The last big water-hose change to Java came in Java 9. Since then, thanks to the new release cadence, the language is evolving faster, but with bitesize improvements. With release every six months, we'll soon be seeing Java 15! In this presentation we'll explore the features of Java, both the language changes and the significant JDK changes, starting from Java 9 to the current version.

Language changes
Significant JDK changes

One of the most intriguing classes in the JDK is the Collectors utility class, with a collection of some highly powerful functions that are useful during the reduce operation of streams. The functions that are in this class have so much to offer and yet, due to their complex nature, often are not used as much as they should be. Using well defined live coded examples, we will take up several common programming problems. Discuss them quickly and drive the implementation of these using the Collectors' methods. By the end of this presentation you will know more throughly the power of Collectors and how to apply the methods in there.

The Collectors utility class
Benefiting from Collectors
Learn to program some advanced capabilities of functional style along the way

How do we move information realtime and connect machine learning models to make decisions on our business data? This presentation goes through machine learning and Kafka tools that would help achieve that goal.

In this presentation, we start with Kafka as our data backplane and how we get information to our pub/sub. As they enter Kafka, how do we sample that data and train our model, then how do we unleash that model on our real-time data? In other words, picture extracting samples for credit card approvals for training, then attaching the model for online processing: The moment we receive an application, we can either approve or disapprove a credit application based on a machine learning model trained on historical data. We will discuss other options as well like Spark, H2O, and more.

Graal has already proved to be an important advancement in Java. One such feature is AOT, Ahead of Time Compiling which takes JVM byte code and converts it as a native application as if it was written in C. This means a great deal for those who need to develop fast microservices with natively compiled speed.

This presentation will start with a quick introduction to Graal VM. Then jump into how to bootstrap and get started with Quarkus micro service. From there will discuss the standard set APIs, convert your application into a native image, and then containerize it for deployment.

Spark has a machine learning aspect to it and it's called Spark MLLib. We discuss an intro into machine learning, some models, then apply some of those common machine learning models.

You may also already know what Spark is, if not, well, we will either introduce it again or remind you. We will go over a quick introduction to its purpose. Then we will go all Machine Learning on it. We will have a discussion of the purpose of data science, what the rigors are with data science and then apply this data into Spark MLLib. We will discuss the various models and then apply various data into Spark in order to achieve some insight into the data you have and have currently been aggregating.

In this presentation, we will discuss Kafka Connect. Kafka Connect is an opensource project from Confluent. Kafka Connect provides us a way to move data from a data store as a source and stream or batch that information into Kafka. Kafka Connect also gives us a way to take information from Kafka and send that to another data store, a Sink. Every source and sink can be connected to and from various databases and message queues.

What this presentation will entail:

A brief overview and review of Kafka
The Architecture of Kafka Connect
Where to find connectors
Standalone vs Distributed
Connecting a Source
Creating Single Message Transforms
Connecting a Sink

At the end of this presentation, we will have a live demonstration of watching a data pipeline using data stores.

Graal is a VM and an awesome VM at that. Able to run a variety of languages and fast. The execution times can be impressive too. This VM can run anything, JavaScript, Python 3, Ruby, R, JVM-based languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, and LLVM-based languages such as C and C++.

We are living in truly exciting times. So much interesting technology including the VM space. Graal is a virtual machine and shared memory system for multiple languages. GraalVM can either run standalone or embedded in OpenJDK or node.js. Graal can even embed inside databases such as MySQL or Oracle. In the presentation, we look at this exciting VM, how to start it, how to run polyglot applications, and how to integrate all within the same VM.

A large part of embracing DevOps involves embracing automation. Over the last decade we have seen the emergence of “as Code” — Build-as-Code, Configuration-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code. The benefits to utilizing such tools are huge! We can codify the state of the world around our applications, giving us the ability to treat everything that our code needs like we treat the code itself. Version control, release management, tagging, even rolling backs are now possible. Terraform, an open-source tool from HashiCorp allows us to build, control and modify our infrastructure. Terraform exposes a Domain-specific language (DSL) that we can use to express what our infrastructure should look like. Terraform can work with all the major cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Google GCP and Microsoft Azure. If you are curious about what this tool has to offer, this session is for you. Come on in, and let's learn how to terraform your cloud.

This session will focus on Terraform. We will look in to how this tool works, explore its capabilities, and see how it can play a pivotal role in our Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) strategy. With lots of code and demos, this session will certainly give you enough fodder for thought, and provide a baseline so you can decide if Terraform is right for you.

Java was once a language that dragged along and evolved at snails' pace. Thankfully, that's no longer the case. The recently years have seen accelerated development of both language features and JDK improvements. In this presentation we will dive into some of the recent changes of Java that are both fun and powerful to use and discuss where the language is heading in the near future.

The modern features of the language
Where's Java heading?

Java Modules are the future. However, our enterprise applications have legacy code, a lots of it. How in the world do we migrate from the old to the new? What are some of the challenges. In this presentation we will start with an introduction to modules and learn how to create them. Then we will dive into the differences between unnamed modules, automatic modules, and explicit modules. After that we will discuss some key limitations of modules, things that may surprise your developers if they're not aware of. Finally we will discuss how to migrate current applications to use modules.

Current approaches to software architecture is broken and does not result in resilient software that is maintainable. The question is - how do we fix it?

Software systems evolve but current approaches to architecture do not factor in this inevitable evolution. Attempts to define the architectural vision for a system early in the development lifecycle does not work. Big architecture up front (BAUF) does not work. To compound the challenge, agile methods offer very little guidance on how to effectively do software architecture.

In this session, we examine several actionable principles that will help you create software architectures that possess the ability to continuously evolve.

Modern architecture paradigms are built upon the concept of modularity. Even monoliths, when built using modularity, demonstrates a high degree of architectural agility. And the beauty is that once modularity is well understand, moving between different architectures is straightforward. A true demonstration of architectural agility.

The architecture paradigms we’re using are changing. The platforms we we use are changing. We are confronted with several new architecture paradigms to choose from, such as microservices and miniservices. Yet should we automatically discard some of the proven architectures we’ve used in the past, including more traditional web services? Likewise, new platforms, such as cloud, complicate the decision. Yet, at the heart of this transformation is modularity.

In this session, we’ll explore how modularity is impacting the platforms we are leveraging and the architecture paradigms we’ll use and offer a clear roadmap with proven guidance on navigating the architecture decisions we must make.

The Java Platform Module System was introduced in Java 9. As developers begin migrating their Java 8 applications to Java 11, they'll have to begin learning the Java Platform Module System (JPMS) and understand how it impacts their applications.

With Java 9, modularity became a first class construct on the Java platform…Finally! In this session, we explore the default module system and examine how to migrate applications. We'll start by examining the first step in the migration and then examine several strategies for migrating your application.

Finally, we will explore advanced concept of JPMS that bring greater structural integrity and encapsulation to the Java platform.

Organizations have a lot of expertise in Java EE. With MicroProfile, developers can leverage this expertise to build cloud-native applications.

Many believe Java EE and microservices aren't compatible. Enter microprofile, which presents a viable option for building microservices. Developers have a wealth of knowledge and skill that they may want to leverage to build microservices as they adopt cloud-native architecture patterns. The MicroProfile is a baseline platform definition that optimizes Enterprise Java for a microservices architecture and delivers application portability across multiple MicroProfile runtimes. In this session, we will explore the MicroProfile and examine it’s viability for using Java EE to build cloud-native applications.

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. 12 Factor is an app development methodology for building modern apps in the modern era.

We’ve reached the limits of agility through process improvement alone, and further increases demand we focus on improving architecture, infrastructure, and methodology simultaneously. 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 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.

In this example-driven presentation, we'll start with an empty directory and have an application (simple as it may be) running in a production environment, leveraging Spring and 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 example-driven session, we'll build a complete (albeit simple) Spring application, leveraging Spring's support for reactive programming at all levels, from the database to the client.

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.

In this session, we'll explore the Spring Boot Actuator, a runtime component of Spring Boot that lets you peer inside a running application and, in some cases, even tweak configuration on the fly. We'll look at many of the Actuator's endpoints, learn how to customize and even create new endpoints, and see how to expose Actuator metrics to several popular instrumentation and monitoring systems.

Spring Boot makes developing applications with Spring easy work by offering auto-configuration for many common application scenarios. And with Spring Boot's starter dependencies, even an application's build file can be easily managed. But Spring Boot's powers don't end when the application is deployed. That's where the real fun begins.

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

TBD

The way we communicate with our applications is an ever-evolving experience. Punch cards gave way to keyboards. Typing on keyboards was then supplemented by pointing and clicking with a mouse. And touch screens on our phones, tablets, and computers are now a common means of communicating with applications.

These all lack one thing, however: They aren’t natural.

As humans, we often communicate with each other through speech. If you were to walk up to another human and start tapping them, you’d likely be tapped (or punched) in response. But when we talk to our applications, we communicate on the machine’s terms, with keyboards, mice, and touch screens. Even though we may use these same devices to communicate with other humans, it’s really the machine we are communicating with—and those machines relay what we type, click, and tap to another human using a similar device.

Voice user-interfaces (Voice UIs) enable us to communicate with our application in a human way. They give our applications the means to communicate to us on our terms, using voice. With a voice UI, we can converse with our applications in much the same way we might talk with our friends.

Voice UIs are truly the next logical step in the evolution of human-computer interaction. And this evolutionary step is long overdue. For as long as most of us can remember, science fiction has promised us the ability to talk to our computers. The robot from Lost in Space, the Enterprise computer on Star Trek, Iron Man’s Jarvis, and HAL 9000 (okay, maybe a bad example) are just a few well-recognized examples of science fiction promising a future where humans and computers would talk to each other.

Our computers are far more powerful today than the writers of science fiction would have imagined. And the tablet that Captain Picard used in his ready room on Star Trek: The Next Generation is now available with the iPad and other tablet devices. But only recently have voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant given us the talking computer promised to us by science-fiction.

In this example-driven session, we'll explore the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and see how to develop skills for Amazon's Alexa. You'll learn how to use the ASK CLI to jumpstart skill development and how to create conversational applications in NodeJS.

Contrary to popular belief, software engineering culture is not about the free food, open office spaces, and ping pong tables.

You can sense a great team culture when you observe it, and unfortunately you've probably experienced (or are currently experiencing) elements of a bad team culture. Not to worry - it's never too late to grab the reins and make small changes to steer your team in the right direction!

In this talk, Kate will highlight 8 tactical tips that attendees can implement on their teams immediately to help shape their team's culture!

Attending meetings, researching a new feature, writing support documentation, troubleshooting an annoying bug, responding to on call duties, and the growing email inbox; when do I find time to actually write code?

This one hour session will involve hands on activities for participants to assess their priorities and learn essential skills for maximizing their busy schedules and spending time on the things that actually matter!

Please view and download the handout before joining this session. (located with session slides)

Do you feel inspired by conference talks but overwhelmed by all of the take aways to remember when you get back to work? This session will provide an opportunity to identify and practice key leadership skills immediately!

We will work to understand what your motivational style means to you and how you can use it as a compass for decision making and improving your enjoyment at work.

“Forewarned is forearmed”
-Old Proverb

If it seems like humans are easy to deceive, it's because we are. The myriad traits that make humankind so eminently exploitable are practically baked into our DNA. Too often these same traits make it into the software we build. This session takes an entertaining look at why humans are so easy to fool and goes on to explore what we can do to overcome our weaknesses and build more secure software.

Security is everyone's responsibility but the burden disproportionally falls on us. As software engineers, we are the last line of defense in our organization. We build the technology and that technology is constantly scanned, probed, and tested. Building truly secure software requires going beyond mere functional requirements; it requires a complete shift in how we think about problems.

You have some modular code with a REST API. You are on your way to Microservices. Next, you package it in a container image that others can run. Simple. Now what? Your service needs to log information, needs to scale and load balance between its clones. Your service needs environment and metadata way outside its context. What about where the service will run? Who starts it? What monitors its health? What about antifragility? Updates? Networking? Oh my.

Don't get flustered. We will explore how Kubernetes simplifies the complexity of distributed computing.

This session will help you understand the terms, architecture and the mechanics of the Kubernetes tools. You will understand how to target your applications to a seemingly complex distributed compute platform.

Everything in Kubernetes revolves around the Pod. We explore all the important building blocks around Pods and grow outward to all the other fundamental features and resources related to Pods. You will leave this session with a core understanding of the best practices to run your applications on Kubernetes.

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

Things we do with apps in containers, in pods:

Declare
Label and annotate
Deploy
Inspect
Scale
Update
Expose
Configure
Connect to a volume
Run as a job
Define probes
Define resource constraints
Install and uninstall with Helm
Taints and Tolerations

We will explore these Kubernetes “kinds:” Pod, Service, Namespace, Deployment, ConfigMap, Secret, ReplicaSet, StatefulSet, Job, CronJob, PersistentVolume, DeamonSets

Bring your laptop if you want to follow along with the hands-on demonstrations, or run the exercises later if you just want to watch.

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.

Kubernetes is a powerful platform for running containers and distributing computation workloads across resources. A significant question is how do you get all your code to this platform, continuously.

In 2019 our community is bursting with new solutions to assist our delivery pipelines. While Jenkins is a dominant player, there is a growing array of new ideas and choices. From coding at your laptop to building containers to deployments, we will explore the various tools and techniques to reduce the delivery frictions.

Kubernetes is also a fitting platform for hosting your continuous tools, pipeline engines, registries, testing, code analysis, security scans, and delivery workflows.

From this session, you will understand the latest tools and techniques for pipelining on Kubernetes. Let's up the game on your Maturity Model.

Three evolutionary ecosystems work well together Java, Containers, and Kubernetes.

Past versions of Java were never designed to be “container aware”. This has led some to stray away from the JVM and consider other shiny languages. But wait, before you go, let's discover what Java 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 (…) has done to get our applications into efficiently distilled containers that pack nicely into Kubernetes.

Topics covered:

Microframeworks
Java9+, advancing beyond the troubled past
Java runtime to container runtime - a paradigm shift for “run anywhere”
Distillation pattern · small containers with a reduced attack vector
Multi-stage Dockerfile
JLink, JDeps
GraalVM
Hands on example

Several of us come from server-side programming background and are either asked to develop applications for the front-end or asked to closely work with front-end developers. The tool set and facilities on the front-end are vastly different from the backend and can be daunting. In this highly practical presentation, we will take a live-coding approach to learn about creating client-side code and explore common set of tools that we will use whether it is a Angular, React, or a Vue application.

Client side development
Creating projects
Tools
Development
Bundling
Packaging
Testing

JavaScript has had metaprogramming from the beginning, but in recent versions of the language more power has been packed. This opens door for not only doing function and property injection but also synthesis. In this presentation you will learn, using live examples, the power of metaprogramming and how to make use of that to create dynamic, highly extensible code for your client side and server side applications.

Metaprogramming
Injection
Synthesis
Extending existing classes and functions

Machine Learning with Distributed Computing are both relatively complex software architectures to wrap your head around. Through the years the solution stack has taken various forms, most of which have been difficult to setup and maintain. Today with the advent of tools like TensorFlow and Kubernetes, we can combine these technologies and stand on the shoulders of giants. Your ML solutions will not just be running, but will also be easier to maintain and observe.

The session will present the fundamentals of how these two work together for a complementary solution stack. We walk through a hand-on demonstration that you can later take and exercise for yourself and show to your peers.

Prerequisite: Be sure to attend Kubernetes Koncepts (at least part 1) as this presentation builds on those ideas.

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.

Imagine toString, equals, and hashCode in a single class. Can you change implementations on the spot? Probably not, there may be too many dependencies on your implementation. Time to break out an adapter pattern, a utility class, or better yet, a type class! A type class is a kind of template in very static functional programming languages. Imagine a template that can read, write information as a side effect as well? Type classes are powerful.

For these various type-classes, we will be looking at a project called TypeLevel Cats. TypeLevel is a group of projects that adhere to a code of conduct, modular systems, static, functional, open source programming. TypeLevel Cats is the flagship project for Typelevel.

Our presentation will be following this story:

Just a tiny bit of Scala
Introduction to an implicit
Introduction to a typeclass
Using Cats
Eq
Monoid
Monad
Functors

Even if you are not a Scala Programmer, you may want to come in and see how type classes work because I am making a bet… This will be something that will be used by other JVM languages in the future. Kotlin doesn't have it now, Groovy doesn't have it now, TypeScript doesn't either although some projects are working towards this idea.

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.

Docker compose has been a part of the docker ecosystem since the beginning. It allows us to “stitch” together our services so that we can deploy all our services and related infrastructure using the “one” button. Furthermore, we can now use docker-compose to target Kubernetes, exemplifying the role that docker compose has to play in our day to day interaction with Docker.

If you are new to docker-compose then this is the session for you. Lets take a look at the capabilities of docker-compose, see what it takes to use it for local development and testing, and finally see how we can target Kubernetes so we can mimic our production deployment on our laptops.

Albert Einstein once said — “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

As developers, architects, managers, tech-leads, our job entails solving big problems. However, our systems are composed of parts, and it is the interaction of those parts that ensure the system works, and tells us where to go looking when things fail. What does it mean to think in systems? What are the benefits, and what are tools are available to us? If any of this intrigues you (and it should) come join me as we explore a new way of thinking about problems, both big and small.

In this session we will take a page from Donella H. Meadows fantastic book “Thinking in Systems” and attempt to get an understanding of what makes up a system, how we can tease apart the moving parts of the system, and get into the mindset of a “systems thinker”.

Giving peer feedback, coaching junior developers, and establishing professional career goals are quite often dreaded tasks as Software Engineers.

This session will demystify both of these activities and provide attendees with tactical resources to apply in their roles immediately.

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

Java 8 Streams are awesome and we know that, but there is more to be desired. For example, there is no zip or sliding. This leaves us needing some help from external libraries

This presentation takes a look at some of the common extension libraries that are available for Java to enhance our streaming experience. We will compare and contrast:

StreamX
Eclipse Collections
Guava
Vavr

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.

The fundamental testing libraries in Java have undergone complete redesigns in the past few years. JUnit 5, known as JUnit Jupiter, redesigns the most well-known tool in all of testing. This talk will demonstrate the new features, how they are intended to be used, and discuss experimental ideas in the pipeline.

JUnit has been remarkably stable over the years and is one of the most widely adopted frameworks in the Java world. The latest version, JUnit 5, takes JUnit to the next level. Full of new features like conditional test execution, parametric testing, labeling and filtering tests, and more, it brings all the modern thinking on testing into the JUnit world. It also takes advantage of the functional features added to Java since version 8 to create a powerful, new library for testing your code.

Good discussions are supposed to diverge from their intended path. Free association is a feature, not a bug, and helps you see new connections between ideas. Without structure, however, it can be difficult to add context to new ideas and understand how they relate to more immediate problems. This talk discusses the technique of mental bookmarks – how to remember where you were when a discussion diverged. In addition to giving you a reputation for having an amazing memory, the skill also helps with personal awareness in general.

To give the technique context, we'll look at the fractal nature of success – the way we tend to see our current environment in relative terms, always comparing ourselves to those slightly more successful and slightly less successful.

Learn the basic syntax and semantics for the Kotlin programming language. Kotlin is an alternative JVM language that provides null safety, static typing, and powerful IDE support. This talk will emphasize the relationships between Kotlin and Java, highlighting the differences in types, functional programming, collections, and more.

Demonstrations will include:

how to transform Kotlin code to view the equivalent Java
how to work with classes, interfaces, and objects
how to use collections, streams, and sequences

and much more.

Java is now on a six-month release schedule, with new features being added all the time. This talk summarizes the features that have been added to Java, including collection factory methods, private methods in interfaces, records, the enhanced switch statement, and more. The goal is to show not only what has been added, but why and where to use them.

Additional topics will include Local Variable Type Inference, the new HTTP client, the pattern matching, and text blocks. This talk will be updated throughout the year as more features are added to new releases.

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

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

Gradle has been described as the open source project with the most documentation that doesn't help. Key concepts, like the different steps Gradle takes at initialization time, configuration time, and execution time are not obvious, but must be understood to use Gradle effectively. This talk will cover those topics, as well as how to use source sets, IDE integration, testing in parallel, the build cache, and multi-project builds.

New topics to be included based include writing your own custom tasks, using version constraints, archiving and expanding files and folders, and incremental builds for efficiency.

Recently revised to include dependency conflict resolution, lazy task creation, the TOML file for versioning, and more.

“Forewarned is forearmed”
-Old Proverb

The #1 fallacy of distributed computing is “The Network is Reliable.” Yet we still build web apps that 100% rely on a server and a network connection. What if we could build web apps that work, regardless of connection state? The promise and capabilities of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) make this possible, and these capabilities are available today.

This session doesn't focus on a specific technology or backend technology; while those demonstrations are impressive, they are only useful for a handful of use-cases. Instead we look at architecture patterns and techniques that can work with any framework, any backend, and virtually any app.

In 2005 the way we built web applications changed when Google released Google Maps and the AJAX map canvas. This approach fundamentally changed how users expect to interact with web applications. Suddenly any app that sent postback after postback felt cumbersome and positively ancient.

Progressive web apps and offline capabilities are that next big shift. Soon any app that doesn't work offline is going to be as jarring and frustrating of a user experience as it would be to go back to a pre-ajax world. Don't let this be your app!

In tech teams it's a constant firefight. We react. Then we react to the reaction… the cycle continues. In all this noise, in all this chaos, how do we move forward. How do we remain proactive?

A great leader must be an enabler for the team. At times this means insulating the team from the noise. At other times it means improving the environment for the team. At all times, however, it requires setting clear priorities and conditions for success.

This session is focused on the art of moving forward in even the noisiest environments.

Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium

February 28 - 29, 2020

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