Conference recap: a knowledge sharing event between 4 companies
On Friday 25th March, Extra Horizon co-hosted a mini-conference at the Corda Campus in Hasselt, Belgium. As well as Extra Horizon, three other software development companies were present; Prato HR, Kunlabora, and Hootsuite. This conference was an opportunity for the companies to share technical and software-related knowledge, as well as gain fresh insights from one another.
Four engaging and interesting presentations took place, led by both Extra Horizon and the attending companies.
1. Challenges when developing Software as a Medical Device — Kobe Leysen, Chief Technical Officer at Extra Horizon
Developing software as a medical device comes with many challenges, with the ultimate aim being to deploy your product to market in good time and with confidence. However, human lives can be at risk when developing medical device software. For this reason, you must pay close attention to complying to regulations, implementing a quality management system, and performing clinical studies of your product. This can make it harder to get your product, and any new features, onto the market.
Kobe Leysen explained how developing medical software differs hugely from traditional software development, using their customer FibriCheck as a case study.
2. Segregating customer infrastructure in medical backends — Christopher Hex, Product Owner at Extra Horizon
As Extra Horizon provides a backend for medical applications, keeping customer data separate is a top priority. This is why they deploy dedicated backend environments for each customer. Christopher Hex explained how they leverage AWS Organisations and Terraform, in order to properly segregate customer information in a maintainable way.
3. Serverless — Kunlabora
Kunlabora, a Leuven-based software development company, gave a presentation about the benefits of serverless technology, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), for their applications.
With Kunlabora having applied serverless technologies to their projects for many years already, they explained how to use the serverless framework to build successful applications, useful techniques to solve integration use cases, and how AWS can be used as an alternative to the serverless framework.
4. Microservices from the trenches — Prato HR
Prato HR, a developer and supplier of HR software and services, talked about their microservices architecture. This architecture forms the basis of their payroll engine, which was developed over 4 years ago.
In this session, attendees found out why Prato HR chose microservice architecture, the advantages and disadvantages of this choice, how they organised their teams, and the organisational and architectural lessons learned in the process.
5. GraphQL — Hootsuite
Hootsuite, a social media management tool, explained what GraphQL is and how you can implement GraphQL into your API, as well as the common pitfalls of GraphQL. Using themselves as a case study, Hootsuite explained how GraphQL aggregates data from their microservices before displaying it in their web application.
The organizers expressed satisfaction with the conference’s success and noted their enthusiasm for continuing to exchange expertise with partner companies.