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.

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. 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:

1. Bricks - how we design cloud native services
2. 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.

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:

1. Bricks - how we design cloud native services
2. 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.”

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

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.

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.

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

• 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

In this session we will explore the router that ships with Angular. We will see how to leverage its power and flexibility to build real world applications.

Angular ships with a powerful new router. One that allows you to manage your application state, allow for things like nested and child views, as well as loading modules on demand. If you have complex workflows and you wish to learn the new way of navigating your Angular application, this is the session for you.

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.

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.

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.

Creating code is easy, creating good code takes a lot of time, effort, discipline, and commitment. The code we create are truly the manifestations of our designs. Creating a lightweight design can help make the code more extensible and reusable.

In this presentation we will take an example oriented approach to look at some core design principles that can help us create better design and more maintainable code.

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.

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.

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!

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

Many have already seen what Reactive Streaming can do: RXJava, Akka Streams, Project Reactor. Now reactive streaming is a part of the canonical package for Java and now we can handle asynchronous pipelines with boundaries and make better well thought out applications

This presentation introduces you to the core components of Reactive Streams: Publisher, Subscriber, and Processor. We will discuss when to use Reactive Stream and how to avoid complicated scenarios like Backpressure. We will also cover some of the core problem spaces and how to overcome.

If Java 8 was all about how we code, Java 9 is all about how we will build. Modularization will have the biggest impact of any change that happened in Java since its inception. In this presentation we will learn about the need for modularization, how it impacts development, the rules to follow when creating modules, and the effect it has on legacy code.

We will explore creating module, using modules, readability, exports, automatic modules, and unnamed modules.

For those still grappling with Generics. This will be an attempt to clear the air about generics. What are wildcards? What is extends? What is super?  What is covariance? What is contravariance? What is invariance? What is erasure? Why and when do I need this?

Generics or parameterized type is one of the more pain items in any statically typed language on the JVM. This presentation is set to overcome some of these hurdles and understand some of these confusing terms. We will cover the following:

• Covariance
• Contravariance
• Invariance
• Erasure
• Generic Assignments
• Weird Generic Funky Stuf
• Use-Site vs. Declaration-Site Variance
• Differences between Java vs. Scala vs. Kotlin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By now I bet your company has hundreds, maybe thousands of services, heck you might even consider some of them micro is stature! And while many organizations have plowed headlong down this particular architectural path, your spidey sense might be tingling…how do we keep this ecosystem healthy?

In this talk, I will go beyond the buzzwords into the nitty gritty of actually succeeding with a service based architecture. We will cover the principles and practices that will make sure your systems are stable and resilient while allowing you to get a decent night's sleep!

Development teams often focus on getting code to production losing site of what comes after the design and build phase. But we must consider the full life cycle of our systems from inception to deployment through to sunset, a discipline many companies refer to as site reliability engineering.

While your organization may or may not have an SRE team, you have someone playing that role and we can all benefit from looking at the principles and practices that we can bring to bear on our projects. In this talk, I will introduce the concepts of SRE and how you can adopt these ideas on your applications.

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.

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.

Every developer takes pride in the code they write, as they should. But, we know not all code are created equal. Not all of us create good quality code all the time. So, putting aside personal biases, how can we measure the quality of code.

In this presentation we will look at both qualitative metrics and also quantitative metrics and tools that can benefit software developers create maintainable better quality code.

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.

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.

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.

For the last several years, the JavaScript world has been awash in various Model-View-Whatever frameworks and libraries with new implementations popping up like bunnies. With the popular React library, Facebook took a different approach to developing JavaScript user interfaces by focusing on the View in MV*. This talk will get you up and running on React, a library that gives us a declarative approach to designing highly performant interactive user interfaces. We'll dive into the basics of components, JSX, the virtual DOM and more. By the end of this session you'll have a solid foundation in what React brings to the table and how it might help you on your next project.

For the last several years, the JavaScript world has been awash in various Model-View-Whatever frameworks and libraries with new implementations popping up like bunnies. With the popular React library, Facebook took a different approach to developing JavaScript user interfaces by focusing on the View in MV*. This talk will get you up and running on React, a library that gives us a declarative approach to designing highly performant interactive user interfaces. We'll dive into the basics of components, JSX, the virtual DOM and more. By the end of this session you'll have a solid foundation in what React brings to the table and how it might help you on your next project.

As a developer, your focus was squarely on the “functional requirements” aka the business capabilities your application must meet. But once you step in the architect role, you discover a world inhabited by “the ilities” otherwise known as the non functional or quality attributes of a software system. But how do we know which ilities matter and which ones don't? And much as we may want to turn every knob up to 11, many ilities are inversely related - maximize one and you by definition minimize another.

In this talk we will look at various architectural problems giving participants opportunities to try and balance non functional requirements. We'll discuss the consequences of various approaches as well as how we can best document the inevitable decisions we arrive at.

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.

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.

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.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the software field, you’ve undoubtably found yourself in a (potentially heated) discussion about the merits of one technology, language or framework versus another. And while you may have enjoyed the technical debate, as software professionals, we owe it to our customers (as well as our future selves) to make good decisions when it comes to picking one technology over another.

In this talk, I will explore what criteria we should consider when comparing technologies, how we can avoid burning platforms as well as what to do when we’ve reached a dead end. We will also apply these techniques to a current technology or two.

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.