This week, I had the chance to attend the 60th edition of meet.js Białystok! As usual, the event attracted interesting speakers, inspiring presentations, and developers from different technologies. Although this time there was no pizza or free beer, the atmosphere was great, and the conversations during the breaks were priceless. I even met some friends from my postgraduate JavaScript Developer studies.
First presentation: Create microservices in AWS quickly and without unnecessary complexity
Dariusz Korolczuk, a man with rich professional experience and a preference for simple but effective solutions, shared his knowledge about creating microservices in AWS. He showed how to:
- start with prototypes in pure JavaScript (.mjs, yargs),
- smoothly move to serverless using Lambda and lambda-api,
- use SQS to handle asynchronous tasks,
- send email notifications using SES.
Thanks to the Serverless Framework and .env files, the deployment process was simple, scalable, and flexible.
The speaker gave some practical tips and showed a great sense of humor.
Second presentation: I’m sorry Dev, I’m afraid I can’t do that – struggles of a developer with GenAI
Paweł Łukaszuk, an experienced programmer, academic teacher (and mine too), and Tech Leader, took us on a journey into the world of generative artificial intelligence. With humor and distance, he talked about:
- myths that AI will soon replace all of us,
- challenges related to the costs and legality of using GenAI,
- differences between OpenAI and Anthropic (“it depends”),
- myths about training models on our code.
Paweł also shared personal insights about when it is worth adding GenAI to a project and when it’s better to avoid it. The presentation was full of practical tips and anecdotes that entertained the audience.
It was definitely worth attending this event, both for the interesting content and the opportunity to exchange experiences with other participants. If you haven’t had the chance to attend meet.js yet, I highly recommend it! See you at the next edition!