Engineering the Future of Software
Feb 25–26, 2018: Training
Feb 26–28, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Schedule: Best Practice sessions

9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Average rating: ***..
(3.50, 8 ratings)
Jochem Schulenklopper and Gero Vermaas offer an overview of TIME, a well-known model for application portfolio management by Gartner, and cover some improvements to the model, including a process for determining business value of applications, a innovative method of measuring IT quality (from an architect's perspective), and tactics for improving the applications in an organization's IT landscape. Read more.
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Cloud native
Location: Sutton North
Tags: cloud, native
John Chapin (Symphonia)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 6 ratings)
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.
9:00am–12:30pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Mike Amundsen (Amundsen.com, Inc.)
Average rating: ***..
(3.86, 7 ratings)
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.
1:30pm–5:00pm Monday, February 26, 2018
Microservices
Location: Beekman Parlor
Daniel Bryant (Datawire), Andrew Morgan (Independent)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 6 ratings)
Testing microservices is challenging. Dividing a system into components naturally creates interservice dependencies, and each service has its own performance and fault-tolerance characteristics that need to be validated during development and the QA process. Daniel Bryant and Andrew Morgan share the theory, techniques, and practices needed to overcome this challenge. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Enterprise architecture, Leadership skills
Location: Sutton North
Eben Hewitt (Sabre)
Average rating: ****.
(4.54, 28 ratings)
Eben Hewitt explains what the world’s top strategy firms can teach us about the intersection of strategic thinking and architecture and outlines a framework, process, and set of tools that will help you create a powerful technology strategy for your organization. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Allen Holub (Holub Associates)
Average rating: ****.
(4.26, 23 ratings)
If you still use large up-front design phases, you'll likely encounter problems with your design as you implement. The solution is to build around a domain-focused metaphor that allows for incremental changes while maintaining coherence throughout. Allen Holub demonstrates how to develop an effective and coherent architecture incrementally as the code evolves. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Business solutions, Distributed systems, Fundamentals
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Ben Evans (jClarity)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 10 ratings)
Confused about what a blockchain is? Think you might have a need for one but are confused by all the hype (and the vendors bearing solutions)? Want to understand how blockchain can be useful to your systems and processes? Join Ben Evans to learn the basic technology underlying the blockchain, explore real use cases, and find out how to avoid antipatterns. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Jonathan Moore (Comcast Cable)
Average rating: ****.
(4.15, 13 ratings)
Rate limiting is the most common capacity management approach for API gateways, but concurrency management is a fundamentally better concept for a variety of reasons. Jon Moore outlines the basic queuing theory behind concurrency management and shares a new algorithm for keeping misconfigured clients from causing trouble for everyone else. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Cloud native, Distributed systems, Scale
Location: Grand Ballroom West
Steven Wu (Netflix)
Average rating: **...
(2.42, 19 ratings)
Steven Wu explains how Netflix’s SPaaS platform empowers users to focus on extracting insights from data streams and build stream processing applications and shares lessons learned building and operating the largest SPaaS use case: Netflix’s Keystone data pipeline, a self-serve platform for creating near-real-time event pipelines that processes three trillion events and 12 PB of data every day. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Allard Buijze (AxonIQ)
Average rating: ****.
(4.47, 15 ratings)
Most discussions about implementing microservices start by evaluating the technical options and their challenges. However, the real business value is in functionality. Allard Buijze demonstrates how to build evolutionary microservices, starting with a single application that can be scaled out and distributed once the sensible boundaries are known. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
John Chapin (Symphonia)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 6 ratings)
Even EC2 has serverless attributes, and you can leverage them to realize the benefits of serverless in your classic enterprise cloud architectures. John Chapin shares the true story of an enterprise IT organization for which a potent combination of “mostly serverless” technology and a DevOps mindset have laid the groundwork for a future serverless transformation. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Average rating: **...
(2.30, 20 ratings)
A big part of microservices architecture is decomposing monolithic applications with tightly coupled data models, but moving to decentralized data management is one of the most challenging aspects of a microservices architecture. JP Morgenthal shares strategies for your redesign efforts, the possible pitfalls, and the trade-offs these approaches force architects and engineers to make. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Leadership skills
Location: Regent
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 12 ratings)
Communicating (about) architecture to non-IT and business stakeholders is a valuable skill. 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 dives into theory and shares practical tips on eight different facets of visually communicating your architecture. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Georgios Gkekas (ING Bank)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 9 ratings)
Georgios Gkekas shares ING's advanced analytics journey to promote modern machine and deep learning techniques internally through a central, best-of-breed technical platform tailored for data science activities. The platform offers only the necessary automated tools to replace the tedious, repetitive, and error-prone steps in a typical data science pipeline. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Devops, Fundamentals, User experience design
Location: Sutton North
Heidi Waterhouse (LaunchDarkly)
Average rating: ****.
(4.40, 5 ratings)
Heidi Waterhouse explores risk reduction and harm mitigation, helping you understand where you can prevent problems and where you can just make them less bad, and shares available tools to make every disaster a disappointing fizzle. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Cloud native, Microservices
Location: Regent
Tags: cloud, native
Daniel Bryant (Datawire)
Average rating: ****.
(4.40, 10 ratings)
It's evident that modern software architecture is evolving toward fully component-based architectures, but there are many challenges to delivering such applications in a continuous, safe, and rapid fashion. Daniel Bryant shares a series of patterns to help you identify and implement solutions for continuous delivery of contemporary service-based architectures. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Duncan DeVore (Lightbend)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 3 ratings)
Duncan DeVore discusses the ins and outs of dealing with modular JVM-based application consistency, distributed state, and identity coherence with techniques such as idempotency, eventual and casual consistency, the CAP theorem, single source of truth, and distributed domain design. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
James Siddle (Skyhook Consulting Ltd)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
Software architecture can be beautiful, but business and engineering reality is often inconvenient and messy. James Siddle explains how living product roadmaps help you deal with reality without compromising your architecture vision. You’ll learn Agile roadmapping techniques and how to engage with stakeholders to move toward your architecture goals while avoiding wasteful endeavors. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Stephen Pember (Toast)
Average rating: ***..
(3.33, 3 ratings)
Event storage offers many practical benefits to distributed systems providing complete state changes over time, but there are a number of challenges when building an event store mechanism. Stephen Pember explores some of the problems you may encounter and shares real-world patterns for working with event storage. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Robert Lefkowitz (Warby Parker)
Average rating: ****.
(4.64, 11 ratings)
Robert Lefkowitz offers a overview of technical debt, explaining how to prevent or reduce it, when to increase it, and how to use refactoring to refinance it. Read more.
10:45am–12:15pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Michelle Brush (Cerner Corporation)
Average rating: ****.
(4.73, 11 ratings)
Our architectural decisions are both guided and judged by the things we choose to value and measure in our systems. Michelle Brush explains how to assess what aspects of the system different organizations should value and therefore constantly measure and shares approaches for measuring for accountability and improvement of those values in an architecture. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Business solutions, Leadership skills
Location: Sutton North
James Thompson (Mavenlink)
Average rating: ***..
(3.80, 10 ratings)
Traditional management approaches tend to focus on narrow measures of performance. Within engineering organizations, this can lead to incentives around the wrong practices and priorities. Coaching models refocus the management of engineers around professional growth in a way that can create a virtuous cycle. James Thompson explains how to build a technical coaching program in your organization. Read more.
1:15pm–2:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Maria Gomez (BCG Digital Ventures)
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 9 ratings)
Think of this talk as Microservices 201. You know microservices basics and their pros and cons and have maybe even started putting them in production but haven't spent much time thinking about how to maintain them. Maria Gomez explores the most important operational concerns for maintaining microservices and explains why observability helps you maintain a healthy production environment. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Bernd Rücker (Camunda)
Average rating: ****.
(4.18, 11 ratings)
In distributed systems, some business transactions and even more end-to-end processes stretch across boundaries of individual services. While event-driven choreography leads to nicely decoupled systems, complex event chains cause headaches. Bernd Rücker explains why transforming certain events into commands is beneficial and how to avoid losing sight of larger-scale flows. Read more.
2:15pm–3:05pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Devops, Distributed systems, Microservices
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Sam Stokes (Honeycomb)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 10 ratings)
In the complex world of microservices and distributed systems, we need to understand what our software is doing. Traditional tools, such as logs, read by humans and filtered by crude rules, aren’t powerful enough. Sam Stokes explains that we need new, better tools and why this will also require us to design our systems to give the tools better data. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Matthew McLarty (MuleSoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.17, 12 ratings)
Microservices have taken the software architecture world by storm. Initially driven by a desire for increased delivery velocity and greater scalability, organizations are now recognizing the importance and complexity of securing their microservices. Matt McLarty shares techniques for securing microservice APIs and a practical model you can implement in your organization. Read more.
3:50pm–4:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Suudhan Rangarajan (Netflix)
Average rating: ****.
(4.83, 6 ratings)
As Netflix continues its journey beyond 100M members, the company is rearchitecting its critical Playback API service to better serve its business needs for the next three to five years. Suudhan Rangarajan discusses why and how Netflix rebuilt the Playback API service and outlines a rigorous framework that you can use to reason about your microservice architecture. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Christian Posta (solo.io)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)
When building microservices, you must solve for a number of critical functions, but the process can be incredibly complex and expensive to maintain. Christian Posta offers an overview of Envoy Proxy and Istio.io Service Mesh, explaining how they solve application networking problems more elegantly by pushing these concerns down to the infrastructure layer and demonstrating how it all works. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Enterprise architecture, Leadership skills
Location: Sutton North
Joel Crabb (Target)
The catchphrase of the year is digital disruption. It's finally clear that digital complacency is a path to nonexistence even in industries that haven’t yet felt the direct impact of the digital era. Joel Crabb explains why retail has been completely disrupted and, in the process, is reinventing enterprise architecture for digital relevancy. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Application architecture, Cloud native
Location: Mercury Ballroom
Average rating: ***..
(3.83, 6 ratings)
Michael Bevilacqua-linn shares an architecture for a cloud-based end-to-end data infrastructure that handles everything from classic analytic use cases to real-time operational analysis to modern machine learning techniques in an elastically scaleable and secure manner. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Marty Brodbeck (Shutterstock)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
In an effort to consolidate and modernize the company’s technology stack, Shutterstock recently embarked on a technology overhaul, which also led to organizational and cultural change. Marty Brodbeck shares some of the decisions Shutterstock made and the challenges it faced during this huge transformation, along with key principles that drove and guided the shift. Read more.
4:50pm–5:40pm Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Devops
Location: Beekman Parlor
Maria Gomez (BCG Digital Ventures)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Think of this talk as Microservices 201. You know microservices basics and their pros and cons and have maybe even started putting them in production but haven't spent much time thinking about how to maintain them. Maria Gomez explores the most important operational concerns for maintaining microservices and explains why observability helps you maintain a healthy production environment. Read more.