Spring Boot apps
Speaker: Filip Procházka (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Filip is the Principal Engineer at ShipMonk. In his previous incarnations, he worked as a VP of Engineering at Cogvio and Architect and Senior Developer for both Rohlik.cz and Damejidlo.cz. Filip is also a friend of mine whom I know from the PHP community (I used to be a PHP developer back in my days).
In his presentation, Filip demystified the concept of “observable” by introducing us to the concepts of OpenTelemetry and DataDog. OpenTelemetry provides you with a single, open-source standard for capturing and exporting metrics, traces, and logs in cloud-native applications and infrastructure. As a zealous Java supporter, his slides were full of Java code snippets and insightful illustrations. That, combined with his captivating personality, skyrocketed his talk to the top 3 of today’s meetup!
Asynchronous PHP using PCNTL signals
Speaker: Michael Olšavský (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Michael is the Principal Engineer at ShipMonk. He, together with his colleagues, ensures that the backend codebase is state of the art. Michael is also one of the hiring managers for PHP positions. In the past, he worked at several developer and DevOps positions.
In his talk, Michael showed us how to utilize the PCNTL extension to perform basic events asynchronously. PCNTL is a module that provides us with a set of functions for managing and controlling processes from within PHP scripts and is commonly used for implementing process daemons as well as writing scripts that can handle signals such as SIGTERM or SIGINT.
Closing thoughts
I am happy that ShipMonk has decided to organize this meetup and is planning to do more in the future. With some interesting speakers, diverse topics, and amazing refreshments, it was an evening I will look fondly back on for a long time. After the sessions ended, there was a networking block where everybody just hung out (pun not intended) and had a great time. I already look forward to the next meetup!
If you have read so far, you might want to follow me here on Hashnode. Feel free to connect with me over at LinkedIn or Mastodon.
