Matt Stine

The Pragmatic Programmer Revisited

While rummaging through some books the other day, I came across my copy of The Pragmatic Programmer. Flipping to the copyright page, I realized that it had been 16 years since its publication. Many of our careers have been deeply affected by reading and considering the many nuggets of wisdom contained in this book, and it is near the top of multiple recommended reading lists.

Refactoring the Monolith: LIVE!

Many of us would love to embrace microservices in our day-to-day work. But most of us don’t have the opportunity to start over with a pure greenfield effort. We have to understand how to refactor our existing monolithic applications toward microservices. Practical steps include building new features as microservices, leveraging anti-corruption layers, strangling the monolith.

Confessions of an Agile Product Manager

Over the past year I’ve had the pleasure of wearing the hat of “product manager” for the Spring Cloud Services team at Pivotal, operating using a distributed variant of the Pivotal Labs process. Along the way I’ve learned many valuable lessons that I hope you’ll be able to apply to your product development efforts.

Concourse: CI that scales with your project

Concourse (http://concourse.ci/) is a CI system composed of simple tools and ideas. Concourse can express entire pipelines, integrating with arbitrary resources, or it can be used to execute one-off tasks, either locally or in another CI system. Concourse attempts to reduce the risk of adoption by encouraging practices that keep your project loosely coupled to the details of your continuous integration infrastructure.

Reactive Fault Tolerant Programing with Hystrix and RxJava

As we build distributed systems composed of microservices, we introduce new potential performance problems and failure points. As the number of nodes in our system increases, these problems rapidly amplify. In order to keep our composite systems responsive, we can apply the techniques of reactive programming. In order to keep our composite systems healthy, we can apply fault tolerance patterns like circuit breakers and bulkheads.

Microservices in the Large: Tracer Bullet Architecture

Much is said about the decentralized governance of and local autonomy given to “two pizza teams” build microservices. But how do you organize teams to effectively collaborate to build the eventual composite system?

Distributed Tracing of Microservice Architectures

Embracing microservices also means embracing distributed systems. Distributed systems carry with them multiple challenges. One set of challenges includes problem of visibility into the behavior of the composite system, understanding that behavior, and being able to isolate the cause(s) of problematic behavior. These challenges can be addressed by applying the techniques known collectively as Distributed Tracing.

Monitoring and Metrics and Logging: Oh My!

Visibility is one of the primary characteristics of applications that aren’t just coded well, but run well in production. We need visibility to understand:

• how our system performs
• how our system misbehaves
• how our system fails
• how our users interact with our system
• what’s providing value to users and what’s not
• and more!

In this talk we’ll look at the three disciplines of monitoring, metrics, and logging, and see how properly used, they can dramatically increase our system’s inherent visibility.