We have been listening to you and we agree that our community needs more vibrance. We are not able to grant your wishes for in-person events any time soon, but we are working hard to provide a platform for all user groups in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg to make use of to bring their monthly meetups back in virtual form.

Thursday 10th September 2020

19:10 Of representation and interpretation: A unified theory
Talk by Arnout Boks (50 minutes)

Many hard problems in programming originate from one single source: not properly distinguishing the representation of data from the way it is interpreted. Have you ever written code that filters $_GET for SQL injection attempts? Struggled with timezones? Tried to get escaping right for Javascript in HTML? Detected the character encoding of a string? All are examples of this one problem. In this talk we will look at some examples of the representation-interpretation problem and find the general pattern behind it. We will see how primitive types make it so hard for us to get this right, and how we can use value objects to steer us in the right direction. You’ll start finding many more examples of this pattern and understand them more easily. Contains: math, character sets, strong opinions on string escaping, and an almost illegal slide.

20:10 Regex-fu
Talk by Juliette Reinders Folmer (50 minutes)

Regular expression, you either hate them or you love them, but do you really know how to harness their power ? Based on the PCRE implementation, this talk will show you how to get the most out of your /^regex(es)?$/, how switches affect your results, how to be less greedy, how to assert your power and let's not forget: when *not* to use regex.