Lightning Talk Blog

Education is an important part of our lives at Instea. We regularly host internal technical discussions where team members share short talks on IT innovations. Here is a summary of the most recent topics.

1. Actors

The Actor model is a programming paradigm enabling scalable, concurrent, and fault-tolerant applications. Key implementations include Erlang (with native support) and the Akka / Akka.NET libraries.

Core Rules

• All computation occurs within actors
• Communication happens exclusively through messages
• Each actor receives a unique address upon creation
• Messages are immutable
• Actors process messages sequentially (giving them a single-threaded appearance)
• Actors can modify state, send messages, or create child actors

Hierarchy & Fault Tolerance

Actors organize hierarchically with parent-child relationships. Parents supervise children and respond to failures by choosing a strategy: resume, restart, stop permanently, or implement a custom approach.

The following screenshot shows a basic Erlang actor implementation with state management:

2. Python for Node.js Developers

The modern Python stack using FastAPI is a compelling alternative for JavaScript developers:

• Optional built-in type checking via mypy
• ASGI servers (Uvicorn) use single-threaded event loops — mirroring Node.js architecture
• FastAPI provides routing, OpenAPI documentation, dependency injection, and security
• PyPI manages dependencies (pipenv is roughly equivalent to npm/yarn)
• Recommended tools: PyCharm IDE, pytest (testing), flake8 (linting), black (formatting)

3. Web Workers (create-react-app)

Workerize-loader enables offloading computationally intensive JavaScript tasks to background threads. It works out-of-the-box with create-react-app and supports TypeScript with declaration files.

4. Google Maps — HTML Markers

Custom HTML markers solve alignment and debugging issues with standard Google Maps markers. The implementation requires extending google.maps.OverlayView and defining three lifecycle methods:

• onAdd() — DOM creation
• draw() — position updates
• onRemove() — cleanup

5. Recoil

Recoil is a state management library developed by Facebook. It has a more "reactish" and familiar design compared to Redux.

Key Components

• Atoms: State units that are directly readable and writable
• Selectors: Derived data nodes (must be pure functions); support asynchronous operations

Advantages over Redux include a simpler API and React 18 concurrent rendering support. The main limitations are its experimental status and a smaller developer community compared to Redux.

6. SonarCloud

SonarCloud is a cloud-based code quality and security review service requiring minimal setup. Key features include:

• Issue detection across 24 programming languages
• Severity-based issue reporting
• Quality gates for pull requests
• SonarLint IDE extension for preventative fixes

---

We also touched on several other topics during these sessions: Low Code/No Code platforms, page load performance and its impact on UX and conversions, and Nest.js for backend development.

Interested in diving deeper into any of these topics? Leave a comment or drop us an email.