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

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

Microservices are all the rage. But this isn’t a session on microservices. It’s a session on 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’ll refactor a monolith using patterns of modular architecture. In the end, you’ll see how the underlying set of principles used to modularize the monolith are virtually identical to the benefits of a microservice architecture, albeit manifest in a different way. Once modularized, you’ll also be amazed at how much architectural agility we have in our ability to now shift between different approaches to modularity, including microservices.

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

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

What if I told you that configuration was optional?

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

In this session, we'll open the hood on Spring Boot and see how it works. Using this knowledge, we'll look at ways to optimize Spring Boot, override autoconfiguration, and create custom extensions to Spring Boot's Actuator.

Spring Boot does many wonderful things that get you well on your way to developing amazing Spring applications. But how does it tick? How can you customize it? And how can you override it's default autoconfiguration when you want something a little different?

In this session, we'll explore Spring Cloud, the extension to Spring which addresses many of the common challenges of developing cloud native applications. We'll focus primarily on Spring Cloud's support for centralized configuration, service discovery, and failover/monitoring.

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

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

Aside from being buzzword-compliant, Microservices are a means of defining entire systems from composable, but distinct deployment units gaining all of the benefits of finer-grained modularity.

Microservices present new challenges to developers, however. How do you configure your microservices? How are microservices discovered? And how can you avoid a cascading failure when one microservice becomes sluggish, unresponsive, or otherwise unhealthy?

In this session, we'll look at Spring Cloud Data Flow, a cloud native programming and operating model for composable data microservices on a structured platform.

Microservices are commonly thought of as small REST-based services that are assembled to form a larger, more complete application. In reality, however, REST is only the communication mechanism which is only a implementation detail and not intrinsic to the notion of microservices.

Meanwhile, data processing and integration between various components of an application and external services is a key factor of many applications. In cloud native applications, this kind of data flow and processing is still relevant. Spring Cloud Data Flow offers a solution for data processing and integration where each step in the flow is, in fact, a microservice…but not necessarily a REST service.

Security is an important aspect of any application. For many years, Spring Security has been the go-to framework for securing Spring-based application. But historically Spring Security has been cumbersome to work with, involving an enormous amount of XML configuration to shape an application's security scheme.

In recent versions of Spring Security, however, XML-based configuration has taken a backseat to a powerful Java-based configuration option. Spring Security's Java-based configuration offers a fluent API for defining the security constraints for an application which is easy to read and eliminates the need for klunky XML configuration. On top of Spring Security's own configuration improvements, Spring Boot autoconfiguration makes it incredibly easy to get started securing your application, minimizing even the amount of Java configuration required.

In this session, we'll take a look at what's involved in securing a Spring application with Spring Security. In doing so, we'll take full advantage of Spring Boot to autoconfigure as much security as we can get away with and then rely solely on Spring Security's Java-based configuration to shape the security aspect of an application. We'll also briefly look at how to use Spring Security when securing microservices.

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.

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.

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

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

It begins with a vision - an awe-inspiring idea that both excites and motivates you. Then the compromises begin… Budget, schedule, scope, work/life balance; you're forced to cut a corner here and there and the vision of perfection slips further and further away until the end result is fragile, fetid shell of your original idea. How can we deal with inevitable compromises while maintaining our integrity as engineers (and pride in our work)

Like many of his talks, Michael has a very unique perspective on this phenomenon. After nearly two decades of experience both as a software engineer and as a professional magician he leverages all his skills explores this topic in an entertaining and insightful manner. It turns out creating beautiful, perfect code is not very different from creating the perfect card trick.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlock your latent photographic memory. In this session you'll learn failsafe techniques and systems that allow you to never forget names, appointments, or numbers. In the process you'll be more effective and imaginative at work; improve reading speed and comprehension, and shorten study times.

An improved memory will change your life, literally. In the session we will describe in detail several memory techniques that, with a little practice, will have you remembering virtually anything you want.

How do we define identity in a distributed software system? How do we manage it securely? How do we make identity assertions and verify those claims?

Technologies don't magically become solutions. They are used within domain, design and deployment contexts. This talk will focus on the singular notion of Identity and how it cross-cuts the distributed systems we are building.

We will focus on a variety of technologies and standards that help us make, identify, claim and verify identities.

Authenticated Identities are the first step to establish Privilege. Most systems fail to have sufficiently, deeply entrenched notion of how to apply and minimize privilege to avoid data and systems from being abused.

Technologies don't magically become solutions. They are used within domain, design and deployment contexts. This talk will focus on the singular notion of Privilege and how it cross-cuts the distributed systems we are building.

This talk will focus on the Valet Key problem and how to avoid it. We will visit various standards and technologies that help us strengthen our security profiles by reducing our dependence on open-ended and unfettered access to our systems and data.

Data integration costs are well beyond what they should be for such a crucial business function. The good news is that they needn't be. By relying on integration-friendly standards and technologies that were designed to support sharing information, we can reduce these costs while increasing our business capabilities.

Technologies don't magically become solutions. They are used within domain, design and deployment contexts. This talk will focus on the singular notion of Integration and how it cross-cuts the distributed systems we are building.

We will look at how the REST Architectural style leads us to integration-friendly standards such as RDF, Linked Data, SPARQL and JSON-LD. These technologies are useful both within our firewalls and with third party partners.

Information conveys value as it travels around our systems, resting for a time in our data stores. The value we get out of it is sometimes matched by the value others would get from it as well. We need mechanisms to protect sensitive information from prying eyes and control with whom we share it.

Technologies don't magically become solutions. They are used within domain, design and deployment contexts. This talk will focus on the singular notion of Secrecy and how it cross-cuts the distributed systems we are building.

This talk will focus on strategies from the world of encryption to keep secrets secret as we produce, store and transfer information in distributed systems. A successful strategy for doing so will rely on notions of Identity and a strong Privilege model, but we will mostly focus on specific building blocks upon which we maintain Privacy and Confidentiality.

We will also address the forces that undermine our ability to trust encryption such as bugs, design flaws and those who wish to actively undermine our need to maintain Secrecy.

Learning to Trust in a distributed system is a complex and harrowing process. By combining the notions of Identity and Secrecy we can build protocols that help us achieve it.

Technologies don't magically become solutions. They are used within domain, design and deployment contexts. This talk will focus on the singular notion of Trust and how it cross-cuts the distributed systems we are building.

This talk will focus on a variety of standards and technologies that help us connect the worlds of Identity, Secrecy and Integration. We will look at technologies that benefit from open standards to allow us to make and verify claims that strengthen our ability to Trust. This will also include a look at the Distributed Trust models such as Blockchain-based transactions and platforms that build upon them.

What's in Java 9 and, more important, how does that impact us?

In this presentation we will take a look at the major features that are likely to make in to Java 9, discuss the benefits of each one of them using practical hands on examples.

Organizations have moved from making their employees available to having their applications available directly to the users. This changes the magnitude of scale
of interactions the applications have to support. Furthermore, with devices and bots accessing the systems, we’re looking at a complete different rate of response than we once had to aim for.

In this presentation we will discuss the fundamentals of reactive systems, the key design goals, and the technologies that facilitate building such systems.

You've heard the old adage “It's not what you know it's who you know.” The focus of this session is divided between ways to better connect with everyone you meet as well as ways to grow your network, help and influence people and ultimately build long-term relationships and build your reputation.

Networking isn't about selling nor it isn't about “taking.” Done properly it benefits everyone. Among the benefits are strengthening relationships; getting new perspectives and ideas; building a reputation of being knowledgable, reliable and supportive; having access to opportunities and more!

Slides available online: https://prezi.com/ck1fdbhgqwiq/?token=8f8240f753ad9ae2c50ce696657020f40a877a40fa224790652eb412ac5eb8d3

When you hear the term “Internet of Things (IoT)” what do you think of? From a customer perspective it is a bunch of cool gadgets. From the datacenter perspective IoT == the onslaught of data and previously unprecedented scale.

This presentation is provide a walk through of the technologies necessary to dynamically create in data pipelines and process them for near real-time access to analytics.

This presentation will provide an overview of the Lambda architecture along with a brief walk through of each of the components of a common IoT datacenter infrastructure. Topics to include:

AKKA
Kakfa
HDFS
Spark
Cassandra
Mesos / DCOS

Brief mentions of Hive, Storm and InfluxDB included.

A look into Java memory including Metaspace and garbage collectors including G1.

This session will look at the Java monitoring and management capabilities, which includes the ability to make VM argument changes on the fly. This session will dive into the different memory compartments including details on Metaspace and how they are used by the JVM. Finally this session will explore the different GC options and how they affect response times and throughput.

Containers and Micro-service are like peanut butter and jelly, they just go together. However do you know how resources are managed in a container and how that affects your application. This session will dive into how Java is affected living under control groups.

This session will review containers, the underlying technology to containers along with different container runtimes such as Docker. We will look at the anatomy of a container including control groups (cgroups) and namespaces. This session will conclude with the challenges of running the JRE in a container and the impact that has on the efficiency of the process at scale.

TBA

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.

Big up front design is discouraged in agile development. However, we know that architecture plays a significant part in software systems. Evolving architecture during the development of an application seems to be a risky business.

In this presentation we will discuss the reasons to evolve the architecture, some of the core principles that can help us develop in such a manner, and the ways to minimize the risk and succeed in creating a practical and useful architecture.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

This session will focus on the Angular 10

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

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

Details

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

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

This session will focus on the Angular 10

Details

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

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

In today's world, our applications need to be both responsive, fast and scalable. Our applications need to respond to user interactions such as mouse movements, clicks and inputs as well as asynchronous inputs like XHR calls, server sent events, setInterval, even web socket events! Unfortunately as things stand today, there is no consistent way to deal with the myriad of different “changes” that could happen in an application.

But what if there is? This is what Reactive Extensions (specifially RxJs in this session) allow us to do. It offers us an abstraction that allows us to treat everything from DOM events (infinite streams) to our domain (maps, sets and arrays) as streams. This consistent interface now permits us to create and manipulate any source identically. Futhermore, it allows us to react to different sources as if they are one!

Reactive Extensions are fast becoming the de-facto approach of managing asynchronicity in JS land. From Netflix's UI to Angular 2 $http to ES7 - reactive programming is everywhere!

This session is RxJs 101, covering

A brief introduction to reactive programming
How reactive programming is analogous to dataflow programming
The architectural patterns underlying reactive extensions
How we can create and manipulate “observable” streams within our applications
Error handling
Hot and Cold observables
The reactive landscape, and a couple of gotcha

If we have time we will look at a simple demo, and reactive progamming's role in Angular 2

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

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

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.

Test Driven Design, we hear is a great way to create lightweight design that is easier to maintain and evolve. Unfortunately, just writing test cases mechanically do not lead to good design. In fact, it may really not lead us anywhere we want to really go!

In this presentation we will discuss some of the challenges with using test driven development, look at practical and pragmatic solutions that will help us make a good use of this wonderful design tool.

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.

Functional programming promotes immutability and using higher-order functions. Functional code is in general easier test, but lambdas and lazy evaluations pose some challenges from the tools point of view. That's where JUnit 5 comes in.

Learn the challenges to testing functional style code and how JUnit 5 addresses those.

Today you can't swing a dry erase marker without hitting someone talking about “the cloud”. From the CIO to the project room, the cloud is bound to be a topic of conversation. While there is no denying the buzz worthiness of the term, you probably should take a deep breathe before declaring your entire portfolio will be cloud native by the end of the year. In this talk, I will discuss a practical way of assessing your applications and how to create a thoughtful plan to move applications to the cloud - when it makes sense.

We'll talk about what factors to consider when surveying an application, why some systems shouldn't go to the cloud and what else you need to consider beyond the basics of picking a cloud vendor. Cloud based deployments have tremendous benefits to today's organizations - but as with any new technology, it must be introduced with care.

making the move to architect

A number of developers and organizations are beginning to make use of Java 8. With anything that's new, we often learn it the hard way.

By stepping back and taking a look at programming style as idioms, we can quickly gravitate towards better coding style and also avoid some common traps that we often get drawn towards.

The technology space is a lot like the ocean - miss one wave and another will come along shortly; most shiny new things begin with a sizable amount of hype as everyone rushes to play with the new toy. This cycle is often met with a level of disappointment as we quickly discover our new bauble isn't all that and a bag of chips so we rush off to the next best thing ever.

A few short years ago, HTML5 was the new hotness but at the time browser support was spotty at best. Despite the spotlight moving on to something else, browser support has improved markedly and we even have new toys to play with! In this talk, I will walk you through what is possible in today's browser as well as what other new features you might not be aware of. HTML5 may no longer qualify as bleeding edge, but it is still deserving of our attention.

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.

Almost every example of an agile project involves a single team and while many successful projects are delivered that way, most enterprise software requires the interaction of several teams. But how do we scale agile beyond a single team? What practices translate and which ones don't? In this talk we'll discuss some of the issues you'll encounter as you move agile beyond a single group and how you can keep multiple stakeholders happy. While it isn't as simple as having a “scrum of scrums” it isn't as hard as replacing every line of COBOL.

Automated testing is a much needed practice in our industry. But, it takes discipline and diligence to write tests. Making automated testing fun can greatly help in that direction. Furthermore, creating fluent, expressive, and concise tests can help to maintain the tests in the long run. If you're keenly interested in creating automated tests for your Groovy and Java code, Spock is a great tool for it.

In this presentation we will start with a quick introduction to automated testing and levels of testing. Then we will dive into creating a small program using automated tests with Spock.

The arguably most pervasive and ubiquitous language is the most misunderstood as well. If you've struggled with and eager to write better JavaScript, come to this presentation to learn about good styles and patterns that can make your next JavaScript code shine. We will start by looking at some ways to make code reusable and reduce errors.

Then we will take a look at some common design patterns, using some concrete examples.

Twin Cities Software Symposium

October 21 - 22, 2016

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