Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes be sure to attend: Kubernetes Koncepts (1 of 2)

Aha moments with apps in containers can be quite liberating. The mobile space is saturated with “there's an app for that”. For us, we now expect “there's a container for that”. “Write once, run anywhere” (WORA) has changed to “Package once, run anywhere” (PORA). The growing community of containers is riding up the hype curve. We will look at many ways to assemble pods using architecture patterns you already know.

Your software package delivery and installation is no longer an rpm, deb, dmg, jar, war, native executable or a run script, it is simply an image that has a common run container command.

During the presentation, we will explore some examples on Katacoda.

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes be sure to attend: Kubernetes Koncepts

At the 2009 Agile conference, J.B.Rainsberger declared “Integration tests are a scam”. I agree. Come see some compelling reasons why consumer-driven contract testing is a much better approach. Particularly for microservices.

We will explore different testing techniques on Kubernetes, including an important one called “Consumer-Driven Contracts”.

After a brief overview of the concepts a live demonstration will show you how to:

set up a Pact Broker on Kubernetes
write a consumer that defines and publishes Pact contracts
deploy and run a few Spring Boot microservices on Kubernetes
connect microservices to a database and public data source
verify the consumer pacts against a producer
find API defects and fix them

This is the droid you are looking for. Within this droid are hundreds of rules designed to review your code for defects, hotspots and security weaknesses. Consider the resulting analysis as humble feedback from a personal advisor. The rules come from your community of peers, all designed to save your butt.

We will explore techniques on how to add these checks to your IDE, your build scripts and your build pipelines.

Too much chatter in your pull requests? See how the analysis tools teach best practices, without ego or criticism, to a spectrum of developers. As a leader see how to develop an effective code quality intern program around this technique. We will also see some techniques to use Kubernetes to obtain reports and dashboards right on your local machine and from your continuous integration pipeline.

Cloud continues to grow in importance in even the most conservative companies’ IT strategies. Because of this, even experienced software architects must confront a new world in which many of our normal architectural assumptions no longer hold. Before we create architectures that leverage cloud infrastructure, we need to rebuild our mental model of infrastructure around the appropriate concepts and principles. The purpose of this session is to do just that.

In this session we’ll:

tour the current cloud infrastructure landscape
explore the key business and technology motivators for adopting cloud
explore the unique aspects of cloud infrastructure that violate our traditional assumptions
examine the risks associated with adopting cloud infrastructure
navigate some of the key tradeoffs involved with cloud architecture choices
overlay traditional architecture patterns and examine their suitability to cloud
define a cloud native architecture that is optimized to exploit the uniqueness of the cloud environment

The learner should leave this session prepared for deeper dives into cloud native architecture patterns and migration strategies.

NOTE: We'll cover roughly 50% of the material in Part 1.

In this session we’ll:

tour the current cloud infrastructure landscape
explore the key business and technology motivators for adopting cloud
explore the unique aspects of cloud infrastructure that violate our traditional assumptions
examine the risks associated with adopting cloud infrastructure
navigate some of the key tradeoffs involved with cloud architecture choices
overlay traditional architecture patterns and examine their suitability to cloud
define a cloud native architecture that is optimized to exploit the uniqueness of the cloud environment

The learner should leave this session prepared for deeper dives into cloud native architecture patterns and migration strategies.

NOTE: We'll cover roughly 50% of the material in Part 1. If you come to only Part 2, we'll be starting in the middle.

Now that we’ve been equipped with an understanding of how software architectures can exploit the unique aspects of cloud infrastructure environments, it’s time to construct a pattern catalog that can guide our decision making as we journey from concepts and principles to concrete implementations. The software industry has long been motivated by the promise of a “component marketplace” from which we can draw commodity components which can be composed via standardized mechanisms to create powerful systems. These systems are often compared to the myriad of possible creations that can be produced using Lego pieces. The power in the Lego “architecture” is found in the amazing diversity of individual pieces that are composed via a universal system of compatibility. Cloud native architectures approximate the same power via Lego-like patterns.

In this two-part series, we’ll divide the cloud native patterns into two categories:

Bricks - how we design cloud native services
Mortar - how we compose cloud native systems

In part one we’ll study “Brick Patterns” from the following categories:

Externalized Configuration
Externalized State
Externalized Channels
Runtime Reconfiguration
Continuous Delivery via Multi-Version Concurrent Execution
Brick Telemetry

The learner should leave this session prepared to design and implement cloud native “bricks” that can be composed via any “master builder” of cloud native solutions.

In this two-part series, we’ll divide the cloud native patterns into two categories:

Bricks - how we design cloud native services
Mortar - how we compose cloud native systems

In part one we’ll study “Mortar Patterns” from the following categories:

Service Discovery
Edge Gateways
Fault Tolerance
Event-Driven Systems
Contract Management
Integration Telemetry

The learner should leave this session prepared to compose cloud native solutions from any available collection of cloud native “bricks.”

If you’ve been following along, you’ve realized by now that cloud native architectures are fundamentally different than most traditional architectures. Most of the cloud native architectures that we can see in the wild have been built by relatively young companies that began from a zero-legacy state. Architects in more mature organizations are faced with the daunting challenge of building modern systems that exploit the unique characteristics of cloud infrastructure while simultaneously attempting to migrate legacy systems into those same environments, all the while “keeping the lights on.”

Much of the last two years of my career have been spent helping Fortune 500 companies devise cloud native migration strategies, and I’ve built a increasingly large catalog of patterns that have proven useful across multiple systems and industry verticals. In this session we’ll dive into those patterns and more, including:

the utility of cloud native maturity models
the cloud continuum: cloud ready, cloud friendly, cloud resilient, cloud native
the app continuum: evolving toward distributed systems
criteria for selecting applications to migrate
the occasionally palatable perils of “lift and shift”
applying the Strangler Pattern
leveraging strategic domain-driven design: bounded contexts, context maps, and anti-corruption layers
insulating from “irreplaceable” legacy systems of record with hexagonal architecture

The learner should leave this session with a tool belt suitable for attacking an upcoming cloud native architecture migration effort.

On the 2017 tour, I introduced the notion of “serverless” and Functions as a Service (FaaS) platforms. We understood the motivation for serverless computing, compared serverless to other cloud-native infrastructure approaches, navigated some architectural tradeoffs, and took a whirlwind tour of the Big 3 FaaS providers.

In this 2018 edition of the talk, we’ll still cover a few of the same themes to bring new folks up to speed, but we’ll also look at what’s changed in this ecosystem over the past year, take a look at new or enhanced features, offerings, runtimes, and programming models, and examine what use cases are becoming popular for serverless computing. We’ll also look at how tradeoffs have evolved, and definitely throw in a few demos.

In this presentation, we'll build, test, and deploy an image-processing pipeline using Amazon Web Services such as Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, and Rekognition.

We'll take a look at some of the following topics:

Describing serverless deployments with SAM
Testing lambda functions with SAM Local
Interacting with AWS API's from lambda functions
Configuring IAM policies for lambda functions
Describing workflows of functions with Step Functions
Deploying with Cloud Formation

Chaos Engineering, pioneered by Netflix, is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

In this presentation, we'll take a look at the problem of building resilient software, and discuss how applying Google's SRE principles and patterns for architectural resiliency can help us to solve it. We'll then examine how the practice of Chaos Engineering can help us to prove or disprove the resiliency of our systems.

Java 8 is the most significant change to the language since it's introduction, surpassing changes seen in any of the previous versions. It is not merely syntactical change or addition of a few extra features, it's a paradigm shift. Come to this presentation to learn about the power and capabilities of functional programming using Java 8 and how to benefit from those when building Java applications.

Lambda Expressions
A Look under the hood
Stream
Functional Programming Principles Applied
Function Pipeline
Lazy Evaluations
Parallel Streams

Turning a stream into a parallel stream is extremely easy, but is that the prudent thing to do? While flipping that switch is almost effortless there are some significant ramifications. In this presentation we will learn the power of parallel streams but also why, when, and where it makes sense to use parallel streams. Through a series of example we will learn about cases where it makes sense and some there it does not.

Streams
Parallel Streams
Controlling Threads
Deciding Threads
Performance Implications
Recommendations on prudent use

Design patterns are common place in OO programming. With the introduction of lambda expressions in languages like Java, one has to wonder about their influence on design patterns.

In this presentation we will take up some of the common design patterns and rework them using lambda expressions. We will also explore some other patterns that are not so common, but are quite useful ways to apply lambdas.

JavaScript will celebrate it's 24th birthday in 2020. For a language that has been around for such a while it has seen very few, if any changes to the language itself. Well all that is about to change with ECMAScript.next (or ECMAScript 6). ECMAScript 6 modernizes JavaScript syntax, while bringing in features such as modules for better namespacing, class as a first class construct, and a variety of additional operators thus ensuring that JavaScript is ready for the next era of large scale modern web applications. ES 7, 8, 9 and now 10 all use the features introduced by ES6 to further the language.

In this session we will take a look at some of the features that ECMAScript 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 and 10 bring to the table. We will take an exploratory approach, and by the end of 3 hours, you will be well versed with ALL of the new features in JavaScript.

In this session we will get acquainted with Docker. We will discuss what docker is, how to install it, and how to start using Docker. We will also explore some of the benefits of containerizing your applications.

Containers are taking over the world. Containers provide a means to have hermatic builds of your software, allowing for truly immutable testing, and delivery of your software. Docker is one of many containerization technologies, and in this session we will take a brief look at Docker and what it has to offer.

In this session we will dive deeper into Dockerfiles. We will explore the DSL that Dockerfiles provide to allow for the automation of image creation.

Dockerfiles provide a means to automate the creation of images, and consequently the containers within which our applications run. The Dockerfile, though minimal, provides us with everything we need to package our software, and enable it to run. In this session we will dive deep into the Docker DSL, and explore the many commands that it provides, and along the way explore some differences between similar commands, and some gotchas.

In this session we will take a look at building applications with Angular. We will build a very simple application from the ground up, and attempt to understand the approach of Angular, as well as understand some of the terminology that Angular introduces.

This session will focus on the Angular 10

TypeScript, Components, Annotations/Directives, Observables, Reactive Stores, Model-Driven forms … Oh my! Angular, much like AngularJs (1.x.x), despite being a powerful platform for building rich client side applications, comes laden with both new terminology, and a “newer” approach to writing client side code.

In this session, as we build a simple application, we will attempt to tease apart these concepts, slowly building our understanding towards how these pieces come together, and how we can leverage them to build rich client side application.

Details

Quick overview of what Angular has to offer, how it is different from Angular 1.x
A glance at the project we are going to build, and all the important files that angular-cli generates
Create our first component
Proceed with creating a component hierarchy to display all hard coded data

Along the way we will see how to use the Angular style guide to follow conventions adopted by the Angular community at large, and some ways to use the angular-cli tool.

This session will focus on the Angular 10

Details

Using in-build pipes in Angular
Create our own pipe
Create the necessary infrastructure to allow for HTTP Calls to the backend
Load all the containers using Ajax
Introduces routing, and update the homepage to navigate to these routes

Along the way we will see how to use the Angular style guide to follow conventions adopted by the Angular community at large, and some ways to use the angular-cli tool

Reactive Programming in gaining a lot of excitement. Many libraries, tools, and frameworks are beginning to make use of reactive libraries. Besides, applications dealing with big data or high frequency data can benefit from this programming paradigm. Come to this presentation to learn about what reactive programming is, what kind of problems it solves, how it solves them. We will take an example oriented approach to learning the programming model and the abstraction.

Reactive Programming
Nature of Problems
Programming API
The Reactive Programming Abstraction
Examples

Big data applications have entire different demands than typical CRUD applications that have ruled the enterprise for decades. When dealing with high frequency and high volume of data, we have to reach to a different set of tools than we have been used to.

The objective of this presentation is to first discuss the issues with dealing with big data and high performance computing. Then we will take a look at libraries and tools that can more easily help us address those issues.

Distributed and parallel computing have been around for a while. The problem is not new, but solutions have generally been complex. Over the years several solutions have come along to ease the pain. Spark is a wonderful programming API and a tool that can ease the pain of creating distributed, high concurrent, performing code.

In this presentation we will take an example oriented approach to creating applications that make use of Spark. We will learn how to create the code to use Spark, how to configure and manage the number of threads, and how to distribute the computations.

Kafka has captured mindshare in the data records streaming market, and in this presentation, we knock on its door and see what lies behind. What is the draw? What makes it an attractive addition? How does it compare to Message Queues and other message streaming services?

We will do a thorough introduction into what is Kafka. We will also discuss Consumers, Producers, Streams. Integration with ZooKeeper, and discuss the performance aspect of using Kafka.

Serialization is important for anything Big Data. We need to send information over the wire and we need to do so efficiently. This core concept presentation covers various serialization techniques and libraries. That way you can use Akka, Kafka, Spark, and various MQs efficiently

For this presentation, we will focus on three topics: Core Java Serialization, Apache Avro, and Google's Protocol Buffers. We will review serialization and deserialization ease of use, review performance, and how to integrate with Akka, Kafka, Spark.

This session we discuss Akka/HTTP which wraps around the Akka's actor systems and Akka reactive streams to create scalable and resilient RestFUL web services.

Akka/HTTP is a full stack client and server API to produce and consume HTTP services. In this session, we discuss the philosophy of Akka/HTTP, setup, and some common approaches. This presentation will be presented in both Scala and Java.

This is my story of lessons learned on how to stop the crushing effects of business pressure… I was team lead with full control of our green-field project. After a year, we had continuous delivery, a beautiful clean code base, and worked directly with our customers to design the features. Then our company split in two, we were moved under different management, and I watched my project get crushed.

As a consultant, I saw the same pattern of relentless business pressure everywhere, driving one project after another into the ground. I made it my mission to help the development teams solve this problem. This is my story of lessons learned on how to transform an organization from the bottom up. I'll show you how to lead the way.

The crushing business pressure is caused by a broken feedback loop that's baked into the organization's design. In this presentation, I'll show you how to fix the broken feedback loop. Learn how to:

Gather evidence of developer productivity loss
Identify the key organizational changes required for success
Make the case to management for improvement
Partner with your manager for long-term success

If the system is broken, we need to fix the system. You can change the system by making the decision to lead.

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.

With the advancement of AI, the paradigm shift of blockchain, the media war for the Internet, and escalating emotion, it's time to explore brand new territory – using software as a metaphor to construct a functional model of the human mind. Imagine your brain's logic is written in code. You fire up the debugger, set a breakpoint in the “Self” class, and inspect your brain's internal state. What are the state variables? What does the code look like? How do we fix the bugs?

I.flow() is a theory of consciousness that models motivation behavior of humans using software as a metaphor, because… why not? From the origin of gut feel reasoning, to the feedback loops that drive you, we'll breakdown the functional architecture that makes the universe tick.

I.flow() is the underpinning theory behind MetaOS, the generalized AI platform being pioneered by Open Mastery. In an age where everything is changing faster than ever, and the magic of sci-fi novels is coming to life – we're faced with some of the most difficult questions about what it means to be human:

Who am I? What do I live for? What is the purpose of life?

“I.choose() therefore I.am()”

By the end of this conference you will have learned many new tools and technologies. The easy part is done, now for the hard part: getting the rest of the teamand managementon board with the new ideas. Easier said than done.

Whether you want to effect culture change in your organization, lead the transition toward a new technology, or are simply asking for better tools; you must first understand that having a “good idea” is just the beginning. How can you dramatically increase your odds of success?

You will learn 12 concrete strategies to build consensus within your team as well as 6 technique to dramatically increase the odds that the other person will say “Yes” to your requests.

As a professional mentalist, Michael has been a student of psychology, human behavior and the principles of influence for nearly two decades. There are universal principles of influence that neccessary to both understand and leverage if you want to be more effective leader of change in your organization.

In this session we discuss strategies for getting your team on board as well as when/how to approach management within the department and also higherup in the organization.

In Part 1, you learned the core principles of influence and persuasion. How to we take this back to the office and apply what we've learned?

We dive deep in to specific strategies to get both the team and the business on board with your ideas and solutions. We cover several realworld patterns you can follow to be more effective and more persuasive. Part 1 was conceptual, part 2 is practical.

In this example-driven presentation, you'll learn how to leverage Spring Boot to accelerate application development, enabling you to focus coding on logic that drives application requirements with little concern for code that satisfies Spring's needs.

For over a decade, Spring has sought to make enterprise Java development easier. It began by offering a lighter alternative to EJBs, but continued to to address things such as security, working with various sorts of databases, cloud-native applications, and reactive programming. And, along the way, Spring even took steps to make itself easier to use, offering Java-based and automatic component configuration. Even so, there's still a lot of near-boilerplate code required to develop Spring applications.

Enter Spring Boot. Spring Boot's primary purpose is to make Spring easier to work with. It achieves this in three ways:

Automatic configuration : Considering what's on the runtime classpath as well as other factors, Spring Boot can automatically configure components in a Spring application context.
Simplified dependency management : Taking advantage of transitive dependency resolution at build-time, Spring Boot offers several “starter” dependencies, focused on specific characteristics of an application, that transitively bring in libraries to enable development of those characteristics.
Runtime insight : Spring Boot offers insight into the inner workings of a running application via REST endpoints and/or JMX MBeans to better understand what makes a running application tick.

All together, Spring Boot lets you focus on fulfilling your application's requirements without worrying about writing code that satisfies the needs of a framework.

In this session, you'll learn how to take your Spring Boot skills to the next level, applying the latest features of Spring Boot. Topics may include Spring Boot DevTools, configuration properties and profiles, customizing the Actuator, and crafting your own starters and auto-configuration.

TBD

In this session, you'll learn how to use Spring Data to rapidly develop repositories for a variety of database types, including relational (JPA and JDBC), document (Mongo), graph (Neo4j), and others (Redis, Cassandra, CouchBase, etc).

For decades, relational databases and SQL have enjoyed their position as the leading choice for data persistence. Even though many alternative database types have emerged in recent years, the relational database is still a top choice for a general purposes data store and will not likely be usurped from its position any time soon. When it comes to working with relational data, Java developers have several options.

But relational databases are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Thankfully, there are many options for data persistence, including relational, document, graph, key-value, and column-store databases, each presenting their unique way of handling data suitable for different problems.

Spring Data makes it easy to work with various databases by offering a programming model that is consistent, regardless of which type of database you're working with. And regardless of the database you're dealing with, you will find that Spring Data eliminates a lot of boilerplate code.

In this session, you'll see how to take Spring Data's automatic repository generation to a whole new level. We'll look at ways to model data and manipulate Spring Data to produce repositories and APIs that are more than just CRUD layers on top of a database.

TBD

In this session, we'll explore the new reactive features in Spring 5 to build reactive, non-blocking applications using Spring's familiar programming model.

Traditionally, applications have been built using a blocking, synchronous model. Although comfortable and intuitive for most programmers, this model doesn't scale well. And although there are several new approaches to reactive programming, they don't necessarily fit into the familiar programming model that Spring developers are accustomed to working with.

Spring 5 has introduced a set of new reactive features, enabling non-blocking, asynchronous code that scales well using minimal threads. Moreover, it builds on the same concepts and programming models that Spring developers have used for years.

Serverless is a big topic these days. More specifically, Function as a Service (FaaS) enables small-scale functions deployed in the cloud to be enabled only as needed. Compared to Platform as a Service (PaaS) services which are “always on” and require explicit scaling, FaaS services wake up when needed and are scaled by the platform automatically.

Imagine a service that only gets invoked one per hour. In PaaS, that service is always running and ready to handle requests, consuming processor resources and ultimately costing more to be ready at a moment's notice. In contrast, FaaS services awaken quickly upon invocation and go away when finished, conserving resources and cost.

In this example-driven session, we'll see how to create and deploy Function as a Service (FaaS) services with Spring and Spring Boot.

Machine Learning is a huge, deep field. Come get a head start on how you can learn about how machines learn.

This talk will be an overview of the Machine Learning field. We’ll cover the various tools and techniques that are available to you to solve complex, data-driven problems. We’ll walk through the algorithms and apply them to some real but accessible problems so you can see them at work.

This open source machine learning framework from Google has taken off. Come learn what you can do with it in your own organization.

TensorFlow is a powerful data flow-oriented machine learning framework developed by Google's Brain Team. It was designed to be easy to use and widely applicable on both numeric, neural network-oriented problems as well as other domains. We'll cover the over view as well as apply it to several fun, realistic problems.

Documents contain a lot of information. We'll introduce you to a variety of techniques to extract them.

Machine Learning techniques are useful for analyzing numeric data, but they can also be useful for classifying text, extracting content and more. We will discuss a variety of open source tools for extracting the content, identifying elements and structure and analyzing the text can be used in distributed, microservice-friendly ways.

For the last 20-30 years, there has been a never-ending set of solutions for building cross-platform desktop applications. Most of them suck. Electron is one that doesn't.

It is a new solution that forms the basis of the Atom Editor, Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, the Slack app and more.

Come see what happens when you combine the best of the Web, Node.js and Chromium to provide attractive, modern, flexible, useful, consistent cross-platform desktop applications.

Electron grew out of the work on the Atom Editor from GitHub. Developers familiar with JavaScript, Node and Web Development will be comfortable with an engine that uses the same technologies as they move to the Desktop. At the same time, the Chromium engine, which has support for modern technologies such as WebGL, WebRTC and desktop-integration hooks, as well as HTML 5 and CSS, rounds out the platform. The strength of the Web mixed with native desktop integration hooks and the performance and flexibility of Node strikes the right balance for avoiding sucky cross-platform applications.

What happens if web applications got really fast?

We are increasingly able to do more in the browser because of faster networks, optimized JavaScript engines, new standard APIs and more. There is a new initiative to allow a binary format called WebAssembly that will provide a compiled, cross-platform representation that will take us to the next level. Complex business applications and 3D video games will alike will benefit from this new standard. Come hear about what it can do for you.

An evolutionary architecture supports incremental, guided change along multiple dimensions.

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later”. But then microservices showed that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. This talk, based on my upcoming book, investigates the family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, along with how to build evolvable systems. Understanding how to evolve architecture requires understanding how architectural dimensions interact; I describe how to achieve appropriate coupling between components and services. Incremental change is critical for the mechanics of evolution; I cover how to build engineering and DevOps practices to support continuous change. Uncontrolled evolution leads to undesirable side effects; I cover how fitness functions build protective, testable scaffolding around critical parts to guide the architecture as it evolves.

The software development ecosystem exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium, where any new tool, framework, or technique leads to disruption and the establishment of a new equilibrium. Predictability is impossible when the foundation architects plan against changes constantly in unexpected ways. Instead, prefer evolvability over predictability. This keynote illustrates how to achieve evolutionary architectures and how to retrofit existing systems to support better evolution.

Hypothesis and data driven development ties together current thinking about requirements, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, modern architecture, and engineering techniques to help rethink building software.

Agile development claims to abhor “Big Design Up Front”…yet what is that giant backlog building session but BDUF in other clothing? Back in the olden days of software development, we were forced to speculate on what users want, then build it. We were basically running a buffet. But what if we could switch to à la carte? With modern engineering practices like Continuous Delivery, we can shift our perspective and start building by hypothesis rather than speculation. This talk shows the full spectrum of software development, from ideation through execution and deployment, through the lens of modern software engineering practices. I discuss building a platform using feature toggles, canary releases, A/B testing, and other modern DevOps tools to allow you to run experiments to see what your users really want. By building a platform for experimentation, product development shifts from up-front guessing to market driven. This talk unifies the practices of modern architecture, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery to provide a new approach to feature development. This talk also demonstrates how to undertake major architectural restructuring with zero regression failures by relying on data and the scientific method.

This session covers two critical soft skills for architects:

creating clear, concise documentation of software architecture, both structure and decisions
presenting architectural ideas as clearly as possible

New architects find soft skills like creating lucid documentation and building compelling presentations challenging. This presentation covers a variety of ways to document ideas in software architecture, ranging from diagramming techniques (that aren't UML) to Architecture Decisions Records and ultimately to presentations. The second part of the talk leverages patterns and anti-patterns from the Presentation Patterns book to help architects build clear and concise representations of their ideas.

This session compares Service-oriented, Service-based, and Micro-service architectures, describing the problem each is designed to solve, differences and similarities, variants and hybrids, and engineering practices.

Microservice architectures are quite popular, described as “SOA done correctly”. But what are the real differences between SOA, Microservice, and service-based architectures? What about middle ground between the shared everything of SOA versus shared nothing of microservices? This talk explores the similarities and differences between various service-oriented architectural styles. I describe the characteristics of SOA, microservices, and hybrid service-based architectures, along with the considerations and constraints for each. I also discuss specific engineering practices, orchestration styles, reuse strategies, and migrating from monolithic applications to service-based or microservice architectures. No one architecture can solve every problem, and many projects take on more complexity than necessary by choosing the wrong paradigm.

Java 8 is pretty great, but mix in JavaSlang (now called Vavr) and get ready for some functional programming excitement.

JavaSlang is a project that decorates Java with immutable data structures, better Optionals, tuples, and more. Now with JavaSlang (Vavr) we can really bring in some more power to functional programming and Java. We will even discuss some new concepts like for comprehensions, Try, and Either!

Traditional approaches to software architecture do not address the core tenet of all agile practices - feedback! We make many of the most important architectural decisions early in the development lifecycle and fail to get accurate feedback on those decisions throughout implementation. Compounding the problem? Agile methods offer no architectural advice. This session explores several architectural practices that help increase 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.

Recently, microservices have take the development community by storm. Though a modern architectural paradigm, the underlying principles of microservices are embedded across many proven traditional architectural approaches, especially modularity. At the end of the day, microservices are just one way to the increase modularity of our software system. But there are others.

In this session we will examine several different ways to modularize large software systems. We'll start with the “modular monolith” and demonstrate how this modular monolith gives us a significant degree of architectural agility to evolve the architecture to microservices by incrementally breaking pieces of the application off and deploying them as microservices.

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.

The way we build and deliver software is changing. We must deliver software more quickly than ever before and traditional approaches to software architecture, infrastructure and methodology do not allow us to meet demand. We’ve reached the limits of agility through process improvement alone, and further increases demand we focus on improving architecture, infrastructure, and methodology simultaneously. 12 Factor is an app development methodology for building modern apps in the modern era.

Building modern apps requires modern methods and 12 Factor is an app development methodology that helps development teams build software by emphasizing development practices that meld together modern architectural paradigms with agile practices like continuous delivery for deployment to cloud platforms. In this session, we’ll examine the 12 Factors and explore how to apply them to apps built using Java.

We can often easily tell when the performance of the code is poor, but, it is not easy to figure out where things are going wrong. Guessing where the problem may be is not only frustrating, but also may keep us away from the real problem area.

In this presentation we will take a look at tools that can help us to gain useful insights into the performance of client side code and identify issues in a more intelligent manner.

JavaScript is a very powerful and ubiquitous language. At the same time, it is also a language that is often misunderstood and misused. Better quality code greatly reduces the effort and time to maintain software. So, there is a good incentive to improve quality of code.

In this presentation we will cover two things. We will discuss dos and don'ts for programming with JavaScript. Then we will look at a set of tools that can help keep an eye on our code and prompt us to improve the quality.

Tools/libraries/frameworks that rely on modern JavaScript heavily make use of metaprogramming capabilities that is relatively new in the language.

In this presentation we will learn about the metaprogramming API, the benefits it provides, and how to benefit from this programming facility.

Gradle is the build tool of choice in the open source world, and rapidly becoming the standard in industry as well. Anyone who works with Gradle on a Java project knows the basics of the Java plugin and how to write simple tasks in Groovy. Gradle can do much more, however. This talk will demonstrate how to write your own custom task classes and how to create Gradle plugins from them. Other Gradle features will be demonstrated as well, including file manipulation, incremental builds, generating the Grade wrapper, and resolving conflicts in dependencies.

Gradle Inc also provides a free build scan capability to analyze build files. This too will be demonstrated, as well as profiling your build, determining dependencies, and more.

Understand Java from a functional programming point of view. This part covers the basics of lambdas and streams, emphasizing functional programming by transforming collections using the stream approach.

Also includes method references and static and default methods in interfaces.

Functional features in Java, including parallel streams, the java.util.function package, the Optional data type, and reduction operations.

The talk also covers the new date and time package based on Joda time, as well as collectors and implementing the Collector interface.

Java SE 8 introduces many new features that can simplify your code. Using streams, lambdas, and the new Optional type all change the way we write Java. In this presentation, we'll work through a series of examples that show how to rewrite existing code from Java 7 or earlier using the new Java 8 approach.

Examples will include replacing anonymous inner classes with lambdas, switching from iterating over collections into transforming streams, using immutables wherever possible, lazy evaluation, and more.

This talk will focus on interesting features of Java 8 that go beyond the basics. Topics will include:

the map, filter, and flatMap methods
simple reductions
extracting and combining streams
using Optional as intended
grouping and partitioning
downstream collectors
the java.time package
generics in detail

Sample code will be provided to illustrate all the techniques, along with tests and a build file.

It happens to us all; there are simply days where it seems impossible to get anything done. This session focuses on techniques and tips to get into the zone, stay in the zone and to protect your productivity, even in disruptive environments.

Rather than focusing on any one productivity methodology (e.g. GTD) This talk analyzes the internal and external factors that affect our productivity and offers broader strategies to get back on track.

On the NFJS tour, there are questions that seem to come up again and again. One common example is “How do we determine which new tools and technologies we should focus our energy on learning?” another is “How do we stop management from forcing us to cut corners on every release so we can create better and more maintainable code?” which, after awhile becomes “How can we best convince management we need to rewrite the business application?”

There is a single metaanswer to all these questions and many others.

It begins with the understanding that what we as engineers value, and what the business values are often very different (even if the ultimate goals are the same) By being able to understand these different perspectives it's possible to begin to frame our arguments around the needs and the wants of the business. This alone will make any engineer significantly more effective.

This session picks up from where “Stop writing code and start solving problems” stops discussing what is value, how do we align the values of the business with the needs and values of the engineer.

So you're a Large Enterprise and you want to “Go Agile”. How do you do that and does Agile ACTUALLY Scale? In this talk, we will dive into the real issues that today’s large Enterprises face when trying to Transform their organization.
Why are Agile Transformations so hard?
What is the “secret ingredient” needed for Agile Success?

This talk is for anyone who wants to know more about agile software development and transforming an Enterprise from top to bottom.

What gives Agile its Agility? Where does agility come from? How do we measure it? If you have been using agile for awhile, why is your velocity falling? What can you do to get it moving back in the right direction? How do you incorporate testing into an Agile Team? What kind of roles/specialization do you need to have a truly cross-functional team? In this talk, we will dive into where agility actually comes from and how you can discover or rediscover agility for your teams.

We will take a deep dive into the technical practices that give agile it’s agility. We will talk about the metrics. practices, and tools that should really be used in agile. This talk is intended for developers that are new to agile or have been practicing Scrummerfall for too long. Subsequently, there are some technical aspects that relate to specific coding techniques. Knowledge of an objected oriented programming language is recommended (but not required) to get the full benefit of this session. If you are already an agile guru, you will probably know this stuff. If you're not, then take home what you need to achieve success with an agile team.

Continuous delivery is not a pipe-dream technology, reserved only for the “cool kids” at hip tech startups. Although it's not easy, many concepts are within reach of most teams. That being said, it require more than simple technology changes. Attend this session to learn the fundamental concepts of CD, how to build your CD pipeline with Gradle and Jenkins, and recommendations on tools and best practices.

No prior knowledge is assumed and this talk will start from first principles.

Part one begins with a detailed overview of what CD is (and isn't) and how to build a business case for CD. Making both the technical case and business case for CD is vital as it's necessary to get the entire organization on board with the changes required.

Part two is a deeper dive into building a continuous delivery pipeline with Gradle and Jenkins (although the broader concepts can be applied to the tooling of your choice) You'll see how easily Gradle integrates with Java and how to leverage configuration management and gradle plugins to build all of your quality gates.

We all have seen our share of bad code and some really good code as well. What are some of the common anti patterns that seem to be recurring over and over in code that sucks? By learning about these code smells and avoiding them, we can greatly help make our code better.

Come to this talk to learn about some common code smell and to share your experiences as well.

Metaphors are the foundation of understanding – a conceptual lens that highlights some details, and hides others. Whether you're trying to understand an idea, design an architecture, or communicate an idea to a member of your team, metaphors shape the fabric of our thoughts.

The side-effect of understanding the world one way, is it becomes extremely difficult to see the world another way. Blindspots are the areas of understanding that fall outside of our metaphorical lenses, the invisible world that doesn't “make sense”.

In this session, we'll do a deep dive into the nature of metaphors and blindspots, and you'll learn three new brain hacks that can help you shift between metaphorical paradigms on command. We'll also discuss some of the blindspots in our industry caused by the Technical Debt metaphor, and how you can force a paradigm shift in your organization to Flow-oriented systems thinking.

Learn to see the world with a whole new perspective by hacking your brain with metaphors!

Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

Whether the context is software development, life, or solving the hardest problems in the world, the same principle applies: asking better questions leads to better answers. What if you had a tool that asked you just the right questions, in just the right moment?

In this session, you'll learn how to craft a metaphorical model that describes the dynamics of a problem as a tool for generating the right questions, so that your brain works on solving the right problem. Per Einstein's theory, after you know the proper question to ask, you should be able to solve the problem in five minutes.

Now, if Einstein thinks this technique will lead to a 1200% performance increase in problem-solving capabilities, do you really want to miss this talk?

Think back over your career as a software developer. How many great–and I mean truly great–software developers have you worked with? The chances are you can count them on one hand? Developers with 20-30 years experience can rarely name more than two or three. What does it take to be considered truly great? Michael can certainly tell you what NOT to do… from cold, bitter experience.

Ego Driven Development is a humorous and brutally honest look at a career spanning nearly two decades. We dive into war stories, train wrecks and so many misguided attempts at greatness. There is a path to becoming a truly great software engineer, but it's not always where we first look.

Great Lakes Software Symposium

November 3 - 5, 2017

TEST