Awareness is the knowledge or perception of a situation or fact, which based on myriad of factors is an elusive attribute. Likely the most significant unasked for skill… perhaps because it's challenging to “measure” or verify. It is challenging to be aware of aware, or is evidence of it's adherence. This session will cover different levels of architectural awareness. How to surface awareness and how you might respond to different technical situations once you are aware.

Within this session we look holistically an engineering, architecture and the software development process. Discussing:

* Awareness of when process needs to change (original purpose of Agile)
* Awareness of architectural complexity
* Awareness of a shift in architectural needs 
* Awareness of application portfolio and application categorization 
* Awareness of metrics surfacing system challenges
* Awareness of system scale (and what scale means for your application)
* Awareness when architectural rules are changing
* Awareness of motivation for feature requests
* Awareness of solving the right problem

The focus of the session will be mindful (defined as focusing on one's awareness), commentating in sharing strategies for heightening awareness as an architect and engineer.

Just as sharpening the saw is the best way to cut down a tree… sharpening your development environment allows for a more focused more productive experience.
This session is a collection of scripts, aliases, shells, editors and tools which will super charge your development experience.

This session will cover:

zshell, oh my zsh and powerlevel10k
system aliases, scripts and functions
switching java, ruby and python environments
git, hub and git aliases
working pull-requests and stand-up meetings from the CLI
iterm2 scripting and wizardry
ngrok and working with secure call-backs

Bring your machine and lets have you productive within 2 hours!

Apache Kafka is the core of an amazing ecosystem of tools and frameworks that enable us to get more value from our data. Let's take a journey through this wonderful world and see what we can learn.

In this session, we'll have a gentle introduction to Apache Kafka, and then a survey of some of the more popular components in the Kafka ecosystem. We will be looking at the Kafka Producer and Consumer libraries, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, the Confluent Schema Registry, and ksqlDB. You will leave loaded with ideas of ways to put Kafka to use in your organization, and a list of resources to help you on your journey.

Some say that data is the new oil, and like oil, data needs to be collected, refined, and distributed to gain value from it. For years we've collected data into tankers called databases, and when we had enough, we shipped batches of it to be refined by some process. Then when that was done, we'd make it available to end-users. However, unlike oil, data tends to lose its value the longer we wait to use it. (Data is the new milk?)

So, what if we could hook up a pipeline* to the source of the oil, er… data, and transform it in near real time, on its way to the end-users? That's precisely what we can do with Apache Kafka and Kafka Streams. In this session, we’ll see how we can use Kafka Streams to enrich, aggregate, summarize, and otherwise transform our data while it is flowing through our systems.

These pipelines are completely harmless to the environment.

Event-driven architectures look great on paper (or a whiteboard), but it's easy to run into snags when trying to implement them. In this talk, we'll see how tools from the Apache Kafka ecosystem can make this task easier and a lot more fun!

In this session, with Apache Kafka as the backbone, we'll use Micronaut to implement an event-driven architecture that is loosely coupled and easily extensible. Then we'll extend it with a Kafka Streams application without affecting any of the existing applications.

In this example-driven session, we'll review several tips and tricks to make the most out of your Spring development experience. You'll see how to apply the best features of Spring and Spring Boot, including the latest and greatest features of Spring Framework 6.x and Spring Boot 3.x with an eye to what's coming in Spring 7 and Boot 4.

Spring has been the de facto standard framework for Java development for nearly two decades. Over the years, Spring has continued to evolve and adapt to meet the ever-changing requirements of software development. And for nearly half that time, Spring Boot has carried Spring forward, capturing some of the best Spring patterns as auto-configuration.

As with any framework or language that has this much history and power, there are just as many ways to get it right as there are to get it wrong. How do you know that you are applying Spring in the best way in your application?

Workshop Requirements

You'll need…

A Java IDE of your choice. I'll be using IntelliJ, but you are welcome to use Spring Tools, Netbeans, or whatever you prefer for Java development. (Spring Tools–either the Eclipse or VSCode version–or IntelliJ is recommended, though).
Java 17 or higher. I recommend using SDKMan (https://sdkman.io/) for managing multiple versions of Java on your machine. I'll be using Zulu 17.0.6 for most tasks, but may switch to a Liberica NIK version for purposes of native builds.
Docker (optional, but may be necessary for some tasks)

In this example-driven presentation, we'll take a high-level look at how Spring applies reactive programming at all layers of an application. You'll also learn the essentials of working with Project Reactor, the reactive programming library for Java that Spring's reactive support builds upon.

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 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.

In this example-driven presentation, we'll focus on working with reactive data persistence. We'll start by seeing how to create reactive repositories for relational databases with Spring Data R2DBC. Then we'll explore non-relational reactive persistence for MongoDB and Cassandra.

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 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.

In this example-driven presentation, we'll focus on how to build reactive APIs in Spring. We'll start with Spring WebFlux, a reactive reimagining of the popular Spring MVC framework for HTTP-based APIs. Then we'll have a look at RSocket, an intriguing new communication protocol that is reactive by design.

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 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.

In this example-driven session, we're going to look at how to implement GraphQL in Spring. You'll learn how Spring for GraphQL builds upon GraphQL Java, recognize the use-cases that are best suited for GraphQL, and how to build a GraphQL API in Spring.

Typical REST APIs deal in resources. This is fine for many use cases, but it tends to be more rigid and less efficient in others.

For example, in an shopping API, it's important to weigh how much or how little information should be provided in a request for an order resource? Should the order resource contain only order specifics, but no details about the order's line items or the products in those line items? If all relevant details is included in the response, then it's breaking the boundaries of what the resource should offer and is overkill for clients that do not need it. On the other hand, proper factoring of the resource will require that the client make multiple requests to the API to fetch relevant information that they may need.

GraphQL offers a more flexible alternative to REST, setting aside the resource-oriented model and focusing more on what a client needs. Much as how SQL allows for data from multiple tables to be selected and joined in response to a query, GraphQL offers API clients the possibility of tailoring the response to provide all of the information needed and nothing that they do not need.

Workshop Requirements

Java (17 or higher)
An IDE of your choosing (I'll be using either Spring Tools or IntelliJ, but VSCode or even NetBeans will be fine if you prefer)

We live in a world of microservices. Yet, what is a microservice? What defines the boundaries of a microservice? How do we define the relationships between microservices? Thankfully domaindriven design gives us the concepts and practices to better design and decompose our services.

In this session we will consider many of the concepts of DDD — How bounded contexts use Ubiquitous language to model the domain, how context maps can be used to establish the interconnections between services as well aggregates and domains events, all of which will service us well as we go about creating our microservices.

In this session we will go further with DDD, considering aspects like aggregates, domain events, factories and repositories, and consider how DDD can be represented in architecture, be that hexagonal, REST or RPC.

If you need a deeper dive into DDD, then this is the session for you.

Embraced containers yet? If so, that only presents the beginning of the journey. Designing your images to be lean, and your containers configurable requires us to leverage Dockerfiles to their maximum potential. At scale, everything matters—build times, testing, multi-stage builds, conventions around tagging and logging. There is a whole ecosystem of tools around how we can best build our images and containers.

In this session we will learn many a trick on how we can leverage Docker's own tooling as well as third-party tools to ensure that our first steps in the container world are the right ones.

You have been using Git for a while. You know how to stage and commit your work, create and delete branches and collaborate with your team members using remotes. But Git often leaves your confused — ever committed to your work to the wrong branch? Even worse, ever accidentally delete a branch that you needed to keep around? And what is God's good name is “Detached HEAD state”? Why tag commits, when we have branches? Is there a better work-flow than just using merges? What's the difference between a merge and a rebase?

The answer to all of these questions, and more, lies in the constitution of a commit, and the directed acyclic graph (DAG) that Git uses to manage your history. This, right here, is the key to understanding everything in Git.

In this hands-on workshop, we will level up your Git skills. We will foray into the underbelly of Git, and reveal the mystery behind the arcane interface that is the Git CLI.

By the end of this workshop, you will have a keen understanding on how best to use Git, as well as know how to dig yourself any prickly situation you might find yourself in. You will become your team's hero(ine). Most importantly, you will walk away with a keen appreciation of how beautiful and elegant Git really is.

You have been using Git for a while. You know how to stage and commit your work, create and delete branches and collaborate with your team members using remotes. But Git often leaves your confused — ever committed to your work to the wrong branch? Even worse, ever accidentally delete a branch that you needed to keep around? And what is God's good name is “Detached HEAD state”? Why tag commits, when we have branches? Is there a better work-flow than just using merges? What's the difference between a merge and a rebase?

The answer to all of these questions, and more, lies in the constitution of a commit, and the directed acyclic graph (DAG) that Git uses to manage your history. This, right here, is the key to understanding everything in Git.

In this hands-on workshop, we will level up your Git skills. We will foray into the underbelly of Git, and reveal the mystery behind the arcane interface that is the Git CLI.

By the end of this workshop, you will have a keen understanding on how best to use Git, as well as know how to dig yourself any prickly situation you might find yourself in. You will become your team's hero(ine). Most importantly, you will walk away with a keen appreciation of how beautiful and elegant Git really is.

This talk is designed to catapult your productivity, enhance your emotional intelligence, and refine your problem-solving skills. This talk is not just a series of presentations; it's a transformative experience tailored for the ambitious software developer and architect seeking to leave a mark in the fast-paced world of technology.

Dive into the essence of developer and architect productivity, where we unravel the secrets to optimizing your workflow and leveraging your skills for maximum impact. Discover the “24 Hours Instant Happiness” principle, a proven strategy to inject a dose of joy into your daily routine, fostering a positive work environment and personal life.

“Maximizing Your Impact” takes you deeper into the realm of influence, equipping you with the tools to excel in your projects and inspire those around you. Through “Effective Communication” and the intriguing “Mirror Technique,” learn how to build rapport, foster collaboration, and lead with empathy, amplifying your charisma in all professional interactions.

As we delve into the core of success, “Emotional Intelligence is 85% of Success” highlights the paramount importance of self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills in achieving your goals. The “6 Phase Meditation Approach” and “Day Launcher” sessions are designed to refine your focus, creativity, and emotional stability, setting a solid foundation for a productive day ahead.

The inclusion of “Empathy Maps” and “IDEO Case Studies” offers a practical lens through which to view user-centric design and innovation. At the same time, the “SCAMPER Technique” provides a creative framework for problem-solving, ensuring you're equipped to tackle challenges with agility and inventiveness.

Elevate your productivity to new heights with “5 Choices for Super Productivity,” a comprehensive guide to prioritizing effectively, embracing extraordinary outcomes, and mastering your technology. Learn the art of “Managing Energy, Not Time,” a paradigm shift that promises to enhance your efficiency and job satisfaction.

As the talk culminates, “The Paradox of Choice” and the latest “Technology Trends to Focus On” prepare you to navigate the complexities of the modern tech landscape with confidence and curiosity.

This masterclass is more than just a talk; it's an invitation to transform how you work, lead, and innovate. Join us to unlock your full potential and reshape your future in software development and architecture. Whether you're looking to boost your productivity, enhance your emotional intelligence, or simply find more joy in your work, this talk is your gateway to a more fulfilling career and life.

Developers and Architects are designers, problem solvers, and innovative, creative artists. Software design is an art that requires both left and right brains to be active so you can understand what customers need. Next, we will explore habits and tools to plan, learn, research, organize, teach, develop, mentor, and architect.

Agenda
Enhancing Productivity and Personal Growth
– Developer and Architect Productivity
Strategies for improving daily workflow and efficiency in software development and architecture.

– 24 Hours Instant Happiness
Quick wins for boosting morale and happiness within the team and personal life.

– Maximizing Your Impact
Techniques to increase your influence and contributions in projects and teams.

– Effective Communication
Importance of clear communication and the Mirror Technique to improve understanding and rapport.

– Increasing Charisma
Tips for becoming more charismatic and influential in professional settings.
Building Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness

– Emotional Intelligence is 85% of Success
Discussing the critical role of emotional intelligence in achieving professional success.

– 6-Phase Meditation Approach
Introducing a meditation technique to enhance focus, creativity, and emotional stability.

– Day Launcher
A strategy to start your day with intention and focus, setting the tone for productivity and success.

– Empathy Map
Utilizing empathy maps to better understand user needs and enhance team collaboration.

– IDEO Case Studies
Examining case studies from IDEO to illustrate successful applications of empathy in design.

– Understanding a Problem with SCAMPER Technique
Exploring the SCAMPER technique to creatively solve problems and innovate solutions.
Strategies for Super Productivity

– 5 Choices for Super Productivity
Detailed strategies for enhancing productivity by prioritizing important tasks, aiming for extraordinary outcomes, scheduling priorities (“big rocks”), mastering technology use, and maintaining energy levels.

– Managing Energy, Not Time
Shifting focus from time management to energy management to maximize productivity and well-being.

– Increasing Frequency to Do What You Want
Techniques to align daily actions with personal and professional goals more effectively.

– The Paradox of Choice
Understanding how reducing options can lead to increased satisfaction and productivity.

– Technology Trends to Focus On
Highlighting current technology trends that developers and architects should be aware of to stay ahead in their field.

As a software architect, you're at the forefront of building scalable, secure, and resilient systems that drive innovation while safeguarding critical digital assets. This workshop is designed to equip you with actionable strategies, cutting-edge tools, and deep technical insights into embedding security into every phase of the software development lifecycle.
In this immersive, hands-on session, we will explore how to elevate your DevSecOps practices to meet the challenges of today’s evolving threat landscape while ensuring productivity and operational excellence.

What You'll Learn:

Integrating Security into CI/CD Pipelines: Discover how to build efficient, secure workflows that empower teams to deliver faster without compromising security. Learn to implement security gates and automate vulnerability detection with tools like SAST, DAST, and dependency scanning.
Tracking Metrics for Success: Understand key DevSecOps metrics such as lead time, deployment frequency, mean-time-to-recover (MTTR), and change fail rate. Learn how observability tools provide actionable insights to optimize performance and reliability.
Proactive Security with Ethical Hacking: Dive into penetration testing and simulate real-world attacks to uncover vulnerabilities in your systems before attackers do. Get hands-on with industry-standard tools such as OWASP ZAP.
OWASP Top 10 for Applications, APIs, LLMs, and Mobile:
- Applications: Learn to identify and mitigate risks such as injection flaws, broken authentication, and misconfigurations.
- APIs: Secure APIs with best practices for authorization, schema validation, and rate limiting to combat vulnerabilities like excessive data exposure.
- LLMs: Explore unique challenges in securing Large Language Models (AI-driven applications), including prompt injection and data leakage.
- Mobile: Address mobile app vulnerabilities such as insecure storage and transport layer protection, ensuring your applications are robust across platforms.
Aligning Security with Business Outcomes: Bridge the gap between technical practices and business goals by aligning DevSecOps with operational KPIs. Demonstrate how secure development drives measurable business value, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence.

Why You Should Attend:

Hands-On Experience: Participate in live demonstrations of vulnerabilities, attacks, and their mitigation across applications, APIs, LLMs, and mobile systems.
Cutting-Edge Tools and Techniques: Gain exposure to the latest tools and practices in CI/CD, ethical hacking, and observability.
Business-Driven Approach: Learn how to connect DevSecOps efforts to organizational success, making security an enabler of productivity.
Collaborate with Experts: Engage with peers and experts to discuss real-world challenges and share actionable solutions.

Who Should Attend:
This workshop is ideal for:

Software Architects seeking to embed security into every layer of system design.
Senior Developers striving to deliver secure, high-performing applications.
Technical Leads responsible for ensuring compliance and operational excellence in development pipelines.

Join us for this transformative session to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to design secure, scalable, and resilient systems that protect your organization and enable innovation.

Salient Points Architects Will Learn in This Talk

Shift-Left Security: Embed security early in the CI/CD process to catch and resolve vulnerabilities proactively.
Key DevSecOps Metrics: Track and optimize lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR, and change fail rate for operational excellence.
Ethical Hacking: Learn how to simulate real-world attacks to identify and fix vulnerabilities before they become threats.
OWASP Top 10 Insights: Gain actionable strategies to mitigate risks across applications, APIs, LLMs, and mobile platforms.
API Security Best Practices: Implement schema validation, token-based authentication, and rate limiting to safeguard APIs.
AI Security for LLMs: Address unique vulnerabilities in Large Language Models, including prompt injection and data leakage.
Mobile App Security: Protect mobile systems from insecure data storage and transport vulnerabilities using OWASP Mobile Top 10.
Business Alignment: Connect DevSecOps practices to measurable business KPIs, demonstrating security’s value in driving success.

This session is a must-attend for architects aiming to design secure, scalable systems while staying ahead in the rapidly evolving security landscape.

Secure, Efficient, Resilient, High-performing, Sustainable, and Cost-effective

Are your applications well-architected? This talk will explore the best practices for operational excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and cost optimization. Think of systems and services which provide business values. Do you know if all of these services are well-architected? You will learn how to create mechanisms, a repeatable process that allows you to improve over time. We will explore the best practices using real-world examples to make them more concrete and actionable.

Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for various applications and workloads. They are built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

Join expert Rohit Bhardwaj to gain the knowledge and skills you need to solve current cloud implementation problems.

What you'll learn — and how you can apply it
By the end of this live, hands-on, online course, you'll understand the following:

– How to create responsive, maintainable, extensible architecture

– How to manage identities for people and machines and understand the significance of role-based, service-based, and attribute-based access

– How to design network topology and protect your network resources

– How to design interactions in a distributed system to prevent failures and improve performance and resiliency

– How to select the best-performing architecture and choose performant storage and databases

– How to manage demand and supply resources

– How to take advantage of user behavior patterns to support your sustainability goals

Topics covered:

Design Principles

– Scaling patterns

– Architecture Design Principles

– Capacity calculations

– Impact of data on design decisions

– Shared Responsibility Model

Reliability

– Resilient Architecture principles

– Herds of complex real-time distributed systems

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

– Blast radius- fault isolation to protect your workload

– Availability patterns

– Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objectives

– Data backup data patterns

– Routing Strategies

– Service quotas and constraints

– Design your workload service architecture

– Failure management in a distributed system

– Monitoring workload resources

– Calculating the response times

– Fallacies of Distributed Systems

– Testing reliability

– Cost Optimization

– Design cost-optimized storage

– Cost-optimized compute

– Data transfer costs

– Manage demand and supply resources

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Sustainability
– User behavior patterns

– Data access and usage patterns

– Development and deployment processes

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Performance Efficiency
– Select the best-performing architecture

– Choosing performant storage and databases?

– No-SQL for performance

– Caching strategies

– DOS attacks

– Tradeoffs to improve performance

– Evolving your workload

– Handle skewed data

– CDN networks like Cloudfront to solve the caching requirements for static and Dynamic
contents

– Monitor and set alarms for performance and network issues

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Operational Excellence
– Principles for Perform Operation Infrastructure as code

– Annotate Documentation - PlayBooks - Part of code

– Create Runbooks - Server down

– Capture failures and analyze them using Events and Real-Time Actions

– KPIs for cloud dashboard

– Incidence response - Root Cause Analysis

– Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies

Security, Privacy, and Compliance
– Manage identities for people and machines

– Identify Access Management

 Role-Based, Service-Based, and Attribute-Based Access

– Securely operate your workload.

– Detect and investigate security events

– Web Application Firewall

– Virtual Private Cloud - design network topology

– Protecting your network resources

– Bastion Hosts

– Data classification

– Protecting data in Transit

– Protecting data at Rest

Hands-on Exercises / Case Studies