Sessions

Academese to English: A Practical Tour of Scala’s Type System

Location: Salon B
April 11th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Scala is famous in part for having one of the richest type systems of all mainstream programming languages today. Despite its reputation, Scala's type system remains one of the most under-documented and jargon-heavy aspects of Scala. This talk will turn the academese into English, providing an example-rich tour of Scala’s type system, covering all the things that make people call it “powerful”. This talk isn't about showcasing a bunch of challenging little logical puzzles with types; on the contrary, this talk is about showing practical uses of Scala's type system, making it work for you and your users. We'll see…
Read more  »

Adventures in Elm: Events, Reproducibility, and Kindness

Location: Salon C
April 12th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

What do you get when you combine strict functional programming with heavy user interaction? Challenges, and unexpected freedoms. Elm is a purely functional language for the browser. It compiles to JavaScript -- after enforcing immutability, types, semantic versioning, and tight boundaries for user and server interactions. Working within these restrictions, I find my programming principles turned upside down. Small components? Who needs them. Global state? No problem. New principles emerge instead: events, reproducibility, kindness in times of error. This session gives an overview of Elm, then focuses on the Elm Architecture: how it overturns what is essential in object-oriented and…
Read more  »

Agile Hiring: It’s A Team Sport

Location: Salon B
April 11th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

When you think of hiring for your team, does the paperwork overwhelm you? Are you concerned about the number of interviews you seem to need to make a great decision? Do you ever have trouble making a decision, to know if this candidate is right for you --the team, the project, and the organization? You know the cost of hiring people is high, and the cost of not getting the right person is even higher. You can apply agile approaches to your hiring, iterating on everything. You can get feedback as you go, and involve the entire team, including the…
Read more  »

Agile HR

Location: Salon E
April 12th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Agile HR represents a new, emerging way for HR to partner with their leaders and people. The paradigm is shifting from one of controls and standards to a new level of engagement – one that focuses on the facilitation and improvement of organizational agility. This means helping to build and drive programs that create adaptability, foster innovation, provide transparency, and inspire collaboration. Building on these principles, Comcast’s Technology + Product team is reimagining Performance Management. We are an innovative and agile organization and we are transforming our Performance Management approach to reflect our culture, provide real-time feedback, and develop our…
Read more  »

Agile Metrics: Velocity is NOT the Goal

Location: Salon E
April 12th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Velocity is one of the most common metrics used (and misused) on agile projects. Velocity is simply a measurement of speed in a given direction; the rate at which a team is delivering toward a product release. As with a vehicle en route to a particular destination, increasing the speed may appear to ensure a timely arrival. However, that assumption is dangerous because it ignores the risks with higher speeds. And while it’s easy to increase a vehicle’s speed, where exactly is the accelerator on a software team? Doc walks us through the Hawthorne Effect and Goodhart’s Law to explain…
Read more  »

Agility at Scale: Tactical and Strategic Approaches

Location: Salon B
April 12th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes. This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It briefly examines the state of mainstream agile software development and argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale.…
Read more  »

AI: A Return to Meaning

Location: Salon A
April 11th, 2016
8:45 AM - 9:45 AM

Artificial Intelligence started with small data and rich semantic theories. The goal was to build systems that could reason over logical models of how the world worked; systems that could answer questions and provide intuitive, cognitively accessible explanations for their results. There was a tremendous focus on domain theory construction, formal deductive logics and efficient theorem proving. The problem, of course, was the knowledge acquisition bottleneck; it was too difficult, slow and costly to render all common sense knowledge into an integrated, formal representation that automated reasoning engines could digest. In the meantime, huge volumes of unstructured data became available,…
Read more  »

An Introduction to Web Components and Polymer

Location: Salon A
April 12th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Polymer is a new kind of library, built atop Web Components. This talk will cover the benefits of using Web Components to create your own encapsulated, custom HTML elements. You'll also learn how to use sets of ready-made Polymer elements to provide common functionality to your own web apps. Jeff's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site. Slides Screencast

Breaking New Ground with Product Development

Location: Salon E
April 11th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Comcast’s X1 Voice Remote is in millions of homes, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Users appreciate the high utility and accuracy of the voice remote. As a product manager, it is Jeanine’s responsibility to understand customers’ needs, position the product against competitors, and ensure aligns with the company’s goals. She will give insight into all of these areas, with an extra emphasis on the understanding customers’ needs and how that shapes the product roadmap. A screencast from Jeanine's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site.

Building Microservices with gRPC and Kubernetes – A practical introduction

Location: Salon C
April 11th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

gRPC is a general RPC framework focused on performance and interoperability across a wide range of programming environments. gRPC was initially developed at Google as a successor to an internal RPC platform called Stubby -- a general application platform at the heart of many Google products and services. gRPC seeks not only to replicate the success of Stubby, but improve upon it, in the open, around modern standards such as HTTP/2 and proven technologies such as Protocol Buffers. In this session we will demonstrate, through a series of live demos and code walkthroughs, how to design, build, and deploy a…
Read more  »

Building Wireless Sensors

Location: Salon D
April 12th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Inexpensive wireless microcontrollers are everywhere. This session will look at building wireless sensors on a variety of hardware: the super low cost ESP8266, the Particle Photon and it's cloud services, and the new Arduino MKR1000. In addition to building connected devices, I'll discuss some options for collecting, storing, and visualizing the sensor data. Slides from Don's talk are now available on the Chariot Solutions site.

Code Quality in Practice

Location: Salon D
April 11th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

We started Code Climate with a simple hypothesis: static analysis can help developers ship better code, faster. Five years later, we analyze over one trillion lines of code each day spanning a wide variety of programming languages, and along the way we've learned a lot about code quality itself: what it means, why you want it, how you get it, and more. This talk will cover some of the more surprising insights, including what makes a code metric valuable, when unmaintainable code may be preferable, and the number one thing that prevents most developers from maintaining quality code over time.…
Read more  »

Delivering Agile Methodologies and Emerging Technologies in Hostile Environments

Location: Salon E
April 12th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Agile vs. Waterfall is often presented as a difference in development methodology, but it is much more a clash of cultures. Large bureaucracies, government regulation and many other factors can create an environment that is hostile to many forms of innovation and in which waterfall is actually the most cost-effective approach. Innovating in such environments can be a challenge, but it is both personally and professionally rewarding to do so. In examining the motivations behind these hostile cultures, we can see patterns and opportunities where individuals or teams of developers can serve two masters and deploy cutting-edge technologies and techniques…
Read more  »

Demystifying Stream Processing with Apache Kafka

Location: Salon A
April 12th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

The concept of stream processing has been around for a while and most software systems operate as simple stream processors at their core: they read data in, process it, and maybe emit some data out. So why are there so many stream processing frameworks, all with different terminology, and why does it seem so complex to get up and running? What benefits does each stream processing system provide, and more importantly, what are they missing? This presentation will start by abstracting away the individual frameworks and describe the key features and benefits that stream processing frameworks provide. These core features…
Read more  »

Dodge Disasters and March to Triumph as a Mentor

Location: Salon E
April 11th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

Good engineers write good code, but the best engineers raise the skills of their junior colleagues, too. If you're a senior engineer, you must learn to mentor new hires. Especially if you’re committed to diversity: mentorship is critical to the careers of women and minorities in tech. I have failed at mentoring, then succeeded. I distinguished five warning signs that a mentorship will fail, and five prerequisites that make a mentorship very likely to succeed. Learn from me, and march to mentorship triumph. A. Jesse's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site. Slides Screencast

Emergence of Real-Time Analytics: Real-time Analysis of Customer Financial Activities With Apache Flink

Location: Salon A
April 12th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

People's financial activities with banks are increasingly migrating to digital platforms. Banks, which are large institutions that move money are transforming into Software Engineering Companies. At the core of modern banks is a large network of systems and platforms that capture, collect, process and analyze the digital data. Collecting and analyzing customers' activities in real-time is critical for modern financial institutions to succeed. In this talk we present a business use case where Capital One needs to process customer activities real-time and react to events appropriately as needed. We then present our experience in building a real-time analytics application that…
Read more  »

Exploring Wikipedia with Apache Spark: A Live Coding Demo

Location: Salon D
April 12th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

The real power and value proposition of Apache Spark is in creating unified use cases combining batch analysis, stream analysis, SQL, machine learning, graph processing and visualizations. In this live coding demo, Sameer will use various Wikipedia datasets to build a dashboard about what is happening in the world during his talk. The application will connect to the live Edits stream of Wikipedia and join it with other Wikipedia datasets to derive interesting insights about what's trending on the planet.

Factory, Workshop, Stage

Location: Salon B
April 12th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

Once upon a time, writing software felt a lot like working in a factory. A product went through an assembly-line-like series of stages where each team added their contribution. At the end of the line, the finished product was packaged up and physically shipped to a customer. Fast forward sixty years. Both the software itself and our process for making it are radically different from this original conception. But in the absence of a newer, more appropriate model for software development, we've unconsciously retained many industrial-era concepts -- and they're holding us back. We need a new model for software…
Read more  »

From Concurrent to Parallel: Understanding Parallel Stream Performance in Java SE 8

Location: Salon C
April 11th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

As core counts continue to increase, how we exploit hardware parallelism in practice shifts from concurrency -- using more cores to handle more user requests -- to parallelism -- using more cores to solve data-intensive problems faster. This talk will explore the different goals, tools, and techniques involved between these various approaches, and how to analyze a computation for potential parallelism, with specific attention to the parallel stream library in Java 8. Brian's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site. Slides Screencast

From Idea to Market: De-risking Critical Assumptions

Location: Salon E
April 11th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Ever wonder how companies like Zappos get started? And why some startups are successful when most fail? From the very start, smart entrepreneurs reduce uncertainty and make educated decisions through a process of focused and iterative "de-risking." Learn how to apply these techniques on your idea. You'll learn: The 5 most common mistakes business people, technologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs make when first starting and how to avoid them. How to to identify critical assumptions that can kill your idea. When to start speaking with target customers. (Hint: it's sooner than you think). The top 4 unexpected reasons ideas and companies…
Read more  »

From Zero to Application Delivery with NixOS

Location: Salon B
April 11th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Managing configurations for different kinds of nodes and cloud resources in a microservice architecture can be an operational nightmare, especially if not managed with the application codebase. CI and CD job environments often tend to stray from production configuration yielding their results unpredictable at best, or producing false positives in the worst case. Code pushes to staging and production can have unintended consequences which often can’t be inspected fully on a dry run. This session will show you a toolchain and immutable infrastructure principles that will allow you to define your infrastructure in code versioned alongside your application code that…
Read more  »

How Your Organization is Killing your Software

Location: Salon A
April 12th, 2016
8:45 AM - 9:45 AM

When asked "What's your architecture?" most people immediately respond with how their software is laid out and what their plans are for improving parts of it. Rarely does anybody really think through their team and organizational architecture, and even more rarely do people understand how that may fundamentally impact how the software gets written and the product that comes out at the end. How do you prevent your organization from killing your product, and how can each person contribute to make things better? Slides from Raffi's talk are now available on the Chariot Solutions site.

Infrastructure As Code Might Be Literally Impossible

Location: Salon B
April 12th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

This talk will begin by briefly examining what it means for infrastructure to be represented as code. We'll examine some fundamental software components required for automating infrastructure using code such as GPG, package managers, SSL, and more. We'll examine some interesting failure cases for these tools and how these shortcomings might make it impossible to truly represent infrastructure as code, for now. This talk will highlight areas where people interested in getting involved in open source projects could make an impact that would benefit the infrastructure as code movement. This talk will also provide some food for thought for infrastructure…
Read more  »

Interactive Computing with Jupyter: Past, Present, and Future

Location: Salon E
April 12th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

Jupyter (formerly part of IPython) is a popular tool for interactively exploring and sharing computational ideas. The Jupyter project provides a consistent environment for dozens of languages, including Python, Julia, and R. The Jupyter web notebook makes it easy to use interactive controls to manipulate and visualize computations and provides a widely-used format for documents that include both code and exposition. In this talk, we will give a brief overview of the Jupyter ecosystem and show examples of how Jupyter fosters interactive exploration and collaboration. We will also look at current and future developments in the platform, including the current…
Read more  »

Ionic 2: Your First @App

Location: Salon B
April 11th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Ionic has revolutionized the way web developers make the transition mobile development, but there’s always room to improve and make the lives of new app developers easier. With Ionic 2, we’ve improved upon much of what made Ionic 1 great, while also keeping things simple and reducing the fatigue that developers can feel when learning a new tool. We’ll introduce you to the basic Ionic 2 concepts and build an app live. Mike's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site. Slides Screencast

Modern C++ for Fun and Profit: This isn’t your old C++

Location: Salon A
April 12th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Think that C++ is an antiquated language and isn’t worth learning? Think that programming in C++ is too difficult and you’ll spend all of your time debugging segmentation faults and memory leaks? In this talk you’ll find out some of how C++ has changed in C++11, C++14, and beyond in ways that make programmer’s lives easier and allow you to write high-performance, maintainable, and well-designed code. Learn why C++ matters to companies around the world and why they continue to use it for performance critical and fundamental cross-platform libraries. Andy's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site. Slides…
Read more  »

Move Deliberately and Don’t Break Anything: Lessons from the Evolution of Java

Location: Salon D
April 12th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Programming language design is not just about type theory and grammars. For evolving a mature programming language like Java, it is about finding ways to add capabilities while maintaining compatibility, both with existing code and with the expectations and mental models of 9 million or so developers. In this talk, Java Language Architect Brian Goetz looks at some of the challenges and lessons of steering Java through major evolutionary changes, and a sneak peek at where the Java platform is headed. Slides from Brian's talk are now available on the Chariot Solutions site.

NoLambda: A new architecture combining streaming, ad hoc, machine learning, and batch analytics

Location: Salon A
April 11th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

In today’s world of exploding big and fast data, developers who want both streaming analytics and ad hoc, OLAP-like analysis have often had to develop complex architectures such as Lambda—a path for fast streaming analytics using NoSQL stores such as Cassandra and HBase with a separate batch path involving HDFS and Parquet. While this approach works, it involves too many moving parts, too many technologies for ops, and too many engineering hours. Helena Edelson and Evan Chan highlight a much simpler approach to combine streaming and ad hoc/batch analysis using what they call the NoLambda stack (Apache Spark/Scala, Mesos, Akka,…
Read more  »

Pitfalls in Technology Selection

Location: Salon E
April 11th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Technology is an ever-changing arena where it seems that everything is the one perfect solution for all your problems. When someone shows you the Next Big Thing, how can you be sure that it will work as intended, much less provide value or serve the needs of the business down the road? Based mainly on development and its related technologies, this talk will address some of the benefits and blight that come from tech selection as well as antipatterns to avoid, situations to embrace, and how to embrace your inner technical nerd and talk shop to engineers. A screencast of…
Read more  »

React Native: A Better Way to Do Mobile (For Both Managers and Engineers)

Location: Salon D
April 11th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

In 2015, two years after its initial open source release, React took the position formerly held by Angular as the darling of the web. It's used on some of the biggest sites in the world, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, NFL, Dropbox, Asana, Atlassian, Khan Academy, Flipkart, Imgur, Reddit, Paypal, WalMart, WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace, etc. Let's be clear though: any UI you can build with React you can also build without React. React's value proposition is that it simplifies your UI code, making it easier to build and maintain: it is declarative, component-based, uses one-way data…
Read more  »

React.js Reconciliation

Location: Salon C
April 11th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

React is a library for building user interfaces. Developers specify how an application "should look", and React automatically updates the page when the underlying data changes. React is able to do this through a process we call "Reconciliation". In this talk, I'll describe how reconciliation works within React, and how we use it to enhance both performance and user experience. In addition to being conceptually interesting, understanding the reconciliation process will allow you to better optimize your own applications. Jim's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site. Slides Screencast

Realm – a New, Easy to Use Mobile Database & Object Framework

Location: Salon A
April 11th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

So you need to store data in your mobile application? Great, now you need to work with SQLite. Writing SQL is great fun if you enjoy thinking about mapping your objects to a relational store over and over and over. But what if there was another solution? One that allowed you to work with objects and store them as such with a powerful query system. No transformations back and forth to a relational store. Well, you’re in luck, one does exist: Realm. Realm is a mobile object (MVCC) database that can do all of these things and more. In this…
Read more  »

Reliable High-Performance HTTP Infrastructure with nginx and Lua

Location: Salon A
April 11th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

We recently replaced a proprietary API management solution with an in-house implementation built with nginx and Lua that is more robust, higher performance, and has greater visibility. Learn about our development process and the overall architecture that allowed us to write high-level code while enjoying native code performance, and how we leveraged other open source tools like Vagrant, Ansible, and OpenStack to build an automation-rich delivery pipeline. We will also take an in-depth look at our capacity management approach that differs from the rate limiting concept prevalent in the API community. Sean's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions…
Read more  »

Rethinking REST in a Microservices World

Location: Salon D
April 11th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Microservices are just like monoliths, except you replace components with services, and method calls with REST calls, right? Wrong! An architecture like this will give you all the complexity of microservices, with none of the benefits. Microservices are supposed to promise improved scalability and resilience by isolating services from each other, but this is undermined when all communication between services is synchronous RESTful communication. To realise the full potential of microservices, we need to stop using REST as our go to, and start rethinking our architectures to use asynchronous communication. This presentation looks at how Lightbend Lagom solves some of…
Read more  »

Rust in Production

Location: Salon D
April 12th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Rust is a systems programming language from Mozilla that focuses on safety, speed, and concurrency. Rust reached 1.0 a year ago, and so there's a question everyone is asking: how has 1.0 tested in production? Is the language "ready" yet? In this talk, Steve will give an overview of Rust's value proposition, focusing on examples and anecdotes from companies using Rust in production today. Slides from Steve's talk are now available on the Chariot Solutions site.

Scala 2.12 & Java 8: More Fun Together!

Location: Salon B
April 11th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

To take full advantage of Java 8's support for lambdas and interfaces with concrete methods, a lot is changing behind the scenes of the Scala 2.12 compiler! At the language level, Scala has always had first-class support for lambdas, of course, and with Java 8's invokedynamic machinery we can now compile them to more compact and efficient bytecode. We also interoperate fully with Java's modeling of functions as Single Abstract Method types (aka functional interfaces). The other advantage of compiling to Java 8 bytecode is a more direct encoding of traits. The invokedynamic instruction plays an interesting role here as…
Read more  »

Securing Software by Construction

Location: Salon D
April 11th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

The high-profile attacks and data-breaches of the last few years have shown us the importance of securing our software. While it is good that we are seeing more tools that can analyze systems for vulnerabilities, this does not help the programmer write secure code in the first place. To prevent security from becoming a bottleneck--and expensive security mistakes from becoming increasingly probable--we need to look to techniques that allow us to secure software by construction. This talk has two parts. First, I will present technical ideas from research, including my own, that help secure software by construction. Even though these…
Read more  »

Security Vulnerabilities in Third Party Code: FIX ALL THE THINGS!

Location: Salon D
April 12th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

Many developers today are turning to well established third-party libraries to speed the development process and realize quality improvements over creating an in-house proprietary font parsing or image rendering library from the ground up. Efficiency comes at a cost though: a single application may have as many as 100 different third party libraries implemented. The result is that third-party and open source libraries have the ability to spread a single vulnerability across multiple products- exposing enterprises and requiring software vendors and IT organizations to patch the same vulnerability repeatedly. How big of a problem is this? What libraries are the…
Read more  »

Serverless Design Patterns for the Enterprise with AWS Lambda

Location: Salon C
April 11th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

Apps no longer just run on smartphones and tablets – they process verbal commands we speak to devices like Amazon Echo, run as bots in Slack channels, and are rapidly evolving customer experiences that span a range of IoT devices in homes, cars, offices, and industrial settings. Crucial to the success of all these ecosystems is one central idea: Code has to not just run in the cloud, it has to be easy to get it there and scale it there. Serverless computing – calling AWS Lambda functions instead of managing heavyweight applications on infrastructure – is changing how developers…
Read more  »

Stability Without Stagnation: Lessons Learned Shipping Ember

Location: Salon C
April 11th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

When we first started working on Ember in 2011, the web was a very different place. Backbone.js was just six months old, ES5 had just started to land, and around half of the page views on the web came from IE 6, 7 or 8. Fast forward to 2016: we have a number of great web frameworks, JavaScript is on an annual release schedule, and Chrome is ascendant. And while mobile phones drove negligible traffic in 2011, the picture is very different in 2016: four in ten page views came from iOS or Android last month. As a project, Ember…
Read more  »

Supercharging Your Mobile App Release with Fastlane

Location: Salon A
April 11th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

How would you like 2 extra hours of your time back every week? All mobile app developers face similar workflows as they work to upload an app to the App & Play Store. Many of these processes are currently done manually, but why not automate them? Fabric's set of developer tools, collectively called fastlane, makes building, testing, and releasing your app faster, reproducible and less troublesome, leaving developers more time to focus on feature code and not deployment! Learn how you can automate the tedious tasks to generate release notes, screenshots and push your final submission straight to the iTunesConnect…
Read more  »

Taming the Modern Public and Private Clouds with Nomad

Location: Salon A
April 11th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Distributed Cluster Schedulers are becoming increasingly popular. They present a good abstraction for running workloads at a "warehouse-scale" on the public and private clouds by decoupling workload from compute, network and storage resources. In this talk, we will talk about the operational challenges of running a Cluster Scheduler to serve highly available services across multiple geographies and in a heterogeneous runtime environment. We will go into details of the needs from a cluster scheduler with respect to managing multiple runtime/virtualization platforms, provide observability, running maintenance on hardware and software, etc. Lastly, we will talk about an open source distributed cluster…
Read more  »

Taming the Wild Wild West of Next-Gen Front-End Apps

Location: Salon C
April 12th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

With the recent release of Angular 2 and React.js capturing growing interest, there are now SO many options to build a front-end to our web applications. Along with the increasing number of developers and the explosive popularity of JavaScript, what was the wild wild west of app development is maturing with it’s own best practices and idioms of software. In this talk we’re casting a wide-net on the range of possibilities for building next-gen front-end apps by looking at the options we have for both building and deploying applications on the edge. Join us as we build and deploy an…
Read more  »

The future of container-enabled infrastructure

Location: Salon C
April 12th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Open Source communities have been pushing the state of art in containers, schedulers, and distributed systems in the last two years. The excitement in the community at the possibilities these technologies unlock is continuing to build. But, what are we solving for? How does this make your infrastructure better? This talk will describe how bringing these technologies together will create more reliable and greatly more trusted server infrastructure. And it will dive into how you can take steps to start taking advantage of these technologies today and moving into the future. Slides from Brandon's talk are now available on the…
Read more  »

The Node Module Diaries: Large App Architecture from the Trenches

Location: Salon E
April 12th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

The Node.js community has evolved a number of application design patterns for JavaScript applications, including application-internal package management patterns. The all-around awesomeness of NPM has lent itself to a hyper-modular approach for Node code not seen in many other language communities. This is great, especially when writing open-source tools designed to be used by others' applications. Meanwhile, the "microservices" or "distributed systems" architectural patterns have begun their ascendancy. It makes sense to isolate components so they can be managed independently of one another. One could be forgiven for thinking that "many modules" and "microservices" are similar answers to similar questions,…
Read more  »

The World of Swift 3

Location: Salon D
April 11th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

When Apple open sourced Swift late last year, they invited the community into the discussion of where Swift should go and why. Instead of us having to imagine what the Swift language and library stewards and architects are thinking, we can read their words on the Swift evolution mailing list. In this talk we’ll look at what idiomatic Swift will look like soon when Swift 3 is soon released and talk about the reasoning behind some of the choices. Daniel's talk is now available on the Chariot Solutions site. Slides Screencast

Transforming Enterprise Development With Clojure

Location: Salon B
April 12th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Modern software architecture emphasizes modularity and composability. While the industry at large is rapidly moving toward approaches such as microservices, the monolith is still alive and well in the enterprise. Monolithic projects will often have tight coupling between components, resulting in codebases that are large and unwieldy. This directly impacts productivity, and translates into costs for the organization. In this session we will explore the aspects of Clojure that encourage writing code that is loosely coupled and reusable. We will discuss the benefits of the Clojure approach, and we will see how it applies in practice with a live demo.…
Read more  »

Understanding Performance with DTrace (While The Customer Yells at You): A Case Study

Location: Salon C
April 12th, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

You’ve built some software that users love, and while its use starts to become more frequent it also becomes more critical. Suddenly the failures, inevitable and previously merely a nuisance, have become critical and emotionally fraught as your users see reputation, revenue, and even job security imperiled! Bugs come in many flavors. None quicken the pulse as much as a critical system suffering from poor performance. They can be hard to drive to root cause, hard to fix, hard to reproduce, and even hard for the user to describe beyond “it’s slow (fix it!)”. Fortunately we’re not completely alone in…
Read more  »

Unleash Your Data with Clojure: Using Transducers and Sequences

Location: Salon B
April 12th, 2016
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

As programmers, we spend the bulk of our time writing code that transforms data from one structure to another. The status quo in languages like Java uses imperative loops that accumulate changes in mutable objects. Functional programming and immutable values offer a different approach with opportunities for composability, concurrency, and simplicity. In this talk we'll examine Clojure's approach to data and data transformation, which is built from a foundation of immutable values and persistent collections. Clojure offers several models for transformation of collections - sequences, reducers, and transducers. We'll compare these to each other and to the status quo to…
Read more  »

Untangling Healthcare with Spark and Dataflow

Location: Salon A
April 12th, 2016
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM

Spark is becoming a data processing giant, but it leaves much as an exercise for the user. Developers need to write specialized logic to move between batch and streaming modes, manually deal with late or out-of-order data, and explicitly wire complex flows together. This talk looks at how we tackled these problems over a multi-petabyte dataset at Cerner. We start with how hand-written solutions to these problems evolved to prescriptive practices, opening up development of such systems to a wider audience. From there we look at how the emergence of Google's Dataflow on Spark is helping us take the next…
Read more  »

Virtual Reality Beyond Gaming: Immersive Technologies in the Industry

Location: Salon E
April 11th, 2016
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Virtual and augmented reality headsets are on their way to an office near you. Forecasts estimate that the immersive computing industry will be valued at over $150B by the year 2020, as consumer and enterprise device adoption grows with the release of devices by Microsoft, Oculus, Samsung, and HTC - to name just a few. As the technology sector begins to incorporate virtual and augmented reality devices into everyday scenarios, the impact across different industries will enable us to rethink the way that we use 3D content to explore and experience data. This session will provide an overview of the…
Read more  »

WebAssembly: A New Compilation Target for the Web

Location: Salon C
April 12th, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

WebAssembly is an emerging standard which defines a new, portable, binary format to serve as a safe and efficient compiler target for the Web. Driven by active cross-browser collaboration, WebAssembly is rapidly taking shape and should be coming in the future to a browser near you. What does this new addition to the open Web platform mean for developers? This talk will provide an overview of the design of WebAssembly and explain how WebAssembly can be used to both bring existing codebases to the Web as well as complement modern web apps written in JS and HTML5. The talk will…
Read more  »