Many of you may have an architect title, take on the role of an architect, or even aspire to be an architect, but are you thinking like an architect? Architectural thinking is learning to look at a problem or task from an architect's point of view. In this session we will look at many facets of architectural thinking, including how requirements shape the architecture, component-based thinking, how to make architecture decisions, and what feasibility and vitality means to an architect.

Agenda:

• expectations of an architect
• technical breadth vs. depth
• how requirements shape the architecture
• making architecture decisions
• component-based thinking

Just as developers use design patterns in software development, architects use well-defined architecture patterns to get a head start on defining the characteristics and shape of the architecture for a system. In this session we will explore some of the more common architecture patterns and use concrete real-world examples to demonstrate how the patterns work. I will also go over the pros and cons of each pattern and discuss how requirements and operational aspects can drive which patterns to use. Using the right architecture pattern for your system is critical, because as we all know, once in place the architecture is very hard to change.

Agenda:

• Why use architecture patterns?
• Layered Architecture Patten
• Event Driven Architecture Pattern
• Microkernel Architecture Pattern
• Space-based Architecture Pattern

The first part of the Continuous Delivery workshop covers the differences between continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery). It also introduces the deployment pipeline_, along with usage, patterns, and anti-patterns. This part concludes with some applied engineering principles.

Releasing software to actual users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. The workshop materials are derived from the best selling book Continuous Delivery and creating in collaboration with the authors and other of my ThoughtWorks colleagues. Continuous Delivery details how to get fast feedback on the production readiness of your application every time there is a change—to code, infrastructure, or configuration.

The first part of the workshop describes the technical differences between related topics such as continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery. At the heart of the workshop is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization's value stream for delivering software. I discuss the various stages, how triggering works, patterns and anti-patterns, and how to pragmatically determine what “production ready” means. This session also covers some agile principles espoused by the Continuous Delivery book, including new perspectives on things like developer workstations and configuration management.

Continuous Delivery relies on a variety of interlocking engineering practices to work efficiently; this session covers three related topics. First, I cover the role of testing and the testing quadrant. Second, I specifically cover version control usage and offer alternatives to feature branching like toggle and branch by abstraction. Third, I describe some incremental release strategies, along with their impact on other stages of project lifecycle.

Releasing software to actual users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. The workshop materials are derived from the best selling book Continuous Delivery and creating in collaboration with the authors and other of my ThoughtWorks colleagues. Continuous Delivery details how to get fast feedback on the production readiness of your application every time there is a change—to code, infrastructure, or configuration.

Continuous Delivery relies on a variety of interlocking engineering practices to work efficiently; this session covers three related topics. First, I cover the role of testing and the testing quadrant, including the audience and engineering practices around different types of tests. I also cover some best practices around testing, including testing ratios, code coverage, and other topics. Second, I specifically cover version control usage and offer alternatives to feature branching like toggle and branch by abstraction. Generally, I talk about building synergistic engineering practices that complement rather than conflict one another. In particular, I discuss why feature branching harms three other engineering practices and describe alternatives. Third, I describe some incremental release strategies, along with their impact on other stages of project lifecycle.

Two big stumbling blocks for Continuous Delivery adaptation are interactions with operations and the keepers of data. First in this session, I cover operations, DevOps, and programmatic control of infrastructure. Second, I discuss how to incorporate databases and DBA's into the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process.

Releasing software to actual users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. The workshop materials are derived from the best selling book Continuous Delivery and creating in collaboration with the authors and other of my ThoughtWorks colleagues. Continuous Delivery details how to get fast feedback on the production readiness of your application every time there is a change—to code, infrastructure, or configuration.

Two big stumbling blocks for Continuous Delivery adaptation are interactions with operations and the keepers of data. First in this session, I cover operations, DevOps, and programmatic control of infrastructure using tools like Puppet and Chef. I also discuss the explosion of tool alternatives in this space, and cover some current-day best practices. Second, I discuss how to incorporate databases and DBA's into the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process. This includes database migrations, strategies for enhancing collaboration between application development and data, and database refactoring techniques.

The basics of developing for the Android platform will be explored, from setting up the SDK to using the Android Studio IDE and the generated Gradle build files. No previous experience is required, other than a basic knowledge of Java.

After discussing how Android fits into the marketplace, we'll look at creating applications, how to use activities, and working with layouts.

Building on the the previous talk, we'll add intents, customized layouts for alternative configurations, talk about the activity lifecycle, use logging, and more.

We'll deploy to both emulators and connected devices, and change input styles.

This session will move beyond the basics cover Android persistence mechanisms, accessing RESTful web services, and more. We'll look at shared preferences, basic file I/O, and the Sqlite database. We'll also show how to operate off of the UI thread to access data from remote servers.

The application will access JSON data on a remote server, parse the data, and update the user interface based on the response.

In the past I have presented quite a few fun sessions about software development anti-patterns - things we repeatedly do while developing code that produce negative results. In this session, I will use the same “pattern” as with my other anti-pattern talks and introduce and discuss many of the common software architecture anti-patterns. These are perhaps more significant than the development anti-patterns because they are harder to refactor. Therefore, knowing these anti-patterns ahead of time will save you time, trouble, and perhaps even your job!

Agenda:

• Introduction
• A detailed look of the most common architecture anti-patterns

Since writing the second edition of the O'Reilly JMS 1.1 book I've spent a lot of time speaking and writing about AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). While I'm still excited about AMQP, I'm also excited about another area of messaging - the recently released JMS 2.0 specification. I'll begin this live coding session with a high-level summary of what has changed with the JMS 2.0 specification release. Then, through live coding I will provide you through a first-hand look at the new simplified API and the new features of the latest JMS specification that not only make it easier to develop messaging applications, but also make it more suitable for enterprise-level messaging. There is a lot happening in the messaging space right now - climb on board this session to see what all the buzz is about!

Agenda:

• specification summary
• openmq 5.0 configuration
• jms 2.0 simplified api
• jms 2.0 new messaging features

The software industry changes rapidly, but you can protect yourself
from these changes by creating code that is complicated enough that
only you can maintain it.

Of course you should not engage in obvious bad practices. The good
news is that you don't have to. You can follow idiomatic industry
practice and stay buzzword compliant with the latest trends, while
quietly spreading complexity throughout systems. Better yet, the
symptoms will show up not in your own code, but in other code that
uses your code, directly or indirectly. You will be a hero as you
lead larger and larger teams burning the midnight oil to keep systems
alive.

Practice these principles, and your code will have an
infectious complexity that guarantees you will always be needed to
maintain it.

• Use OO, and don't forget those setter methods!
• Prefer APIs over data.
• Start with DSLs.
• Always connect (and never enqueue).
• Create abstractions for information.
• Use static typing across subsystem boundaries.
• Put language semantics on the wire.
• Write lots of unit tests.
• Leverage context.
• Update information in place.

In this session, we will take a look at Angular - a new MVC framework by Google. We will discuss some of the terminology that Angular offers, and see how we can use that to develop highly interactive, dynamic web applications. See “Detail” for a list of topics I cover and the Github repo URL

This is an intro-level talk we will take a look at Angular and developing rich web applications. Angular embraces HTML and CSS, allowing you to extend HTML towards your application, and uses plain JavaScript which makes your code easy to reuse, and test.

Note: This is an intro level talk. It is targeted towards developers who are curious about Angular and want to learn about the fundamental features and concepts in Angular.

Topics Covered -

• Bootstrapping an AngularJS application using ng-app
• ng-init and the evaluation {{ }} directive
• A brief look at $rootScope
• ng-model
• Controllers, Dependency Injection, and the View-Model ($scope)
• Looping using ng-repeat
• Forms using ng-form, form validation and submission in AngularJS
• Angular provided filters
• Making AJAX requests using $http

GitHub URL - https://github.com/looselytyped/angudone-backend/tree/solutions

JavaScript will celebrate it's 19th birthday in 2014. 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.

In this session we will take a look at some of the features that ECMAScript 6 brings to the table and see what kind of browser support is available for it.

In this session we will look at some JavaScript patterns, and how you can use them within your code.

No longer can you think of JavaScript as a kiddie-scripting language. JavaScript has now been promoted to a first-class citizen within your application - and with this, comes the need to think of better abstractions, code re-use - even thinking of establishing a common vocabulary to discuss approaches to writing better, cleaner and ultimately more maintainable JavaScript code.

It was over 10 years ago that Spring hit the scene and made a big impact in the enterprise Java development ecosystem. Now that Spring 4.2 is available (and Spring 5 on the way), there's a lot of new features and a lot that you may not know about yet.

Whether you're already working with Spring 4 or are anxious to make a move up, there's plenty of new tricks Spring has in store for you. We'll explore them all in this overview of everything that's new in Spring.

In this presentation, we'll see how to use Spring to create, secure, streamline, hyperlink, and consume REST APIs.

In modern applications, there are a diverse array of clients consuming content from the web. Each of these clients has unique capabilities and limitations, therefore demanding presentation of the application to be tailored to each device. As a result, presentation logic is often pushed into the client itself, leaving the application to serve a common data-oriented lightweight API to be consumed by each client.

For over 10 years, Spring has been the go-to framework for developing powerful Java server applications. Increasingly, however, modern applications are placing heavier demands on the client side, expecting applications to be available anywhere, anytime, and on any device. In a client-rich world, where does Spring fit it?

In this session, we'll explore Spring's role in modern applications where the client can be on someone's desk or in someone's hands. We'll see how to take advantage of various Spring features and libraries to create a rich and responsive application that can run on a variety of devices.

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!

Jamie Zawinski once said “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.“. Many consider regular expressions to be indecipherable, but the truth is that every programmer should consider regular expressions an integral part of their toolkit. From the command line to your favorite text editor, from parsing user input to scraping HTML pages - once you know regular expressions you will find a use for them in almost every programming context.

In this session we will attempt to unriddle the mystery that regular expressions pose. We will start at the basics and work our way towards more complex expressions.

Finally, the Java 8 Date Time API will be in our grasps and now we will celebrate gleefully in the streets! ISO8601 and UTC standards! Immutability! Time to set attention to stun as this presentation will cover all the goods about the new Date/Time API that makes Java programming safe.

Finally, the Java 8 Date Time API will be in our grasps and now we will celebrate gleefully in the streets! ISO8601 and UTC standards! Immutability! Time to set attention to stun as this presentation will cover all the goods about the new Date/Time API in Java 8 that will finally make our code safer than before.

We cover in 90 Minutes:
ISO 8601 & UTC
Instants
Periods
Durations
Parsing
Time Zone Manipulations and Updates
Conversion from Old Java Date Times
Whatever else we can cram into the presentation

This will interactive for the most part with few slides. Bring on your questions.

Gradle has fast become one of the de-facto build tool in the Java ecosystem. Gradle offers a powerful DSL to configure your builds. Whether you have a simple build, or a complex build with many moving parts, Gradle's DSL and extensible API can help you make your builds easier, and possible.

In this sessio we will start from the ground up. We will write our first Gradle script and examine Gradle's configuration vs. execution phases. We will see how Gradle uses plugins to add on functionality for free to your build and end with a look at the Gradle Plugin API to see how easy it is to write your own plugins for better reuse.

Gradle has fast become one of the de-facto build tool in the Java ecosystem. You might have used Gradle to build your project without realizing how much more Gradle has to offer. Up-to-date checking, automatic clean, file operations such as copy, move and zip and so much more are just some of the features that Gradle offers right out of the box.

In this session we will explore some of these features and how we can use them within our own builds.

In this session we will look to see how we can refactor our learning - what tools, and methodologies can we use to help us learn quicker and better - how we can create a store that gives us quick access to information when we really need it.

We all work in an industry in which not only do the tools that we use change ever few years, but one in which we have to shift the very paradigms these tools are built on! Even the most trivial of projects entails tens of different toolkits, frameworks, and languages coming together, and somehow we need to know how to leverage each one. How does one keep up? Despite all our years in schools, and our in-born nature to learn, we often are never taught how to learn. How can we learn faster, and retain even more?

In this session we will take a look at various tools and techniques available to us and see how we can make our learning effective.

Find yourself overwhelmed with hundreds of to-dos? Is your hard-drive littered with dozens of killer ideas that you started with enthusiasm and then just fizzled away? Do you feel like you are moving as fast as can but only getting to the wrong place quicker? Well perhaps this session will help.

There are various techniques and strategies available to us today that aim to help with exactly this conundrum - from Getting Things Done ™ to Personal Kanban. Unfortunately it is often easy to be extremely productive using these systems, but not very effective. After all, it's not about getting things done, but getting the RIGHT things done. In this talk we will discuss not only how to get things done, but also attempt to figure out what it is you actually need to be doing.

In this session, I will attempt to show you how you can leverage various strategies to be more effective, knock to-dos out and have fun while doing it. If time permits we will close with an overview of the tools that are available to you, and how you can use these to become a to-do list ninja :)

Traditional automated testing approches combine input generation, execution, output capture, and validation inside the bodies of single functions. Generative testing approaches gain expressive power by isolating these steps.

With generative testing:

• a generator is a declarative description of possible inputs to a function
• execution is up to your program
• outputs are data, and can be captured for future study
• validators are programs that have access to the generators, the program, and the outputs

There are a number of benefits to this approach:

• once test data generation is separate, it is immediately obvious that such data generation should be statistical, not merely a few hand-picked cases
• validators can be reused in a variety of
• it becomes easier to identify and develop declarative, logic-based validations, rather than imperative ones
• the various phases can be decoupled and run at different times

This talk introduces test data generation and generative testing, using for its examples the data.generators and test.generative libraries developed by the author.

Resources

• test.generative
• data.generators
• chapter 10 of Programming Clojure

Simulation allows a rigorous, scalable, and reproducible approach to testing. The separation of concerns, and the use of a versioned, time-aware database, give simulation great power. This talk will introduce simulation testing, walking through a complete example using Simulant, an open-source simulation library.

Simulation allows a rigorous, scalable, and reproducible approach to testing:

Statistical modeling

Simulation begins with statistical models of the use of your system. This model includes facts such as “we have identified four customer profiles, each with different browsing and purchasing patterns” or “the analytics query for the management report must run every Wednesday afternoon.” Models are versioned and kept in a database.

Activity streams

The statistical models are used to create activity streams. Each agent in the system represents a human user or external process interacting with the system, and has its own timestamped stream of interactions. With a large number of agents, simulations can produce the highly concurrent activity expected in a large production system.

Distributed execution

Agents are scaled across as many machines as are necessary to both handle the simulation load, and give access to the system under test. The simulator coordinates time, playing through the activity streams for all the agents.

Result Capture

Every step of the simulation process, including modeling, activity stream generation, execution, and the code itself, is captured and stored in a database for further analysis. You will typically also capture whatever logs and metrics your system produces.

Validation

Since all phases of a simulation are kept in a database, validation can be performed at any time. This differs markedly from many approaches to testing, which require in-the-moment validation against the live system.

Separation of concerns

The separation of concerns above, and the use of a versioned, time-aware database, gives simulation great power. Imagine that you get a bug report from the field, and you realize that the bug corresponds to a corner case that you failed to consider. With a simulation-based approach, you can write a new validation for the corner case, and run that validation against your past simulation results, without ever running your actual system.

This talk will introduce simulation testing, walking through a complete example using Simulant, an open-source simulation library.

cloud architecture… an architectural walk through cloud services and components

high level
Data Centers / VDC
CDN
Monitoring
Load Balancing
Queue
Storage (s3, etc)
DNS
Search
Routing
(Amazon + Open Source) example: CloudSearch vs ElasticSearch
Security

low level
HAProxy
Nerve
synapse
queues
compute
dns

cloud architecture… an architectural walk through cloud services and components

high level
Data Centers / VDC
CDN
Monitoring
Load Balancing
Queue
Storage (s3, etc)
DNS
Search
Routing
(Amazon + Open Source) example: CloudSearch vs ElasticSearch
Security

low level
HAProxy
Nerve
synapse
queues
compute
dns

So your server is having issues? memory? Connections? Limited response? Is the first solution to bounce the server? Perhaps change some VM flags or add some logging? In todays Java 6 world, with its superior runtime monitoring and management capabilities the reasons to the bounce the server have been greatly reduced.

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 and how they are used by the JVM. Final this session will explore the different GC options and how they affect response times and throughput.

Becoming more agile

Becoming more agile

Groovy isn't designed to replace Java – it just makes Java cleaner and easier to develop. This presentation will look at various tasks Java developers need to do and demonstrate ways Groovy can help.

Topics will include building and testing applications, accessing both relational and NoSQL databases, working with web services, and more.

Groovy has a very easy learning curve for Java developers, so many people become Groovy users without realizing all it can do. This presentation will examine features of Groovy that can make your life easier once you're past the initial adoption stage.

Examples will include closure coercion, mixins, simple runtime metaprogramming, operator overloading, drop and take, a tour through some of the overlooked methods in the Groovy JDK, and more.

The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.

In this presentation, we'll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.

Workshop Requirements

• Please install Java 7 or 8, using the full JDK. Java 8 is preferred and some of the examples will use it, but it isn't required for Spock
• The Spock dependency will be downloaded as part of a Gradle build file, so please install a recent version of Gradle (any version above 2.2 will be fine). Gradle is just a zip file, and can be downloaded from http://gradle.org
• Any IDE with Groovy support will be helpful. I plan to use IntelliJ IDEA, but Eclipse with a Groovy plugin should be fine. None of the exercises require an IDE at all, however, so you're welcome to run all the tests through Gradle builds at the command line
• Please install any recent version of Groovy. If your IDE includes Groovy support, you can skip this step.

The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.

In this presentation, we'll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.

Workshop Requirements

• Please install Java 7 or 8, using the full JDK. Java 8 is preferred and some of the examples will use it, but it isn't required for Spock
• The Spock dependency will be downloaded as part of a Gradle build file, so please install a recent version of Gradle (any version above 2.2 will be fine). Gradle is just a zip file, and can be downloaded from http://gradle.org
• Any IDE with Groovy support will be helpful. I plan to use IntelliJ IDEA, but Eclipse with a Groovy plugin should be fine. None of the exercises require an IDE at all, however, so you're welcome to run all the tests through Gradle builds at the command line
• Please install any recent version of Groovy. If your IDE includes Groovy support, you can skip this step.

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.

Time is very precious and is often threatened by phone calls, emails, co-workers, bosses, and most of all, yourself. The Pomodoro Technique reigns in unfocused time and gives your work the urgency and the attention it needs, and it's done with a kitchen timer.

In this presentation we discuss how to set up, estimate time, log time, deal with interruptions, and integrate with Agile as a team. We discuss timer software and even some of the great health benefits of the Pomodoro Technique.

winning with agile by analyzing the failings of others

winning with agile by analyzing the failings of others

Introduction to Go

Introduction to Go… language of the cloud

The key to understanding Clojure is ideas, not language constructs.
In this talk, we will approach Clojure via 10 Big Ideas.

Each of these ideas is valuable and useful a la carte, not necessarily
only in a Clojure together. Taken together, they beging to fill in the
picture of why Clojure is changing the way many programmers think
about software development.

• edn
• Persistent Data Structures
• Atomic Success Model
• Seqs
• Protocols
• ClojureScript
• Reducers
• core.logic
• Datalog
• core.async

Git, at it's core, leverages a relatively simple data structure to maintain history. In this session we will take a look at this data-structure, which in turn will give us a better view of how Git manages history, and how better to work with it. NOTE: This is NOT an introduction to Git. This session assumes familiarity with Git concepts such as init, add, commit and merge.

Git has fast emerged as one of the leaders in DVCS. Git may seem arcane, but under the covers, leverages a very simple data-structure to store your version history. As developers, it has always serves us well to know how things fundamentally work, and Git is no different. In this talk we will explore this data-structure, and how the various commands you invoke against Git mutate it.

You have been using Git for a while now. You understand the DAG and how commands like merge and rebase work. But there is a lot more to Git such as the stash, reflog, and interactive rebases. How can one use these to make their more effective use of Git?

In this session we will look at some of the advanced facilities that Git offers. We will see how we can use the stash to improve our workflow with Git, how we use rebsae to rewrite and even split commits. After this session you will be well on your way to Git mastery.

You understand the Web. Why do you do REST so wrong?

Doing REST “right” isn't a matter of conformance or purity. It isn't about pleasing hard-to-please Restafarian personalities. It's about understanding that WYBIWYG (What you Build is What You Get). Decisions have consequences. You are free to design and implement whatever you like, but you need to understand the consequences of your choices.

REST, as defined by Roy Fielding's thesis, is a collection of architectural constraints designed to yield certain properties in deployed systems. When you take shortcuts, you simply will not receive all the benefits of loose-coupling, evolvable, flexible, scalable systems. URLs are not enough. HTTP is not enough. To fully embrace the world of REST, you must understand Hypermedia. The good news is that you already do, you've apparently just forgotten.

Here's the thing though. REST is not an endpoint, it is just a beginning. Come to this talk to hear how the story starts. We will take a deep dive into why the Web works, the implications for building Hypermedia-driven REST APIs and start to look at what this means in practice.

The cost of integrating information isn't cheap. Well, at least it isn't if you do it wrong. Chances are, you're doing it wrong.

The single most difficult aspect of data integration is the effort to achieve consensus. It isn't just that we are disagreeable people. It's also that it is a fantasy that there is a “common model” or a “global truth”. Different groups and individuals see the world differently and have different needs from information systems. Language, and therefore what we call things, isn't simply reflective of reality. It plays a constructive and interpretive role.

The problem is that our technologies force us to make choices about world views and pretend that things aren't changing constantly. This yields fragile systems and high impedance to change that cascades through our organizations. This translates to expensive, rigid and difficult to extend failure to give the business what they want.

Our friend Tim Berners-Lee and his Happy W3C Merrymakers have given us a set of technologies to help us solve these problems though. We forget that the Web he designed was not the public Web, but one to solve integration needs for complex organizations like CERN. The HTML bit that we have gotten so excited about is but a small part of the vision. We will introduce RDF and SPARQL as enabling technologies. They do not necessarily replace what you already have, but they do make it possible to share information with people you've never talked to: Collaboration without Coordination.

Webs of documents are fabulous enough. Webs of data will blow your mind.

A table is a fixed structure. A tree is as well. A graph can go on forever and be extended at any time by anyone.

The Web is an unbounded graph. It is our definition of scale. What happens when we start to use it as the basis of sharing information, not just documents. This does not necessarily mean the public Web (although it is certainly appropriate for that as well). It simply means thinking of information as a web of linked entities through discoverable relationships.

Linked data is a way of doing this, but it is also an established project connecting billions of entities from disparate, unrelated sources. How does that even work? What can you do with such a thing? And what does that mean for your organization?

By building on the ideas introduced in the Data Integration talk, we will explore how webs of data built on standards can change everything.

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” –Picasso

If everything is explicitly described in uniform, robust and comprehensive data models, it is easy to imagine how to ask questions of the data. The social, technical and financial costs of getting the information into that state, however, will keep that from ever being a reality. So, how can we integrate and reason over choppy and sloppy data from multiple sources in a variety of formats? We will see how the RDFS and Web Ontology Language (OWL) W3C standards help us connect and reason over content that leaves things unsaid without writing a bunch of custom code.

This is not artificial intelligence, but it is influenced by work done in that field.

The surge of interest in the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, the Semantic Web, and Linked Data has resulted in the development of innovative, flexible, and powerful systems that embrace one or more of these compatible technologies. However, most developers, architects, Information Technology managers, and platform owners have only been exposed to the basics of resource-oriented architectures.

This talk, based upon Brian Sletten's book of the same name, is an attempt to catalog and elucidate several reusable solutions that have been seen in the wild in the now increasingly familiar “patterns” style. These are not turn key implementations, but rather, useful strategies for solving certain problems in the development of modern, resource-oriented systems, both on the public Web and within an organization's firewalls.

Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.

If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?

Scala Koans, a set of test cases that will teach you Scala language. The Scala koans will help the audience learn the language, syntax and the structure of the language through test cases. It will also teach the functional programming and object oriented features of the language. Since learning is guided by failing tests it allows developers to think and play with the language while they are learning.

Workshop Requirements

Namaste,

For those planning to attend the Scala Koans…

Welcome to Scala Koans!

Scala Koans is an interactive session that puts the programming and learning in your hands. Therefore, a laptop is required by all participants. If you do not have a laptop, then perhaps you have a friend with a laptop, is so, well, that would work too. In order to participate in the Scala Koan endeavor, a few things are required:

• A laptop
• A modern JDK installation. JDK 1.6+ will suffice. Remember that it should be a JDK and not a JRE!
• Your JDK should be mapped properly to JAVA_HOME and your PATH variables.
• An installation of your favorite IDE or editor.
• An inquisitive mind.

The process of actually running the koans will be covered during the session. Unfortunately, Internet connectivity is sometimes a dicey affair and at times it can rain on our parade. To avoid having to wait for the install at the conference you can prepare for the koans before the conference! If you don't have the opportunity to do this, we will have either memory sticks or private networks at the conference.

If you want to get started with the set up:

1. Download the koans by visiting https://bitbucket.org/dmarsh/scalakoansexercises and click on the download link on the right hand side of the page. (or you can clone the bitbucket project)
2. Unzip the koans: dmarsh-scalakoansexercises-#####.zip
3. cd into the dmarsh-scalakoansexercises-#### folder
4. If you are in Linux or MacOSX run: ./koans, on Windows ./koans.bat
5. After some initialization, you are now in the koans/sbt shell (you should see a > prompt)
6. In the shell run the following commands:
   a. test:compile
   b. eclipse (if you are planning to use Eclipse)
   c. gen-idea (if you are planning to IntelliJ Idea)
7. Exit the shell by typing exit

Before attending the koans session, you may want to take the opportunity to load some Scala Plugins onto your favorite IDE and Editor. Below is a list of resources that you can use to enhance your environment so that you can enjoy Scala syntax highlighting and other helpful tools like refactoring, debugging and analysis.

Eclipse - The Eclipse has an IDE plugin for Scala called aptly scala-ide. All the information about the plugin can be found at http://scala-ide.org including an easy to follow along video located at http://scala-ide.org/docs/current-user-doc/gettingstarted/index.html. Scala-IDE is also available at the Eclipse Marketplace!

IntelliJ - IntelliJ has a Scala plugin that can be found by going to Settings -> Plugins, clicking on 'Browse Repositories' button and searching for the 'Scala' plugin on the left. Right click on the 'Scala' and choose 'Install'. IntelliJ will prompt you to restart the IDE, do so, and enjoy.

NetBeans - Currently, Github user 'dcaoyuan' hosts a NetBeans Scala plugin at the address: https://github.com/dcaoyuan/nbscala. I have not tried this out since the number of NetBeans users has shrunk in recent years. If you are an avid NetBeans user, and wish to try it, you can let me know the results during the session. There is additional information at: http://wiki.netbeans.org/Scala

Emacs - Github user 'aemoncannon' has created 'ENSIME' (ENhanced Scala Interaction Mode for Emacs) at the address and has a great following. https://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime with some documentation at http://aemoncannon.github.io/ensime.

VIM - For VIM users you can use https://github.com/derekwyatt/vim-scala as a VIM plugin that offers Scala color highlighting

That is it. Hope to see you soon.

Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.

If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?

Scala Koans, a set of test cases that will teach you Scala language. The Scala koans will help the audience learn the language, syntax and the structure of the language through test cases. It will also teach the functional programming and object oriented features of the language. Since learning is guided by failing tests it allows developers to think and play with the language while they are learning.

Workshop Requirements

Namaste,

For those planning to attend the Scala Koans…

Welcome to Scala Koans!

Scala Koans is an interactive session that puts the programming and learning in your hands. Therefore, a laptop is required by all participants. If you do not have a laptop, then perhaps you have a friend with a laptop, is so, well, that would work too. In order to participate in the Scala Koan endeavor, a few things are required:

• A laptop
• A modern JDK installation. JDK 1.6+ will suffice. Remember that it should be a JDK and not a JRE!
• Your JDK should be mapped properly to JAVA_HOME and your PATH variables.
• An installation of your favorite IDE or editor.
• An inquisitive mind.

The process of actually running the koans will be covered during the session. Unfortunately, Internet connectivity is sometimes a dicey affair and at times it can rain on our parade. To avoid having to wait for the install at the conference you can prepare for the koans before the conference! If you don't have the opportunity to do this, we will have either memory sticks or private networks at the conference.

If you want to get started with the set up:

1. Download the koans by visiting https://bitbucket.org/dmarsh/scalakoansexercises and click on the download link on the right hand side of the page. (or you can clone the bitbucket project)
2. Unzip the koans: dmarsh-scalakoansexercises-#####.zip
3. cd into the dmarsh-scalakoansexercises-#### folder
4. If you are in Linux or MacOSX run: ./koans, on Windows ./koans.bat
5. After some initialization, you are now in the koans/sbt shell (you should see a > prompt)
6. In the shell run the following commands:
   a. test:compile
   b. eclipse (if you are planning to use Eclipse)
   c. gen-idea (if you are planning to IntelliJ Idea)
7. Exit the shell by typing exit

Before attending the koans session, you may want to take the opportunity to load some Scala Plugins onto your favorite IDE and Editor. Below is a list of resources that you can use to enhance your environment so that you can enjoy Scala syntax highlighting and other helpful tools like refactoring, debugging and analysis.

Eclipse - The Eclipse has an IDE plugin for Scala called aptly scala-ide. All the information about the plugin can be found at http://scala-ide.org including an easy to follow along video located at http://scala-ide.org/docs/current-user-doc/gettingstarted/index.html. Scala-IDE is also available at the Eclipse Marketplace!

IntelliJ - IntelliJ has a Scala plugin that can be found by going to Settings -> Plugins, clicking on 'Browse Repositories' button and searching for the 'Scala' plugin on the left. Right click on the 'Scala' and choose 'Install'. IntelliJ will prompt you to restart the IDE, do so, and enjoy.

NetBeans - Currently, Github user 'dcaoyuan' hosts a NetBeans Scala plugin at the address: https://github.com/dcaoyuan/nbscala. I have not tried this out since the number of NetBeans users has shrunk in recent years. If you are an avid NetBeans user, and wish to try it, you can let me know the results during the session. There is additional information at: http://wiki.netbeans.org/Scala

Emacs - Github user 'aemoncannon' has created 'ENSIME' (ENhanced Scala Interaction Mode for Emacs) at the address and has a great following. https://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime with some documentation at http://aemoncannon.github.io/ensime.

VIM - For VIM users you can use https://github.com/derekwyatt/vim-scala as a VIM plugin that offers Scala color highlighting

That is it. Hope to see you soon.

Modularity is coming to the Java platform! Java 9 will introduce the Jigsaw module system. OSGi is here today. But don’t wait to start designing modular software. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a framework or a new runtime to start building modular software applications. You can start today. Learn how!

In this session, we'll examine what it means to develop modular software on the Java platform. We'll examine the goals and benefits of modular software, and explore the patterns of modular architecture that help us develop modular software systems. With just a few easy steps, we'll see how to transform our software from a huge monolith to an extensible system of collaborating software modules. By examining an existing software system, we'll see first hand how we can increase software modularity with minimal disruption. You'll walk away not just with a much deeper understanding of the benefits of modular software, but also a migration roadmap for refactoring existing applications to increase their modularity. In other words, you'll see how to get ready today for the application platform of tomorrow.

Despite our wishing it were so, software architecture is not static throughout a project. Yet, we make many of our software architecture decisions early in the software development lifecycle. In today’s volatile technology and business climate, big architecture up front is not sustainable. In this session, we will explore several techniques 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? Possess the flexibility to evolve as new requirements emerge? To satisfy the architectural qualities, including performance, security, availability, reliability, and scalability? Yes. Yes. Yes. 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? Especially in a volatile technology climate where organizations seek to move their applications to the cloud, expose application capabilities to new endpoints, and deliver new capabilities quickly? In this session, we’ll explore techniques to increase architectural agility and provide some actionable advice that will help you get started immediately.

OSGi is the dynamic module system for the Java platform. Today, OSGi is a major part of most application platforms, tools, and is supported by many major frameworks. In this session, we'll explore the fundamental underpinnings of OSGi, explore the OSGi ecosystem, and clearly articulate the benefits of OSGi.

After a gentle introduction to OSGi, we'll explore how OSGi allows us to overcome classpath hell and design very adaptable and flexible software systems. Through several coding examples, we'll explore numerous OSGi techniques, including versioning, hot deployment, isolation, lifecycle, and micro-services.

Monolithic applications are difficult to understand, maintain, and extend with new features and functionality. Modularity helps achieve these goals. Unfortunately, few applications have been designed with modularity in mind. In this workshop, we take a deep dive into modularity.

In part 1, we'll start developing a software system using several of the patterns of modular architecture. We'll explore the patterns and then apply them to develop a sample application. Along the way, we'll discuss implementation variations and the consequences of our decision. When finished, we'll have a simple but useful application that you can take home with you and easily extend with new functionality. This session is all pure Java, and you'll be able to apply the techniques you learn immediately. Be sure to bring a laptop.

Monolithic applications are difficult to understand, maintain, and extend with new features and functionality. Modularity helps achieve these goals. Unfortunately, few applications have been designed with modularity in mind. In this workshop, we take a deep dive into modularity.

In part 2, we'll finish the exercise we began in part 1. We'll continue applying several of the patterns of modular architecture. Upon completing the application, we'll have a short retrospective to discuss the consequences of our design decisions. To wrap up, we'll explore how using a framework (OSGi) that supports modularity extends the benefits of our modular architecture over to runtime without impeding our ability to leverage our modules directly atop standard Java. Be sure to bring a laptop.

There is nothing better than looking at real-world examples to understand project failures and project successes. This session is intended to be an open conversation, based closely to a birds of a feature (BOF) session, however it will have a series of “that happened to me” topics throughout discussed from the perspective of technology.

Discussed will be a clients dating back from 2005. The actually client and there name will not be revealed, but the industry, the contraints and some of the outcomes will.

This multi-disciplinary session takes a deep dive into
the confluence of topics required to fully understand the intersection
of Continuous Delivery and architecture, including evolutionary
architecture and emergent design, with an emphasis on how
architectural decisions affect the ease in changing and evolving your
code, the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven
Design's Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce
intra-component/service coupling, and other techniques.

Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production
readiness of your application every time a change occurs – to code,
infrastructure, or configuration. In the Continuous Delivery world,
rather than hone skills at predicting the future via Big Design Up
Front, Continuous Delivery emphasizes techniques for understanding
and changing code with less cost during the process. Some architectures
and engineering practices yield better designs for this
environment. This multi-disciplinary session takes a deep dive into
the confluence of topics required to fully understand the intersection
of Continuous Delivery and architecture, including evolutionary
architecture and emergent design, with an emphasis on how
architectural decisions affect the ease in changing and evolving your
code, the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven
Design's Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce
intra-component/service coupling, and other techniques.

A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company. This talk discusses using the radar for personal breadth development, architectural guidance, and governance.

ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board creates a “technology radar” twice a year, a working document that helps the company make decisions about interesting technologies and where we spend our time. ThoughtWorks then started conducting radar-building exercises for our clients, which provides a great medium for technologists company-wide to express their opinions about the technologies they use every day. For companies, creating a radar helps you document your technology decisions in a standard format, evaluate technology decisions in an actionable way, and create cross-silo discussions about suitable technology choices. This session describes the radar visualization and how to conduct a radar building session for yourself. After a brief introduction, the bulk of the workshop consists of attendees building a radar for the group, following the same procedure you'll use when you do this exercise at your company. At the end, we'll have created a unique Radar for this event and practiced doing it for yourself.

As Tech Leaders, we are presented with problems and work to find a way to solve them, usually through technology. In my opinion this is what makes this industry so much fun. Let's face it - we all love challenges. Sometimes, however, the problems we have to solve are hard - really hard. So how do you go about solving really hard problems? That's what this session is about - Heuristics, the art of problem solving. In this session you will learn how to approach problems and also learn techniques for solving them effectively. So put on your thinking cap and get ready to solve some easy, fun, and hard problems.

Agenda:

• the checklist
• visual representations
• you know what happens when you assume…
• you gotta start somewhere
• the world is flat
• hey! keep it clean!
• perception can be reality

As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.

This training workshop on security will provide an overview of the security landscape starting with the OWASP top ten security concerns with current real world examples of each of these attack vectors. The first session will consist of a demonstration and labs using hacker tools to get an understanding of how a hacker thinks. It will include a walk through of the ESAPI toolkit as an example of how to solve a number of these security concerns including hands-on labs using the OWASP example swingset.

The workshop will include several hands on labs from the webgoat project in order to better understand the threats that are ever so common today.

Attendees will come away with the following skills / capabilities:

• threat modeling
• security audit plan
• introduction to Pen testing
• key / certificate management
• fixing web application security issues

Don't be the weakest link on the web!

As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.

This training workshop on security will provide an overview of the security landscape starting with the OWASP top ten security concerns with current real world examples of each of these attack vectors. The first session will consist of a demonstration and labs using hacker tools to get an understanding of how a hacker thinks. It will include a walk through of the ESAPI toolkit as an example of how to solve a number of these security concerns including hands-on labs using the OWASP example swingset.

The workshop will include several hands on labs from the webgoat project in order to better understand the threats that are ever so common today.

Attendees will come away with the following skills / capabilities:

• threat modeling
• security audit plan
• introduction to Pen testing
• key / certificate management
• fixing web application security issues

Don't be the weakest link on the web!

Statistics is hot lately, due in part to the easy availability of large data sets and the successes of people like Nate Silver. These aren't your father's statistics, however. A quiet revolution has swept through the field, shifting it from traditional frequentist methods toward a more Bayesian approach. This talk will discuss Bayes' Theorem and show you how to do simple, back-of-the-envelope calculations to apply it to a wide variety of problems.

In addition, we'll also talk about common errors non-experts make when dealing with statistical conclusions, ranging from small sample size issues to the use of arbitrary endpoints to the problem of overfitting and more.

Presentation on Akka. A set various tools to write concurrent, fault-tolerant applications using immutable data, asyncronous message passing using local and remote actors, software transactional memory, and supervised systems.

Akka is a middleware, but it is not your 1990s middleware. Akka is a set of various tools to write concurrent, fault-tolerant applications using immutable data, asyncronous message passing using local and remote actors, software transactional memory, and supervised systems. Akka is also part of the Typesafe stack, a stack that include the Play web framework and the Scala programming language. This Akka presentation will cover both Scala and Java style usage of Akka and give the audience a 30k view of how it comes together. While this presentation is not interactive, all demos will be available on github for those that want to “play” along with their laptops.

The presentation will cover an introduction on the framework by creating a basic web application in both Java and Scala to get you started.

The Play Framework is a lightweight and stateless web framework that is part of the TypeSafe stack, a stack which includes Akka middleware and the Scala programming language. The presentation will cover an introduction on the framework by creating a basic web application in both Java and Scala to get you started. The presentation will also cover javascript library integration and explain the philosophy behind the framework and give an honest analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of the framework. While this presentation is not interactive, all demos will be available on github for those that want to “play” along with their laptops.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become an ugly word in the industry. Not only is everyone more confused than ever about what SOA is, but the tooling and products surrounding SOA has made it into a ubiquitous buzzword that has little or no meaning these days. That said, SOA as an architecture pattern is still very much alive and solves many issues within a service-based architecture approach. So what is SOA from an architecture standpoint? In this product-free session we will take a detailed look at SOA from an architecture pattern point of view, understand how abstraction plays a part in SOA, and also understand the implementation aspects of the pattern. At the end of this session we will look at a few service bus considerations, including dealing with single point of failure scenarios, performance bottleneck issues, and service bus roles and responsibilities.

Agenda:

• architecture pattern elements
• forms of abstraction
• pattern implementation (no products!)
• service bus considerations

Domain Specific Langauges seems like a cool idea, but where's the payoff? This talk provides an overview of how to build both internal and external DSLs (including the state of the art tools), stopping along the way to show how this is practical to your day job.

This talk defines of DSLs (Domain Specific Languages), distinguishes the types of DSLS (internal and external), and shows examples of building DSLs of several kinds. It shows how to utilize DSLs for externalizing configuration (which you're already doing, whether you realize it or not), how to make your code readable to humans, how DSLs make developer tools better (and how to use DSL techniques to build your own tools), and how DSLs can provide your users unprecedented flexibility and power, by building DSLs customized to their job. This talk provides a good foundation for the subject if you've never seen anything about it, but keeps the focus on practical goals.

The goal of core.async is to decouple producers and consumers of
information in software, without dictating specific thread or blocking
semantics, and without introducing callback hell. Also, to do all of this
as a library, portable anywhere you can run a dialect of Clojure.

Queues are a powerful tool for decoupling software
programs. Unfortunately, platforms that have powerful queueing
libraries (e.g. Java) may require blocking threads on the ends of the
queue. And the world's biggest platform (JavaScript in the browser)
doesn't even have queues or threads.

core.async builds upon the work done with Communicating Sequential
Processes,
and provides:

• facilities for independent threads of activity, communicating via
  queue-like channels
• both real threads and shared use of thread
  pools (in any combination), as well as ClojureScript on JS engines

In this talk, we will cover the design of core.async, and then move
directly to exploring core.async's capabilities:

• Creating unbuffered and buffered channels
• Threaded put >!! and take <!!
• Using go blocks to invert control, achieving async without threads
• IOC put >! and take <!
• Simultaneously waiting for multiple operations with alts! and alts!!
• Timeouts as “just another kind of channel”

Finally, we will assemble these primitives into substantial working
programs, building toward the Holy Grail of async: substantial UI
application development in the browser, with no callbacks in sight.

Traditional SQL databases have great power, via ACID transactions and
via a declarative, logic-based query language (SQL). But SQL
databases encounter two problems on the web:

• SQL databases have a rigid information model, and typically a rigid
  deployment model. This rigidity creates impedance mismatches both with
  development languages and with emerging cloud strategies.

• SQL databases struggle with the extremely high write volumes that
  characterize the top four percent of the web, e.g. the Amazons,
  Facebooks, etc.

Much of the effort of the NoSQL movement has gone to solve the second
problem, the problem of the four percent, under the mantra “web scale”.
Datomic solves the first problem – with a flexible information model
and a deployment model suited to the dynamic web, and to the cloud.

Datomic is for the ninety-six percent.

Datomic's information model is based on a universal relation, and an
entity abstraction over that relation. The universal relation
eliminates the join keys and join tables imposed by SQL's plethora of
specific relations, making queries easier to write, read, and
understand. Entities expose the universal relation as associative
collections, which correspond directly to the navigable, associative
style of OO, eliminating the impedance mismatch and the need for
libraries such as ActiveRecord and Hibernate.

Datomic's deployment model is designed for a virtualized world. All
components of the system are designed from the ground up to be
ephemeral. More importantly, Datomic treats storage as a separate
service. You can store your data on the local filesystem during
development, and upgrade to using a SQL database for storage for
production. When you are ready for the cloud, you can store your data
in a distributed storage such as Amazon's DynamoDB, Couchbase, or
Riak.

Datomic's flexibility comes with the expressive power you know and
love in SQL databases. Where the four percent need “web scale”, and
the complex programming model imposed by eventual consistency, most
programs would be better off with the traditional values: ACID
transactions and powerful queries. Datomic gives you these in spades:
transactions always run at the highest isolation level (serialized),
and the Datalog query language has greater expressive power than the
relational algebra at the foundation of SQL.

If you are among the ninety-six percent, and manage transactional data
of record on the web, Datomic may be a good fit for you.

Working with CSS can be arduous. CSS offers none of the facilities that we developers are so used. Facilities like code reuse via abstractions or inheritance, allowing the use of variables and functions. Developers are either forced to violate DRY principles due to copy-paste, or have mile long selector descriptors. This is further exacerbated in larger projects with multiple CSS files.

Enter SASS. SASS stands for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets. SASS is an abstraction built on top of CSS. SASS files are processed by the SASS compiler which outputs CSS. SASS has all the tools that we developers crave in CSS - variables, functions, math operations, even code reuse via mixins and inheritance!

In this session we will take a look at SASS. We will explore it's many features, and dive into some code. We will end the session by looking how we can begin to use SASS in our projects at work.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?“

David Foster Wallace, from This is Water

A fish is swimming along, having some breakfast, when suddenly he's snatched out of his world by his food, abruptly ejected into a bright world where it's hard to breathe, landing on the bottom of a boat, where strange alien creatures make strange sounds. Overhead, he sees an airplane flying at 500 mph. Suddenly, one of the creatures picks him up, removes the hook, and, just as suddenly, he's back home. Yet, when he regales his friends with this tale, no one can believe such a strange world could exist.

This keynote describes the water you swim in but cannot see anymore, like relational databases and application servers. And, it jerks you out of this water (briefly) to describe a strange, fantastical world with things like immutable database servers and phoenix machines. You may have trouble getting your friends who didn't attend to understand.