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Zemanta Backend
Summer School

4. – 8. JULY 2022

Zemanta is organizing a backend summer school where you will learn all areas of backend development and build a robust backend system from scratch.

Modern backend development for data-intensive applications

Zemanta is organizing a backend summer school where you will learn all areas of backend development and build a robust backend system from scratch. We will go through the process of planning the architecture of the system and setting up the development environment, followed by creating a service and running it locally. We will then connect the service to a NoSQL database and an external API, add logging and instrument the application with useful metrics. You will choose what functionality your application will have and implement the necessary business logic. After that, you will learn how to build and dockerize your application and how to deploy it to a public cloud. You will be able to choose between Kotlin and Java accompanied by the Spring Boot framework, which helps you quickly bootstrap production ready applications.

The summer school will consist of many useful talks given by our expert backend engineers, each of which will be followed by a hands-on workshop, where you will put the new knowledge in practice. It’s a great opportunity if you want a better understanding of what it means to be a backend developer and how we do it in the industry

The whole event will happen on site in our offices near Tivoli park and will be completely FREE of charge (including lunch, coffee, snacks and all activities). But we do expect your full commitment during the one week of the summer school – remember: if you apply, get accepted and don’t show up, you are taking away a seat from someone else who really wanted to attend!

Who will benefit most from attending the Backend Summer School?

Eager individuals who know how to write code (most of the summer school is very hands-on), and have some knowledge on databases and software development in general. For example:

  • Final year undergraduate; masters or PhD students at Computer Science or related university programmes
  • Recent graduates from Computer Science or related university courses
  • Professionals in Computer Science jobs who want to learn more about backend development and working on data-intensive applications

How much programming / software development experience do you need?

You will learn a lot about backend development and what it covers during the summer school but it is preferable that you know at least the basics about databases and REST APIs. Good rule of thumb is that if you ever wrote an application with a simple backend, if you did any studies at a computer science university programme or work as a software engineer, then you’re good.

What is the plan?

A week of interesting and relevant talks on different backend development topics given by our highly skilled engineers, followed by hands-on workshops where you will implement the presented concepts and end up with a functional backend service running in production. All this will be accompanied by fun activities and good food.

Detailed agenda:

Monday

9:30-10:15

Coffee & Chat

10:15-11:00

Talk: What we do (Zemanta & Outbrain)

11:00-12:00

Talk: Intro to backend development and Summer school

12:00-13:00

Lunch

13:00-13:30

Talk: Kotlin & Java

13:30-14:45

Workshop: Dev environment setup

14:45-15:30

Talk: Spring Boot

15:30-17:00

Workshop: Setting up and running a first service

17:00 ->

Minigolf & drinks

Tuesday

9:30-10:00

Coffee & Chat

10:00-10:45

Talk: Databases

10:45-12:00

Workshop: Spring Data Elasticsearch

12:00-13:00

Lunch

13:00-14:30

Workshop: Picking an external API and brainstorming ideas

14:30-15:00

Talk: REST clients

15:00-17:00

Workshop: Writing a client and fetching data

17:00 ->

Board game night

Wednesday

9:30-10:00

Coffee & Chat

10:00-11:00

Talk: Logging and metrics

11:00-12:00

Workshop: Adding and exposing metrics and logs

12:00-13:00

Lunch

13:00-13:45

External talk

13:45-17:00

Working on projects

17:00 ->

Escape room

Thursday

9:30-10:00

Coffee & Chat

10:00-10:45

Talk: Building and dockerizing your application

10:45-12:00

Workshop: Dockerizing the application and running it locally

12:00-13:00

Lunch

13:00-14:00

Talk: Deployment pipelines, CI/CD

14:00-17:00

Workshop: Deploying to AWS

17:00 ->

Board game night

Friday

9:30-10:00

Coffee & Chat

10:00-12:00

Final touches & preparing applications for presentation

12:00-13:00

Lunch

13:00-14:30

Showcasing final products and sharing knowledge

14:30-15:00

Graduation ceremony

15:00-16:00

Next steps and AMA for our backend engineers

16:00 ->

Drinks

Why learn from us?

At Zemanta, we’re building the most advanced native advertising platform in the world.

Here’s what our world-class backend teams are working with:

  • Handling over 3 million requests per second
  • 3 in-house data centers and 2 leased data centers
  • More than 500 microservices running in more than 10k pods
  • More than 500k internal API calls per second
  • Petabytes of data
  • Sharing knowledge externally (talks at conferences, meet-ups, hackathons, other events)
  • A part of a world-class software engineering and data science organization distributed across Zemanta and Outbrain

Zemanta joined Outbrain, the largest native advertising company in the world, and together we are on a mission of enabling everyone to discover great content.

Are you ready to take a part in our Backend Summer School?