The One Where We Geek Out on Sustainable Applications with Aicha Laafia

Update: 2025-01-14

Description

About our guest:

Aicha Laafia Java Software Engineer with a love for coding, a taste for delicious food, and a heart for volunteering. Aicha is also a member of the Moroccan Association of Computing Science, a Women Techmakers and Girls Code ambassador, and an IAmRemarkable facilitator.

Find our guest on:

Find us on:

All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada and geeking out with me today, I have Aisha Laafia. Welcome, Aisha.

AICHA: Welcome, Adriana. And welcome everyone.

ADRIANA: So nice to have you on here and for a little bit of background. Oh, so first of all, actually, where are you calling from today?

AICHA: Well, right now I'm from Lyon in France.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. And you know, given that it's afternoon here in, in Canada when we're recording in Toronto, Canada, um, it's evening for you, so I appreciate you taking the time out of your evening, especially because you, you had an event that you were at earlier today that you ducked out of for this recording, so definitely appreciate that. And you know, I wanted to mention to our viewers slash listeners that the way that you and I met was really cool. We met at KCD Porto in Portugal in September of 2024. And yeah, I, I was keynoting there and then you came up to me after my keynote and we started chatting, and it was just so great chatting with you. I had like such an amazing time and, you were telling me your story, so I can't wait to get into that. But first, I have some lightning round slash icebreaker questions for you. Okay, you ready?

AICHA: I'm ready.

ADRIANA: Okay. I swear they're not terrible, they're not painful. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

AICHA: Well, I am a righty.

ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

AICHA: I'm always Android girl.

ADRIANA: All right. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

AICHA: Well, I preferred Linux, but I'm forced to use Windows.

ADRIANA: Oh, that makes me cry. That makes me cry. Do you use Windows subsystem for Linux?

AICHA: That's my hero, literally.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's what saved me too. The last time I had a Windows machine, I'm like, please let them have enabled it. Because that's the other thing. You get a Windows machine and like some companies disable it or don't allow you to like download the VMs, like the whatever Linux VM to run WSL.

AICHA: Well, for me...that's the first thing I ask about is that give me the administration role in my. I have to take control.

ADRIANA: Yes, yes, yes. Good call, good call. And I mean, you do dev work, you should have, you know, some, some sort of administrative access over your, your machine, right?

AICHA: Indeed. And as I am you can say old school. I'm all more like comand type of people. Developers who use command more than like platforms or desktop applications. For me. I like to write things to see logs more than just to click on buttons.

ADRIANA: For sure, for sure. I feel you. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite programming language?

AICHA: It's obviously Java. I don't know like hesitate this question. Of course it's Java.

ADRIANA: Of course. I love it.

AICHA: I love it.

ADRIANA: I think I told you Java was like I spent many years in, in Java, so Java and I were very good friends for a long time. I couldn't tell you what's new in Java anymore though. I'm so out of touch.

AICHA: Well, there's a lot of things indeed. Like Java has been accelerating very, very fast and that's a very good news for us.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Like what? Okay, so my. I'm of the days of like EJBs and J2EE which I don't even know if that's like a thing anymore. What's, what's something cool in Java like that you're excited about.

AICHA: Like right now it's still a thing, but they're working more like beans or Spring doing its work with more advanced features that's handling the beans. But for Java native, like we have the system that. For example, what I really loved is the ZCG like the garbage collection. Right now it's really advanced. Like for there is ?Shenandoah, for example that it doesn't care about what memory size you have. It's always accelerating, always taking care of your memory handling mechanism. Also like right now we don't have to type a lot of things. That's something that many people complain about Java. There are that there are a lot of new features. You get anonymous classes you can create. You don't have like really to do that big lines. You have like Lombok project that you. We cannot like really right now write all those getters and setters for our instance. You can just enable annotation. Getter. Setter.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, yes. This would have saved me so much time. I remember like painstakingly writing all the getters and setters back in the day and you know like your IDE can like auto generate that stuff and all that if you, if you're nice to it. But yeah, that's, that's nice that annotations can help with that. Yay. Yeah, annotations. I think we're just getting started when I was getting out of Java. So yeah, it's been a while.

AICHA: You missed the fun.

ADRIANA: I know, I know I missed the fun. I missed the fun. I, I gotta ask because, because you're, you're into the Java world. How do you, have you ever played with Kotlin or Groovy?

AICHA: Groovy? Yes. Because I didn't. Well, Groovy. Not that much because most of the projects I worked on they were mainly based on Maven, so but a lot of part we tried to migrate some Groovy there and see to replace it but it didn't work. Yeah. So I'm mainly like Maven. For Kotlin, I didn't have the chance to do it, but it's really my to learn list because I've heard a lot of people saying it's really advanced. Like it takes the basic of Java, it's based on Java, but a lot of you can use it on the mobile, you can use it on desktop, even programs in like it's more light, small. Like in terms of performance. I've heard a lot of good things.

ADRIANA: About Kotlin, so yeah, I, I have as well. So yeah, yeah I, I, that's one I wouldn't mind trying out if, if I had time. I gotta, gotta find that time though to learn. There's like so many cool things to learn, I don't know where to start.

AICHA: Indeed this is, and this is why like Kotlin and Python is on my 2025 like to learn lists.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

AICHA: With the machine in AI right now, every like service we try to integrate AI a lot to automate the things especially that communicate with people and a lot of handling processes we try. So I have to learn Python because even using Java in the machine learning there are some script or some integrated libraries that use Python. So we have to understand. Oh in that the new things about Java, we can handle machine learning with Java too.

ADRIANA: That's cool. That's very cool. It's funny you mentioned Python because Python was like the language I learned after Java and I mean P