“Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.” Docker creates containers that provide running process with:

an equal slice of CPU
a maximum memory quota
its own process ID (PID) namespace
its own network interface
its own private root filesystem

It does this by leveraging low-level Linux kernel primitives like cgroups and namepaces. The end result is a portable application container that can run anywhere Docker can run, including on VMs, bare-metal servers, OpenStack clusters, public instances, or combinations of the above.

Containers are an excellent way to package your application such that it can run consistently everywhere you want to run it, a fantastic step toward Continuous Delivery. In this session we'll look at how to use Docker to package, deploy, and run Java applications and other services. We'll also compare Docker to another container solution, Warden, which is a key component of the Cloud Foundry PaaS.

Building and running container images isn’t enough. There are very real problems that we still have to solve:

how do we schedule and run these containers on infrastructure?
how do we create networks that can link these containers across multiple hosts?
how do we handle data that needs to persist across container restarts?
how do we handle concerns like service discovery and load balancing?

These concerns are the focus of much of the development work being done in the Docker ecosystem today.

We’ll examine the use of several projects and how they contribute to solutions to these problems, including:

As we move toward microservices, we learn to properly decompose not only our behavior model, but also our data model into bounded contexts. This data decomposition is not without consequences. By placing strict boundaries around ownership of domain concepts, we make it more difficult to refer to concepts that naturally want to cross these boundaries. How do we “denormalize” these entities effectively? How do we keep these representations in sync? What do transactions look like? How do we ask BIG questions that span multiple contexts? These are the questions that we’ll dive into in this session.

Topics to include:

CAP Theorem
Embracing Eventual Consistency
Command-Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
Caching
Event Sourcing
Lambda Architecture

You don't need Node.js or MongoDB to build “full-stack” solutions, but they sure help! This stack is popular for its scalability, its promise of developer productivity, and the capability to develop all components with a single programming language. Not all use cases are a great fit for JavaScript on the server. But love it or hate it, there are valuable lessons and use cases here for all developers.

We'll examine a complete multiuser end-to-end app using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. We'll connect it to a simple Node.js instance using WebSocket. We'll wire up a simple document-oriented persistence layer with MongoDB. And we'll do it all using mostly-vanilla JavaScript to illustrate concepts that don't depend on particular frameworks.

You'll leave this session convinced that full-stack JavaScript has “teeth”, and that it's not all just hype. And whether you intend to use JavaScript, Java, Ruby, or a mix of various frameworks on the server, the architecture of a dynamic HTML5 app will be made transparent and straightforward.

You don't need massive frameworks to build mobile apps responsive to touch events, that contain fluid animations, or that are easily deployed to app stores. All you really need is a solid grasp of the JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 features and APIs that enable a compelling experience.

In this session, I will show some examples of mobile apps built with HTML5 that offer instantaneous handling of touch events such as pan gestures. I'll demonstrate best practices using CSS3 transitions to implement card and panel design patterns typical of mobile user interfaces. And I'll show just how easy it is to extend the device features available to HTML5 using Cordova, packaging a mobile app for app store deployment.

Web Components change the way you build web applications and think about front-end architecture. Finally, web developers have a sane way to scope and modularize not just their JavaScript, but also the HTML5 and styling. The approach is elegant, encourages compatibility between frameworks, and piggybacks on the web browser's success as an open and extensible runtime. The Polymer framework demonstrates how frameworks can and should evolve in a Web Components world.

In this session, I'll provide an overview of Polymer, and demonstrate the creation of Web Components using the framework. Data binding, true encapsulation of code and style, and dynamic HTML imports are all ready for your use. You will leave with a solid understanding of Polymer basics, and real-world examples of Polymer being used in production today. You will be able to guide your current development to better align with upcoming web standards, and to understand how they will change the way we build and deploy web applications. I'll also show you examples of a large personal project using Web Components to build an entire iOS application.

If the web browser is growing up, then Web Components are the browser leaving home. Finally.

Workshop Requirements

For this workshop, you should bring a laptop with some IDE installed – Brackets (from brackets.io) works well. We'll do the rest in the session, including installing Polymer itself.

Too often we struggle with the transition. We want to become agile, but we feel that some kind of groundwork must be laid. “Sprint Zeroes” are used as an excuse to do anything BUT sprint. Provisioning hardware, setting up development environments, all these things take time in the enterprise. And all of these are very cumbersome - the opposite of agility.

In this presentation we will show you how to take an agile approach to your agile transition. When you leave you will know what you need to do to make the transition to agile with agility. You can start being agile instead of preparing to do agile.

What does it mean to be Agile? What are the basic principles of Agile Software development and how do I build my Agile Team. What do I really need to build a good agile team? What skills sets are required? Do Project Managers make good Scrum Masters? I have been “doing agile” for a while now and it doesn't seem to work? Does anyone ever really do “true agile”? This presentation is an Introduction to agility and is intended for people who are unfamiliar with Agile/Lean principles and want to learn more.

These are questions that I am asked on a regular basis. Even by people with “agile experience”.
In this presentation we will cover the BASICS of Agile software development and how to build your Agile team. This talk is NOT intended for those experienced in the agile space.

QA. We all know we need it, but quality takes time. How do we squeeze it into two-week sprints? Is a story really done if we haven’t finished QA? Do your Dev teams throw “code over the wall” to be tested in the next sprint? Or are your testers expected to test all your code in the last three Days of your Sprint? These are anti-patterns we see all the time in the Large Enterprise. In this presentation we will discuss how QA is handled - and mishandled when an Enterprises “adopt” Scrum. We will conclude with the best approaches to delivering potentially shippable code, in a quickly changing business world. This presentation will assume a basic understanding of agile principles.

In this presentation we will discuss how QA is handled - and mishandled. We will conclude with the best approaches to delivering production ready code in a lean, agile world. This presentation will assume a basic understanding of agile principles. This talk is not technical in nature. It is intended for those struggling with the transition from traditional QA enterprise teams - silos, testers report to a separate management structure - to QA in an Agile environment. We will discuss QA anti-patterns and how agile addresses them.

Being a professional software engineer, it's easy to fall into the belief that one's role in a company is to write code.
Another perspective might be that one's role is to solve problems for the business and that writing code is merely one of several tools available to help solve those problems.

There are numerous problem-solving “anti-patterns” that are rampant in the industry today. “Forewarned is forearmed” as they say. In addition to highlighting these “anti-patterns” with real-life examples and the (sometimes) disastrous consequences, Michael asks some of the difficult questions about our true motivations for our decisions and how our decisions can either positively or negatively affect our team and our organization.

We all have an innate sense of what's possible. Not only is this how magicians fool you, but it might also be what's holding you back.

In this session Michael Carducci shares how he applied lessons learned in his career as a professional magician to his “day-job” as a software engineer.

Magicians have a simple process for creating new material; think of the most impossible thing you can imagine, the engineer a way to make it possible. Michael has been engineering solutions to “impossible” problems for nearly 20 years and this has given him a unique perspective on dealing with challenges in all aspects of his life.

This talk combines illusion, anecdotes and real-world examples to help identify and overcome your mental obstacles.

This 2015 presentation covers the Guava library developed by Google. Guava provides collection extensions to the Java Collection API and, along with this, a cornucopia of time-saving utilities that bring Java as close as possible to some of the more functional
and/or dynamic language competitors like Scala, Ruby, and Clojure. Why a brand spanking new 2015 version of this presentation? Well, there more new stuff to learn and use!

This presentation covers briefly on the tried and true stuff like functions, predicates and how they interact with Java 8. It covers how to use new collection constructs that make life easier, including MultiMap, BiMaps, and MultiSets, immutable collections, handling Futures with callbacks and shutdowns, caches, and then we will dwell on tons of the newer features that came with Releases 16, 17, and 18.

We started with documents on the Web. Then we realized we could share data using the same technologies. And then services. Concepts were next to help us organize all of this information. And now, we want Things on the Internet and Web too. Fortunately, we already have much of the infrastructure to welcome all of these new physical information producers and consumers to the party.

This talk will be a high level overview of how the Internet of Everything scales to accept entire new classes of devices and how we make sense of it all. We will also look toward the future of where we are going next.

Modern applications are changing as we embrace the engineering practices associated with Continuous Delivery and DevOps, migrate our applications to modern cloud platforms, elastically scale applications with the dynamics of customer demand, and embrace microservices architectures. The Twelve-Factor App is a collection of application development patterns developed by Heroku engineers that aim to support these types of architectural and cultural change.

The 12 Factors are:

One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys
Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
Store config in the environment
Treat backing services as attached resources
Strictly separate build and run stages
Execute the app as one or more stateless processes
Export services via port binding
Scale out via the process model
Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown
Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible
Treat logs as event streams
Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes

We’ll examine how to implement these factors using JVM “microframeworks” like Spring Boot and Dropwizard.

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.

Topics will include:

what metrics should we collect?
how should we expose those metrics?
can frameworks help?
what should we monitor?
monitoring components vs. systems
building dashboards
the art of logging
log aggregation and analysis
tools, tools, tools, tools!

Modularity is coming to the Java platform! Java 9 will introduce the Jigsaw module system. OSGi is here today. But don’t wait to start designing modular software. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a framework or a new runtime to start building modular software applications. You can start today. Learn how!

In this session, we'll examine what it means to develop modular software on the Java platform. We'll examine the goals and benefits of modular software, and explore the patterns of modular architecture that help us develop modular software systems. With just a few easy steps, we'll see how to transform our software from a huge monolith to an extensible system of collaborating software modules. By examining an existing software system, we'll see first hand how we can increase software modularity with minimal disruption. You'll walk away not just with a much deeper understanding of the benefits of modular software, but also a migration roadmap for refactoring existing applications to increase their modularity. In other words, you'll see how to get ready today for the application platform of tomorrow.

OSGi is the dynamic module system for the Java platform. Today, OSGi is a major part of most application platforms, tools, and is supported by many major frameworks. In this session, we'll explore the fundamental underpinnings of OSGi, explore the OSGi ecosystem, clearly articulate the benefits of OSGi, and examine OSGi in the context of other microservice architectures.

After a gentle introduction to OSGi, we'll explore how OSGi allows us to overcome classpath hell and design very adaptable and flexible software systems. Through several coding examples, we'll explore numerous OSGi techniques, including versioning, hot deployment, isolation, lifecycle, and OSGi specific microservices.

Traditional approaches to software architecture are broken. Attempts to define the architectural vision for a system early in the development lifecycle do not work. In today’s volatile technology and business climate, big architecture up front is not sustainable. In this session, we will explore several principles that help us create more flexible and adaptable software systems. But first, we’ll expose the true essence of what’s meant when we say “architectural agility.”

What’s the goal of architecture? To serve as a blueprint of the system that everyone understands? Possess the flexibility to evolve as new requirements emerge? To satisfy the architectural qualities, including performance, security, availability, reliability, and scalability? Yes. Yes. Yes. At the heart of these three questions are the three pillars of architecture - social, process, and structure. But how do we create software architectures that achieves all of these goals? And how do we ensure no disconnect occurs between developers responsible for implementation and architects responsible for the vision? In this session, we’ll explore several principles to increase architectural agility and provide some actionable advice that will help you get started immediately.

New architectural paradigms are emerging that challenge traditional assumptions about the way that scalable and adaptable software is built. At the heart of these paradigms is a modular approach that breaks apart the monolithic application into microservices. But breaking apart the monolith has implications beyond software architecture and microservices are just one implementation alternative.

In this session, we will explore modularity’s fundamental role in a large scale software architecture. We’ll compare and contrast different implementation technologies for building modular architectures. And we’ll discover the impact that modern architecture has on infrastructure and methodology. Finally, we will examine how modern web and mobile apps fit into this overall architectural story.

Microservice architecture is a modern architectural approach that focuses on breaking apart the monolith and building modular services. But the framework we use has a tremendous impact on how we build and deploy services. A new type of framework has emerged that provides a lightweight stack for building microservices.

In this session, we will explore some modern Java micro frameworks for building microservices. Example frameworks you may see include Dropwizard, Spark, Ninja, RestExpress, Play, Restlet, and RestX.

This is my story of lessons learned on why improvement efforts fail… I had a great team. We were disciplined about best practices and spent tons of time on improvements. Then I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn’t ship again for a year.

Despite our best efforts with CI, unit testing, design reviews, and code reviews, we lost our ability to understand the system. We thought our problems were caused by technical debt building up in the code base, but we were wrong. We failed to improve, because we didn’t solve the right problems. Eventually, we turned our project around, but with a lot of tough lessons along the way.

In this talk, we'll go through a deep-dive case study that starts with project failure, then revisit all the mistakes we made over a 3 year journey to turn the project around. We'll discuss bad assumptions, strategies that failed, ideas that changed, techniques and tools that changed, and how we eventually learned our way to victory.

After reviewing each mistake, we'll have a group discussion about the underlying reasons, so you can avoid these mistakes on your own project.

In this session, we will take a look at Angular - the powerful MVVM SPA framework from Google. We will discuss some of the terminology that Angular offers, and see how we can use that to develop highly interactive, dynamic web applications. See “Detail” for a list of topics I cover and the Github repo URL

In this session we will take a look at Angular and using it to develop rich web applications. Angular embraces HTML and CSS, allowing you to extend HTML towards your application, and uses plain JavaScript which makes your code easy to reuse, and test.

Note: This is an intro level talk. It is targeted towards developers who are curious about Angular and want to learn about the fundamental features and concepts in Angular.

Topics Covered -

Bootstrapping an AngularJS application using ng-app
ng-init and the evaluation {{ }} directive
A brief look at $rootScope and scoping rules
ng-model
Controllers, Dependency Injection, and the View-Model
Looping using ng-repeat
Forms using ng-form, form validation and submission in AngularJS
ng-messages to display form validation messages to the user
Angular provided filters and custom filters

GitHub URL - https://github.com/looselytyped/angudone-workshop/tree/solutions

In this session, we will take a look at Angular - the powerful MVVM SPA framework from Google. We will discuss some of the terminology that Angular offers, and see how we can use that to develop highly interactive, dynamic web applications. See “Detail” for a list of topics I cover and the Github repo URL

In this session we continue our discussion from Part I. As we continue to evolve our application we will seek to use, and understand a few more of AngularJS' core constructs.

Factories and services
Routing using ng-view and $routeProvider
AJAX calls to a backend using $http

If time permits we will look at a few good practices when developing AngularJS applications, ways to modularize your code, and some tools that aid in the development of AngularJS applications.

In this session we will look at some JavaScript patterns, and how you can use them within your code.

No longer can you think of JavaScript as a kiddie-scripting language. JavaScript has now been promoted to a first-class citizen within your application - and with this, comes the need to think of better abstractions, code re-use - even thinking of establishing a common vocabulary to discuss approaches to writing better, cleaner and ultimately more maintainable JavaScript code.

HotSpot provides a variety of garbage collectors with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. To get the most out of our applications, we need to pick the right garbage collector and design to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its
weaknesses.

In this presentation, you'll learn about criteria for picking a garbage collector, how to measure GC performance, and how to write code that works with rather than against the GC.

Today, we all benefit from the sophistication of modern compilers and hardware, but that extra complexity can also make it difficult to reason about performance.

In this talk, we'll examine some surprising performance cases and learn how to
use profiling and benchmarking tools to better understand our modern execution environments.

Unlike earlier languages, Java had a well-defined threading and memory model from the beginning. And over the years, Java gained new packages to help solve concurrency problems.

Despite this, Java concurrency is sometimes subtle and fraught with peril.

In this talk, you'll learn these subtleties. And finally, you'll learn how to handle concurrency by exploring the concepts behind java.util.concurrent and other concurrency libraries.

Early releases of Java performed poorly, but those issues largely disappeared long ago with the introduction of HotSpot. However, much of the performance advice for Java persists through hearsay from those early days.

In this talk, we'll forget the hearsay and take an objective look using benchmarking and profiling tools to find out which optimizations matter today and just as importantly those that don't.

The Semantic Web and its related technologies provide an incredibly powerful model for driving the cost of data integration down to nearly zero. So, how do we deal with developers who are overwhelmed, frightened or annoyed by its data models and formats?

We really do not have to devolve into Webs of Haves and Have nots when it comes to semantically rich, interoperable data and modern application tools, frameworks and user interfaces. There is a surprisingly simple mechanism by which “normal” developers can benefit from the power of the Semantic Web and the latter's developers can integrate with the panoply of tools and toys under constant development by the former.

The trick is JSON-LD. A simple, but deliberately designed extension to JSON that bridges both worlds and is finding its way into many other uses by the likes of Google and GitHub.

We will learn about:

the JSON-LD format
how to frame, sign and validate it
how to convert it to/from RDF
how to describe Hypermedia systems with Hydra and JSON-LD
how to embed and consume JSON-LD in HTML documents
how JSON-LD is being used in a variety of mass market ways

Encryption is a powerful tool for privacy. At least that is what we're meant to think.

If you consider encryption to be a black box of magic, you should probably attend this talk.
If you think encryption will protect your secrets, you should probably attend this talk.
If you have (or haven't) been following the news, you should probably attend this talk.

The truth is, encryption can be an effective way of making it harder for people to steal your secrets. But it isn't magical, it isn't fool proof and, depending on how you are using it, may be completely useless. It is a hard topic that we'll only touch the surface on, but there are very few topics that are more crucial for our industry and profession to understand better than encryption. You don't have to understand the math (although that will help), but you do have to understand what it will and won't do for you*.

*and how implementations of it may have been intentionally compromised

If you're not terrified, you're not paying attention.

Publishing information as webs of data does not require us to just give it away. We have a series of tools and techniques for managing identity, authentication, authorization and encryption so we only share content with those we trust.

Before we tackle Web Security, however, we need to figure out what we mean by Security. We will pull from the worlds of Security Engineering and Software Security to lay the foundation for technical approaches to protecting our web resources.

At the end of the day, an architect's primary job is to communicate. Not only do we need to make sure our teams understand the design of the system well enough to implement it, we must be able to explain our decisions to an audience that isn't impressed with how many TLAs you can rattle off in one sentence. Successful architects need to seamlessly transition from in depth technical conversations to budget meetings to discussions with end users adjusting the message to fit the audience.

While oral communication is key, good architects also spend a good deal of time putting pixel to screen via email, IM and various architectural documents we're expected to create. We need to write clearly and concisely while also knowing when the best course of action is to pick up the phone or walk to someone's desk.

In this talk, we'll explore the various methods that we as architects use to communicate with our stakeholders. We'll talk about knowing our audience, being able to present as well as how to run a good meeting. We'll discuss various patterns (and antipatterns) of presenting along with some concrete advice on how to do it better. At the end of the day, our job is to tell effectively tell a story - this talk will look at ways to do that.

Good architects are, almost by definition, good story tellers. And while good communication skills are vital to success as an architect, so too is an ability to constructively critique an architecture. In this talk, we'll explore why reviews are important and what it takes to perform them well. Additionally, we'll talk about the importance of planning and preparation in conducting a successful review.

Groovy is unusual among programming languages in that it doesn't seek to replace its predecessor. You can freely mix Groovy with Java on a class-by-class, or even line-by-line, basis. If you are working with Java, there's no reason not to make your life easier by adding Groovy where it helps the most.

Groovy helps Java in many ways, especially when processing XML or JSON data, replacing anonymous inner classes, adding tons of library methods that Java has needed all along, vastly simplified file and database manipulation, and much more. This talk will demonstrate how you can add Groovy to Java applications and simplify your development job immediately.

The Executable Specification is a result of implementing a set of practices that allow frequent change in software products to ensure that the right product is delivered economically. We'll explore how mature Agile Team's go from User Stories to Executable Specifications by implementing practices that foster collaboration, shared understanding and liberal automation to achieve living documentation that supports the team.

We'll collaboratively walk through a evolving example of how software can be created by utilizing an executable specification to document the the software requirements and confirm it completeness.

It was over 10 years ago that Spring hit the scene and made a big impact in the enterprise Java development ecosystem. Now that Spring 4.2 is available (and Spring 5 on the way), there's a lot of new features and a lot that you may not know about yet.

Whether you're already working with Spring 4 or are anxious to make a move up, there's plenty of new tricks Spring has in store for you. We'll explore them all in this overview of everything that's new in Spring.

How do you test a Spring application? The easy answer is that Spring encourages loose-coupling through interfaces and dependency injection, therefore it's easy to inject mock implementations at test time.

But, as I said, that's the easy answer.

There's more to testing an application than simple unit-testing. And the most challenging parts of an application to test are the external edges such as the web and database portions. It's difficult to inject a mock user into a web application; and injecting a mock database doesn't give any confidence that persistence code will work with a real database.

In this session, we'll look at various ways that Spring and Spring Boot help with testing the tough-to-test portions of an application.

In this session, we'll see how to build real Spring applications using Spring Boot. We'll also look under the covers to see what makes Spring Boot tick.

Spring offers a number of configuration options: XML configuration, Java configuration, and Groovy configuration to name a few. To some degree, component-scanning and autowiring help eliminate some explicit configuration. But in general most Spring applications require some essential “bootstrap” configuration to enable key functionality. What's the right way to build Spring applications when there are so many choices?

What if I told you that configuration was optional?

Spring Boot is an exciting new programming model for Spring that makes it extremely easy to create stand-alone, production-ready Spring applications. Rather than writing lots of code to satisfy the needs of a framework, Spring Boot helps you focus your coding efforts on your application. Spring Boot takes an opinionated approach to configuring Spring, making it possible to create Spring applications with little or, in some cases, no Spring configuration at all!

You wouldn't write your entire application in a single main() method or servlet. Nor would you develop an entire production-ready application in a single class. It's even unlikely that you'd cram everything into a single package.

Modularity helps us gain order in our code, breaking it into easily digestible, refactorable, pluggable, and testable chunks. Classes and methods are a form of modularity that we're all familiar with. But once the code is built, modularity goes away and we're left deploying a single WAR file.

Aside from being buzzword-compliant, Microservices are a means of defining entire systems from composable, but distinct deployment units gaining all of the benefits of finer-grained modularity. As it turns out, Spring is well-equipped as the platform on which we can build and deploy microservices.

In this session, we'll examine the details of microservices and explore the features of Spring, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud that enable you to achieve modularity via microservices.

The Gradle build tool is one of the most successful projects in the Groovy ecosystem because it addresses a difficult problem – every major build is a custom build. Gradle builds are written in Groovy, so the full power of the language is available if you need it. Gradle supports Maven project structure and repositories and uses Ivy dependency management without being bound by their normal constraints. With major systems like Grails, Hibernate, and the Spring Framework moving to Gradle, this is a technology worth taking the time to understand.

This talk will cover the basics of Gradle both through simple examples and by examining the build files for major open source projects.

Grails is no longer the web framework you remember. Based on Spring Boot and complete with profiles and JSON views, Grails is now an excellent way to build micro-services, access NoSQL databases, provide a powerful REST API, and more.

Grails can do everything Spring Boot can do and more. It combines sophisticated Groovy DSLs with asynchronous capabilities, a newly redesigned data services layer, and more.

Back in the day, web developers had to rely on their wits and a plethora of alert statements - to say our toolkit was spartan would be an understatement. But with the increased importance of web front ends and the rise of JavaScript MVC frameworks, a modern web developer toolkit is finally emerging.

We've evolved from text editors to full fledged IDE's with code completion and refactoring tools but our toolchain doesn't end there. With multiple testing libraries, mocking frameworks, test drivers and even code coverage tools, today's web developer gets to walk downhill on a sunny day.

Take a look at your codebase. Go ahead, this abstract will wait. Notice anything? Perhaps a few more lines of JavaScript than years past? JavaScript is no longer an outlier, a language for the interns, something we can just mash together. Today, JavaScript is a first class citizen. As such, we need to treat it will all the care and feeding we extend our server side languages. This talk will introduce you to a set of tools that will help you write bulletproof JavaScript.

Step one, make sure we aren't making any basic mistakes like using == when we really mean ===. To remedy these types of bugs, we'll leverage JSHint to statically analyze our code. In addition to walking through the setup, we'll discuss how to ratchet up the rules as you improve your codebase. Just like Java or C#, we also need to test our JavaScript code. We'll introduce Jasmine, a BDD style testing tool as well as other tools that make help in the testing process. Last but not least, we'll take a tour of Plato, a JavaScript source code visualizer. Taken together, these tools can go a long way to improve your JavaScript code.

This is a revised and updated version of the previous talk, with current thinking from practice and the literature. The talk presents why conflicts with your manager are inevitable based on differences in priorities and perspectives, and how to plan for them. The goal is to show you how to build the loyalty relationship that allows you to get what you need when you need it.

Topics covered will include diagnosing communication styles, lessons from game theory, working within the organizational hierarchy, and lessons on how to build a relationship with your manager that still allows you the freedom to express yourself and what you really want.

The drive to continuous delivery, micro services and PaaS includes the need to auto scale and potentially auto provision services. This session will identify the legacy thinking of a statically partitioned world and drive to the scalable world of Apache Mesos.

This session will look at the failings of the many of today's cloud technology, identify the goals we have and look into the tooling of how to get there. In this session we will look at:

static vs elastic partitioning
vm vs containers
separating cluster capacity from application scale
load balancing with HAProxy

This session will be packed with demonstrations.

If there is a safe bet, it is that everything fails. From hard drives to power supplies, from routers to software, everything fails. Frankly a planned upgrade of a production service is planned down time, or a failure to continue services for a planned period of time.

This session will look at planning for failure by deploying into an Apache Mesos cluster.

This session will delve into how Apache Mesos identifies failures and how it protects from them. It will also look at how to upgrade infrastructure without down time.

Building a PaaS

Continuous Delivery into a production cloud

Didn't you hear the news? TDD is dead. Yet many developers rely on it for quality code. Come join the zombie apocalypse and learn and understand TDD, what sets it apart from unit testing after the fact, what to do when you need to update code, effective mocking, automatically generating test data and lots of it, leaving code alone and respecting your work, and more

This presentation will cover:

What is TDD?
Benefits of TDD
How to TDD
Mocking
The Great TDD Debate
Opinions of TDD from Industry Leaders
JVM Testing Tools
JVM Testing Languages
Testing Static Calls
Updating Code

Didn't you hear the news? TDD is dead. Yet many developers rely on it for quality code. Come join the zombie apocalypse and learn and understand TDD, what sets it apart from unit testing after the fact, what to do when you need to update code, effective mocking, automatically generating test data and lots of it, leaving code alone and respecting your work, and more

This presentation will cover:

What is TDD?
Benefits of TDD
How to TDD
Mocking
The Great TDD Debate
Opinions of TDD from Industry Leaders
JVM Testing Tools
JVM Testing Languages
Testing Static Calls
Updating Code

Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are “working” today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?

This talk will explore ways to stay sharp as a software professional. We'll talk about how a technology radar can help you stay marketable (and enjoying your career) and how we can use the same technique to help our companies keep abreast of important changes in the technology landscape. Of course it isn't enough to just be aware, we have to drive change - but how? This talk will consider ways we can influence others and lead change in our organizations.

Although Agile has proven to provide incredible benefits in software development and delivery, it is not foolproof, nor a “Silver Bullet.” Plenty of factors need to be considered before attempting this highly disciplined approach.

Learn from the mistakes other organizations have made and discover which pitfalls to avoid to ensure that your first attempt at applying an Agile approach will be met with a successful outcome. This hour-long web seminar will explore these areas and provide clear steps your team and organization should consider to provide a clear set of tools to maximize the opportunity for best results possible.

Some come to Agile assuming it involves less discipline than their traditional methods, but this is a misperception. Today, the need for discipline in software development is greater than it ever was. Agile answers that need, arriving at discipline through the Team. Agile Teams must collaborate to develop strong discipline in both planning and execution.

We'll discuss how teams can obtain Agile discipline to achieve one of our core principles of delivering “working software” frequently. We'll explore some of the key Agile planning and engineering practices like continuous planning, Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Acceptance testing. We'll look at the discipline involved in these practices, their inter-relationship, and the benefits they realize in delivering value to the customer.

To successfully achieve a culture and practice of continuous delivery required discipline at many levels. We’ll discuss some key questions you should be asking and an explore key enablement practices that will establish and support a state of continuous delivery.

Some key questions we'll ask and answer:

Is our software working?
Why not?
Is it good quality?
Can we deliver?
Is it good enough?
How are we doing?

In some organizations, architects are dismissed as people that draw box and arrow diagrams - the dreaded whiteboard architect. While we don't want to foster that stereotype, it is important for an architect to be able to construct basic architectural diagrams. An architect must also be able to separate the wheat from the chaff eliminating those models that don't help tell the story while fully leveraging those that do.

In this workshop, we'll discuss the various diagrams at our disposal. We'll walk through a case study and as we go, we'll construct a set of diagrams that will help us effectively communicate our design. We'll talk about stakeholders and who might benefit from each typ of diagram. Additionally we'll discuss how to constructively review an architectural model.

Workshop Requirements

Neither a laptop nor special software is required for this workshop though your modeling tool of choice (Spark, Visio, OmniGraffle, etc.) is welcome for the exercises. Of course paper and pencil are very effective too and frankly recommended! Feel free to work in pairs or teams. That's it! Well, and a willingness to participate!

In some organizations, architects are dismissed as people that draw box and arrow diagrams - the dreaded whiteboard architect. While we don't want to foster that stereotype, it is important for an architect to be able to construct basic architectural diagrams. An architect must also be able to separate the wheat from the chaff eliminating those models that don't help tell the story while fully leveraging those that do.

In this workshop, we'll discuss the various diagrams at our disposal. We'll walk through a case study and as we go, we'll construct a set of diagrams that will help us effectively communicate our design. We'll talk about stakeholders and who might benefit from each typ of diagram. Additionally we'll discuss how to constructively review an architectural model.

Workshop Requirements

Neither a laptop nor special software is required for this workshop though your modeling tool of choice (Spark, Visio, OmniGraffle, etc.) is welcome for the exercises. Of course paper and pencil are very effective too and frankly recommended! Feel free to work in pairs or teams. That's it! Well, and a willingness to participate!

Behavior-driven development (BDD) has evolved out of agile practices and is designed to make Test-driven development (TDD) more accessible and effective for teams new to agile software delivery. In recent years, BDD has grown to encompass the broader picture of agile analysis, automated acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). Cucumber has been one of the popular frameworks for Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). We will explore the power of Cucumber on the and pragmatic ways to kick start your BDD and testing efforts with Cucumber.

Behavior-driven development (BDD) has evolved out of agile practices and is designed to make Test-driven development (TDD) more accessible and effective for teams new to agile software delivery. In recent years, BDD has grown to encompass the broader picture of agile analysis, automated acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) . Cucumber has been one of the popular frameworks for Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) in the Ruby community. Cucumber-JVM is now available as a pure-Java implementation that now brings that same functionality to popular JVM languages Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Rhino, Jython and JRuby. We will explore the power of Cucumber on the and pragmatic ways to kick start your BDD and testing efforts with Cucumber.

Scala for Java Developers is a full live code and fast paced presentation and workshop (laptops optional), and this is all about the Scala language.

Scala is a wonderful functional/hybrid language. It will become one of the 5 languages that you will need to know to be a highly successful JVM developer in the very near future (others being Groovy, Clojure, Java 8, and JRuby). Scala, as opposed to some of the other languages, has quite a learning curve. This presentation was built for questions. We will start with some basics, how this presentation will flow and end will be up to you, the audience. Bring your intellect, curiosity, and your questions, and get ready for some Scala. Laptops optional so you can try stuff out on your machine and create questions of your own!

Workshop Requirements

Some things will be required if you to participate in the workshop

A modern JDK installation. JDK 1.8+ will suffice. Remember that it should be a JDK and not a JRE!
Your JDK should be mapped properly to JAVA_HOME and your PATH variables.
An installation of your favorite IDE or editor.
An inquisitive mind.

Unfortunately, Internet connectivity is sometimes a dicey affair and at times it can rain on our parade. To avoid having to wait for the install at the conference, you can prepare Scala before the conference! If you don't have the opportunity to do this, we will have either memory sticks or private networks at the conference. But it is preferred to do the installation before the event.

For MacOSX:

Download brew package manager at http://brew.sh
At a console type: brew install scala

For Windows

Visit http://scala-lang.org/download
Download the .msi package
Install the .msi package

For Linux

Download the tar.gz package
Extract the package to your favorite directory
Export SCALA_HOME to your Scala directory (scala-2.11.x)
Add to your PATH: $SCALA_HOME/bin

You may also want to take the opportunity to load some Scala Plugins onto your favorite IDE and Editor. Below is a list of resources that you can use to enhance your environment so that you can enjoy Scala syntax highlighting and other helpful tools like refactoring, debugging and analysis.

Eclipse - The Eclipse has an IDE plugin for Scala called aptly Scala-IDE. You can either download the complete Scala IDE which includes the complete Eclipse download. You can also download the plugin. All the information about the plugin can be found at http://scala-ide.org including an easy to follow along video located at http://scala-ide.org/docs/current-user-doc/gettingstarted/index.html. Scala-IDE is also available at the Eclipse Marketplace, although I would recommend getting the latest instructions from scala-ide.org

IntelliJ - IntelliJ has a Scala plugin that can be found by going to Settings -> Plugins, clicking on 'Browse Repositories' button and searching for the 'Scala' plugin on the left. Right click on the 'Scala' and choose 'Install'. IntelliJ will prompt you to restart the IDE, do so, and enjoy.

NetBeans - Currently, Github user 'dcaoyuan' hosts a NetBeans Scala plugin at the address: https://github.com/dcaoyuan/nbscala. I have not tried this out since the number of NetBeans users has shrunk in recent years. If you are an avid NetBeans user and wish to try it, you can let me know the results during the session. There is additional information at http://wiki.netbeans.org/Scala

Emacs - Github user 'aemoncannon' has created 'ENSIME' (Enhanced Scala Interaction Mode for Emacs) at the address and has a great following. https://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime with some documentation at http://aemoncannon.github.io/ensime.

VIM - For VIM users you can use https://github.com/derekwyatt/vim-scala as a VIM plugin that offers Scala color highlighting

VSCode - Download the “Scala Language Plugin” from the plugins within VSCode.

That is it. Hope to see you soon.

Scala for Java Developers is a full live code and fast-paced presentation and workshop (laptops optional), and this is all about the Scala language. This is Part 2, continuing where we left off from Part 1.

Scala is a wonderful functional/hybrid language. It will become one of the 5 languages that you will need to know to be a highly successful JVM developer in the very near future (others being Groovy, Clojure, Java 8, and JRuby). Scala, as opposed to some of the other languages, has quite a learning curve. This presentation was built for questions. We will start with some basics, how this presentation will flow and end will be up to you, the audience. Bring your intellect, curiosity, and your questions, and get ready for some Scala.

Workshop Requirements

Some things will be required if you to participate in the workshop

A modern JDK installation. JDK 1.8+ will suffice. Remember that it should be a JDK and not a JRE!
Your JDK should be mapped properly to JAVA_HOME and your PATH variables.
An installation of your favorite IDE or editor.
An inquisitive mind.

Unfortunately, Internet connectivity is sometimes a dicey affair and at times it can rain on our parade. To avoid having to wait for the install at the conference, you can prepare Scala before the conference! If you don't have the opportunity to do this, we will have either memory sticks or private networks at the conference. But it is preferred to do the installation before the event.

For MacOSX:

Download brew package manager at http://brew.sh
At a console type: brew install scala

For Windows

Visit http://scala-lang.org/download
Download the .msi package
Install the .msi package

For Linux

Download the tar.gz package
Extract the package to your favorite directory
Export SCALA_HOME to your Scala directory (scala-2.11.x)
Add to your PATH: $SCALA_HOME/bin

You may also want to take the opportunity to load some Scala Plugins onto your favorite IDE and Editor. Below is a list of resources that you can use to enhance your environment so that you can enjoy Scala syntax highlighting and other helpful tools like refactoring, debugging and analysis.

Eclipse - The Eclipse has an IDE plugin for Scala called aptly Scala-IDE. You can either download the complete Scala IDE which includes the complete Eclipse download. You can also download the plugin. All the information about the plugin can be found at http://scala-ide.org including an easy to follow along video located at http://scala-ide.org/docs/current-user-doc/gettingstarted/index.html. Scala-IDE is also available at the Eclipse Marketplace, although I would recommend getting the latest instructions from scala-ide.org

IntelliJ - IntelliJ has a Scala plugin that can be found by going to Settings -> Plugins, clicking on 'Browse Repositories' button and searching for the 'Scala' plugin on the left. Right click on the 'Scala' and choose 'Install'. IntelliJ will prompt you to restart the IDE, do so, and enjoy.

NetBeans - Currently, Github user 'dcaoyuan' hosts a NetBeans Scala plugin at the address: https://github.com/dcaoyuan/nbscala. I have not tried this out since the number of NetBeans users has shrunk in recent years. If you are an avid NetBeans user and wish to try it, you can let me know the results during the session. There is additional information at http://wiki.netbeans.org/Scala

Emacs - Github user 'aemoncannon' has created 'ENSIME' (Enhanced Scala Interaction Mode for Emacs) at the address and has a great following. https://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime with some documentation at http://aemoncannon.github.io/ensime.

VIM - For VIM users you can use https://github.com/derekwyatt/vim-scala as a VIM plugin that offers Scala color highlighting

VSCode - Download the “Scala Language Plugin” from the plugins within VSCode.

That is it. Hope to see you soon.

Java 8 is the biggest change to the Java language ever. The addition of lambdas, functional interfaces, and streams fundamentally changes the programming model for applications. This talk summarizes those changes, along with optionals, method references, and other new features of the language.

Demonstrations will include the map/filter/reduce mechanism, the streaming API, how to write functional interfaces, predicates, suppliers, consumers, method references, default methods in interfaces, optionals, and more.

Jamie Zawinski once said “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.“. Many consider regular expressions to be indecipherable, but the truth is that every programmer should consider regular expressions an integral part of their toolkit. From the command line to your favorite text editor, from parsing user input to scraping HTML pages - once you know regular expressions you will find a use for them in almost every programming context.

In this session we will attempt to unriddle the mystery that regular expressions pose. We will start at the basics and work our way towards more complex expressions.

You have used Regular Expressions before, and they don't faze you one bit. But you know lurking beneath is something even more powerful, and you want to know how to leverage that power. Well fear not! This is just the session you want. We will take a deep dive into Regular Expressions and walk away having understood how to truly take advantage of some of Regular Expressions more esoteric features.

In this session we will look to see how we can refactor our learning - what tools, and methodologies can we use to help us learn quicker and better - how we can create a store that gives us quick access to information when we really need it.

We all work in an industry in which not only do the tools that we use change ever few years, but one in which we have to shift the very paradigms these tools are built on! Even the most trivial of projects entails tens of different toolkits, frameworks, and languages coming together, and somehow we need to know how to leverage each one. How does one keep up? Despite all our years in schools, and our in-born nature to learn, we often are never taught how to learn. How can we learn faster, and retain even more?

In this session we will take a look at various tools and techniques available to us and see how we can make our learning effective.

Find yourself overwhelmed with hundreds of to-dos? Is your hard-drive littered with dozens of killer ideas that you started with enthusiasm and then just fizzled away? Do you feel like you are moving as fast as can but only getting to the wrong place quicker? Well perhaps this session will help.

There are various techniques and strategies available to us today that aim to help with exactly this conundrum - from Getting Things Done ™ to Personal Kanban. Unfortunately it is often easy to be extremely productive using these systems, but not very effective. After all, it's not about getting things done, but getting the RIGHT things done. In this talk we will discuss not only how to get things done, but also attempt to figure out what it is you actually need to be doing.

In this session, I will attempt to show you how you can leverage various strategies to be more effective, knock to-dos out and have fun while doing it. If time permits we will close with an overview of the tools that are available to you, and how you can use these to become a to-do list ninja :)

The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.

In this presentation, we'll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.

Asynchronous AJAX calls, especially those that deal with REST principles are something that all client side frameworks support, and AngularJS is no different. However, in order to truly benefit from AngularJS's support for asynchronous calls, one must understand the various moving parts that make this a reality. This includes promises (with AngularJS' $q library), $http and $resource.

In this session we will explore all the three components that make async calls in AngularJS possible. We will start with understanding the “why” of promises, and how we are to consume and produce promises. We will then dive into some of the inner workings of $http and how it leverages promises under the covers. We will end with an overview of $resource, which combines $http and promises to make working with REST-ful resources a breeze.

What does “better” really mean? If we eliminate duplication, is the code better? If we decide to skip the unit tests, are we doing worse? How do we decide if one design is better than another design?

In this talk, I'll introduce the Idea Flow Learning Framework, a data-driven feedback loop for improving your software development skills. By measuring the “friction” that occurs when developers interact with the code, we can identify the biggest causes of friction and systematically optimize developer experience.

With an unambiguous definition of “better” and objective feedback to learn what works, we can learn our way to better despite the vast world of gray.

About 8 years ago, my project failed, despite “doing all the right things”, and shattered my faith in best practices. Since then, I've learned to measure developer experience as an objective measure of improvement, and I've been codifying the art of “better” into patterns and decision principles for years.

Why go to all this trouble? From my experience, the biggest causes of pain are seldom what we think. When we try to make things “better”, we can easily miss our biggest problems, or inadvertently make things worse. Visibility turned my beliefs about “better” upside-down.

In this talk, we'll cover the three stages of mastery at the core of the learning framework:

Visibility - Learn to see the pain
Clarity - Understand the causes of pain
Awareness - Learn to avoid the pain

By making the pain visible and iteratively learning what works, we can master the art of software development.

Great Lakes Software Symposium

October 16 - 18, 2015

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