Schedule: Hands-on sessions

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.

Architects are often the ones making the decisions about how to build in the right security for systems while making systems usable and delivering them on time. James Stewart shares techniques for considering security of whole systems and explores ways of bringing together cross-disciplinary teams to collectively own secure designs. Read more.

A public API is a new type of service that extends the business model beyond traditional boundaries. Tom Hofte and Marco van der Linden walk you through designing a resource model for a public API. You'll then work in teams to design an API for a fictional case study. Read more.

Communication is a critical skill for architects and tech leads, but it involves much more than simply documenting and diagramming. Seth Dobbs explores the illusion of communication and shares a process for effectively communicating your solutions to different stakeholders. Read more.

Dean Wampler and Boris Lublinsky walk you through building several streaming microservices applications based on Kafka using Akka Streams and Kafka Streams for data processing. You'll explore the strengths and weaknesses of each tool, helping you choose the best tools for your needs, and contrast them with Spark Streaming and Flink, so you can determine when to choose them instead. Read more.

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.

Kai Wähner shares a highly scalable, mission-critical infrastructure using Apache Kafka and Apache Mesos: Kafka brokers are used as the distributed messaging backbone; Kafka’s Streams API embeds stream processing into any external application without the need for a dedicated streaming cluster; and Mesos is used as a scalable infrastructure to leverage the benefits of a cloud-native platform. Read more.

Web design shouldn’t be hindered by the need for a fast, smoothly loading site. Abby Beck explains how to keep design at the forefront of any web project without sacrificing speed. Read more.