Engineering the Future of Software
29–31 Oct 2018: Tutorials & Conference
31 Oct–1 Nov 2018: Training
London, UK

Schedule: Best Practice sessions

10:4512:15 Monday, 29 October 2018
Enterprise architecture
Location: King's Suite - Sandringham
Eben Hewitt (Sabre)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 24 ratings)
Eben Hewitt shares technology strategy patterns for creating and communicating a compelling technology strategy based on architecture principles. Some of these frameworks originate in the world of business strategy consulting and some are hard-won from Eben's time as a CTO and chief architect. Join in to upgrade your skills from architect to strategist using these proven and innovative patterns. Read more.
10:4512:15 Monday, 29 October 2018
Application architecture
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Allen Holub (Holub Associates)
Average rating: ****.
(4.80, 10 ratings)
Though you can design microservices to talk to each other synchronously, as if they were making function calls, that's not the best way to do things. Choreographed (asynchronous) systems solve many problems inherent in synchronous (orchestrated) communication. Allen Holub shows you how to build effective choreographed microservice systems. Read more.
13:1514:05 Monday, 29 October 2018
Microservices
Location: King's Suite - Sandringham
Maria Gomez (BCG Digital Ventures)
Average rating: ***..
(3.11, 19 ratings)
Think of this talk as a Microservices 201. You know microservices basics, but can you successfully maintain them in production? Join Maria Gomez to explore the concept of observability as a way of maintain a healthy production environment. Read more.
13:1514:05 Monday, 29 October 2018
Fundamentals
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Yiannis Kanellopoulos (Code4Thought), Evelyn van Kelle (Software Improvement Group)
Average rating: ***..
(3.75, 12 ratings)
If you want to develop high-quality products, you need happy developers and strong feedback loops. Yiannis Kanellopoulos and Evelyn van Kelle discuss the factors that determine developer happiness, explore the crucial relationship between developer happiness and code quality, and explain how to enhance overall code quality through a blend of interpersonal communication and tool-based analysis. Read more.
13:1514:05 Monday, 29 October 2018
Enterprise architecture
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Kishau Rogers (bigThinking)
Average rating: **...
(2.88, 8 ratings)
The future of software is being driven by intelligent applications. By the year 2020, more than 85% of customer interactions will be carried out without humans. The road to enterprise intelligence starts with the humans behind the curtain. Kishau Rogers explains how to reduce the friction of AI adoption in the enterprise using systems thinking and people-centered workflows. Read more.
14:1515:05 Monday, 29 October 2018
Application architecture
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Szymon Pobiega (Particular Software)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
And you shall do it only once. Exactly once. That's a very common assumption for most of business software. One trigger equals one outcome. Szymon Pobiega explains why duplicate messages are a fact of life in distributed systems (and why no infrastructure can help you). Fortunately, Szymon also shares tips on how to deal with nasty duplicate zombie messages. Read more.
14:1515:05 Monday, 29 October 2018
Distributed systems
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Bernd Rücker (Camunda)
Average rating: ****.
(4.29, 14 ratings)
Integrating microservices and taming distributed systems is hard. Most people still integrate via REST but are not even aware of missing consistency guarantees in these architectures. Bernd Rücker shares three challenges he's observed in real-life projects and demonstrates how to avoid them, using live coding. Read more.
15:5016:40 Monday, 29 October 2018
Fundamentals
Location: Blenheim Room - Palace Suite
Leemay Nassery (Comcast)
Average rating: ***..
(3.80, 10 ratings)
Leemay Nassery explains the importance of data collection pipelines and walks you through efficiently storing various datasets. Join in to learn how to avoid the "pipeline jungle" construct by thinking holistically about the data and the tiers that follow the initial consumption of these events. Read more.
15:5016:40 Monday, 29 October 2018
Distributed systems
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Erik Wilde (Axway)
Average rating: *....
(1.33, 3 ratings)
There are numerous standards and best practices to describe and document APIs, but there's still uncertainty how to best use them to combine API description, documentation, and labeling. Erik Wilde offers an overview of the existing approaches, demonstrates how to use them, and proposes an additional layer on top of which API labeling becomes more unified, and thus more useful. Read more.
15:5016:40 Monday, 29 October 2018
Maggie Carroll (MAG Aerospace)
Average rating: **...
(2.64, 14 ratings)
Software architects and enterprise architects work with a variety of roles, and often the deep technical work is performed by other application architects or solutions architects. Maggie Carroll shares useful skills and actionable techniques for creating a new architecture function and leading other architects in developing a system of systems. Read more.
16:5017:40 Monday, 29 October 2018
Distributed systems
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Wenbo Zhu (Google)
Average rating: *....
(1.50, 8 ratings)
Wenbo Zhu illustrates the key architectural properties and underlying technologies to create and deploy a real-time, stateful application on top of the completely stateless serverless architecture. Read more.
16:5017:40 Monday, 29 October 2018
Microservices
Location: Buckingham Room - Palace Suite
. . (Kong)
Average rating: ****.
(4.20, 10 ratings)
Microservices are all the rage these days. But what practical factors should you consider once you’ve taken the plunge? Marco Palladino provides a working framework of the architectural and organizational decisions senior technologists will need to make in order to solve the right problems for their business. Read more.
16:5017:40 Monday, 29 October 2018
Leadership skills
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Bulama Yusuf (Intellectual Apps)
Average rating: ****.
(4.27, 15 ratings)
As people with strong technical backgrounds, we know how to get most out of the tools and devices we use, but this doesn't necessarily guarantee best results on a team. Bulama Yusuf explores proven ways to communicate and connect with a team as a software architect, ensuring that your team is working at its best. Read more.
16:5017:40 Monday, 29 October 2018
Microservices
Location: King's Suite - Sandringham
Rob Wilson (SailPoint Technologies)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 4 ratings)
Microservices have quickly become a popular way to develop software systems. But as organizations implement production systems based on microservices, they are recognizing the importance and complexity of securing microservices. Rob Wilson shares techniques for securing microservice APIs and details a practical multiplatform model that you can use for securing your own microservice environments. Read more.
10:4512:15 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Scale
Location: Blenheim Room - Palace Suite
Yaniv Aknin (Google Cloud)
Average rating: ***..
(3.60, 5 ratings)
Architectural choices are often driven by nonfunctional requirements like reliability and scalability. Unfortunately, it can be deceptively hard to specify the right requirements. Big decisions made hoping to hit X nines often fail to ensure the nines measure the right thing. Yaniv Aknin shares lessons learned working in this space at Google, helping you focus on metrics that matter. Read more.
10:4512:15 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Microservices
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Dennis Bijlsma (Software Improvement Group), Haiyun Xu (Software Improvement Group)
Average rating: ***..
(3.43, 7 ratings)
Dennis Bijlsma and Haiyun Xu explain how to measure the maintainability of software landscapes that consist of many systems communicating with each other—and what that means for the teams working on them. Along the way, they explore a number of trade-offs to consider when designing the landscape and share best practices for modern software landscape architectures. Read more.
13:1514:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Application architecture
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Vladik Khononov (DoiT International)
Average rating: ****.
(4.58, 12 ratings)
Vladik Khononov shares his experience using the domain-driven design methodology at Plexop, a large-scale marketing system that spans over a dozen of different business domains, from the management of advertising spaces to sales agents’ commissions. Read more.
13:1514:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Leadership skills
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 11 ratings)
Communicating about architecture to non-IT and business stakeholders is a valuable skill for architects. After all, many architectural decisions are made by others, so they need to be informed with clear, honest, intelligible, and helpful information and advice. Jochem Schulenklopper shares theory and practical tips on eight facets of the visual communication of architecture. Read more.
13:1514:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Microservices
Location: King's Suite - Sandringham
Mike Amundsen (Amundsen.com, Inc.)
Average rating: ****.
(4.38, 13 ratings)
Microservices is a popular but vague term. Definitions of microservices can vary depending on what you want them to accomplish and how you want them to communicate with each other. Join Mike Amundsen to learn about the three types of microservices, see what makes them unique, and discover when you deploy each of them. Read more.
13:1514:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Devops
Location: Buckingham Room - Palace Suite
Heidi Waterhouse (LaunchDarkly)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 2 ratings)
Here's some sad news: staging is a lie and will never be identical to production, because production is unknowable. But here's the good news: production can contain multitudes, including features you aren’t ready to turn on or activate yet. Join Heidi Waterhouse for an exploration of the ways that you might be able to kill staging and perform better. Read more.
14:1515:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Application architecture
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Sarah LeBlanc (ThoughtWorks), Hany Elemary (ThoughtWorks)
Average rating: ****.
(4.17, 6 ratings)
Credit card fraudsters are always changing their behavior and developing new tactics. For banks, the damage isn’t just financial; their reputations are on the line. So how do they stay ahead of the crooks? Sarah LeBlanc and Hany Elemary explore a system that utilizes continuous delivery for machine learning to allow for rapid experimentation and the deployment of models to catch these fraudsters. Read more.
14:1515:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Security
Location: King's Suite - Sandringham
Ashley Ward (Twistlock)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 3 ratings)
Ashley Ward details the security advantages of containers relative to traditional architectures, covering what makes containers more secure, the changing nature of the threat landscape for cloud-native technology, and how the combination of container platforms like OpenShift with purpose-built security solutions lets organizations deliver more secure software faster than ever before. Read more.
14:1515:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Serverless
Location: King's Suite - Balmoral
Asher Sterkin (Blackswan Technologies)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 5 ratings)
We don't yet have an adequate language for describing serverless architectures. Today, we use informal diagrams in which no precise meaning can be attached to the diagram as a whole or to any particular element. Asher Sterkin explains why this is a problem and what we can do about it. Read more.
14:1515:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Leadership skills
Location: Buckingham Room - Palace Suite
Mlungisi Duma (First National Bank)
Average rating: **...
(2.07, 14 ratings)
Most architectural designs are rejected by stakeholders or teams, in part because they didn't participate in creating the solution. Mlungisi Duma shares useful techniques for involving business expects in architecture design and the software development life cycle. You'll also learn how to convince the IT team to buy in to the new design without too much resistance or friction. Read more.
14:1515:05 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
User experience design
Location: Blenheim Room - Palace Suite
Tyler Treat (Real Kinetic)
Average rating: **...
(2.74, 19 ratings)
Distributed systems are not strictly an engineering problem. Tyler Treat looks at distributed systems through the lens of user experience, observing how architecture, design patterns, and business problems all coalesce into UX. Tyler also shares system design anti-patterns and alternative patterns for building reliable and scalable systems with respect to business outcomes. Read more.
15:5016:40 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Benjamin Stopford (Confluent)
Average rating: ****.
(4.64, 11 ratings)
One of the most interesting and provocative patterns to face the software architecture community is the idea of using event streaming as a source of truth—a pattern where replayable logs provide both communication and storage, splicing the retentive properties of a database into a system designed to share data across teams. Benjamin Stopford explains why this pattern is transformative. Read more.
15:5016:40 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Irakli Nadareishvili (Capital One)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 12 ratings)
With cloud-native and microservices architecture gaining wide adoption, asynchronous programming patterns are becoming increasingly important. Irakli Nadareishvili details three major async forms that are relevant in this space—event sourcing, reactiveness, and data streams—defining each pattern, explaining relevant use cases, and exploring differences in implementation. Read more.
15:5016:40 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Brad Topol (IBM)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
Continuous delivery for 12-factor microservices works by design. When you can architect a solution for continuous delivery, you control all the angles. But what do you do when you don’t have that luxury? Brad Topol explains how modernizing existing IT infrastructure with containers enables you to manage change through continuous delivery and reduce ongoing operational costs. Read more.
16:5017:40 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Application architecture
Location: Windsor Suite
Average rating: ***..
(3.60, 5 ratings)
Microservices provide a way to break up a monolithic architecture into multiple atomic units, allowing an independent scalability of a service. They also provide a better way to divide the domains across multiple teams. Luca Mezzalira explains how to apply the same principles to frontend applications, enabling you to scale up a project with tens of developers without reducing the throughput. Read more.
16:5017:40 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Enterprise architecture
Location: Buckingham Room - Palace Suite
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
Danske Bank is implementing ideas and practices such as CI/CD, microservices, and DevOps within the extreme conditions of a financial enterprise. Angelo Agatino Nicolosi explains how the bank is defining and delivering brand-new financial services at startup speed through the simple concept of an enclave. Read more.
16:5017:40 Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Serverless
Location: Blenheim Room - Palace Suite
Michael Garski (Fender Digital)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)
Fender Digital’s service infrastructure is 100% serverless. The promises of serverless include reduced costs and simplified operations; the challenge lies in how to implement complex applications on a FaaS platform. Michael Garski shares best practices Fender Digital has established to optimize function performance and ensure observability. Read more.
9:0012:30 Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Leadership skills
Location: Blenheim Room - Palace Suite
Seth Dobbs (Bounteous)
Average rating: ****.
(4.73, 15 ratings)
Communication is not an optional soft skill for architects. It's essential to your success. You may have the most brilliant ideas, but if you're ineffective in communicating their value or if you can't obtain buy-in from your stakeholders, you won't be successful. Seth Dobbs shares a process for effectively shaping and communicating your solutions to different stakeholders. Read more.
9:0012:30 Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Cloud native
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
John Chapin (Symphonia)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
With systems like Travis CI, Circle CI, and CodeBuild, we're never more than a few lines of YAML away from a complete continuous delivery pipeline. However, ephemeral build systems constantly recreate the world from scratch, increasing build time and lengthening the CD feedback loop. John Chapin addresses those challenges and shares a reference pipeline using AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild. Read more.
13:3017:00 Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Marco Emrich (codecentric)
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 9 ratings)
Event-driven programming has been proven useful in many situations. However, the asynchronous programming model often needs some time to get used to. Marco Emrich explores event concepts in a familiar language and walks you through solving an exciting kata with the help of event-driven programming. Read more.
13:3017:00 Wednesday, 31 October 2018
Application architecture
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Mike Amundsen (Amundsen.com, Inc.)
A RESTful approach to microservices offers a number of benefits. Mike Amundsen walks you through building adaptable microservices that take advantage of the features of REST, including statelessness, self-description, and using hypermedia to discover and modify application state. Read more.