Kathryn Hemmings

We’re really looking forward to the next Docklands LJC meetup later this month. For anyone not familiar with this group, it’s a community within the LJC focused on the developer community in and around Canary Wharf each month.

At the next meet up, we’re going to be joined by Dave Farley, a thought leader in the field of Continuous Delivery, DevOps and Software Development in general. Dave is also the founder and director of Continuous Delivery Ltd; co-author of the Jolt-award winning book ‘Continuous Delivery’, a regular conference speaker and a well-known blogger.

Ahead of the session we caught up with Dave to find out more about what we can expect from his ‘Reactive Systems’ talk.

Who do you think should come along and why?

This talk is aimed at technical people. It explores some reasonably advanced ideas in software architecture for very high-performance systems. It is technical at the level of design rather than code, so is understandable by anyone who is interested in, or involved in, creating scalable and/or high-performance systems.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

1. How do you build systems at the limit of performance?
2. How do you architect systems for reliability, resilience, scalability and flexibility?
3. How do you do all of this and not get lost in technical details?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?

I think that reactive systems represent an approach to software development that was born in complex low-latency systems, but has wide applicability. I think that this approach to systems design and development is much more broadly applicable than in the specialist field of high-frequency trading.

Any advice for junior developers entering the industry?

Software development is not about technology. It is not about tools. It is not about which language is best. It is about how we arrange ideas in a way that keeps them understandable when the systems that we create get bigger and more complex; and how we approach our work to allow us to manage the hard parts of Computer science, concurrency and coupling.

Focus on learning how to think about the structures that we create rather than the building-blocks. How do you make your code manageable, readable and navigable?

If you’d like to come along, the talk is happening on Tuesday 29^th January, 18.15 at Barclays Investment Bank, E14 4BB. You can find the full details and RSVP here.

In a couple of weeks, we’re going to be joined by Sander Mak for his Java presentations ‘Modules or Microservices’ and ‘Migrating to Java Modules’. For those of you not familiar with Sander, he is a Fellow at Luminis in the Netherlands; he is also a Java Champion, conference speaker and author of the O’Reilly book ‘Java 9 Modularity’.

We caught up with Sander ahead of the session to find out more about what we can expect…

Who do you think should come along and why?

Everyone who wants to examine their technology choices and preferences. We all love to learn about the latest and greatest, with new frameworks and technologies popping up every week. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, this evening will be different. In the ‘Modules or Microservices’ talk, we’ll take a critical look at what we’re actually trying to accomplish with all these new technologies. That will give food for thought, because both microservices approaches and modular application development approaches have their pros and cons. Yet we rarely think about them together, even though many development platforms (Java, JavaScript, Go and so on) are increasingly moving to modules as first-class citizens. In the second session, we’ll zoom in on what it means to do modular development with Java, by looking at migrating an application beyond Java 8.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

1. When should you go down the microservices route, and when should you consider modular application development as an alternative? Is this even a binary choice?
2. How do you get your company and team to move beyond Java 8?
3. What steps can you take to modularise a codebase?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?

This session will be an exercise in critical thinking. It’s not important that you agree with me in the ‘Modules or Microservices’ debate. However, it is important to think about the impact of the architectural choices we make, and to examine our motivations for these choices!

Any advice for junior developers entering the industry?

Find someone in your company you look up to and ask them for mentoring. You can only learn so much by reading books and listening to talks. Read and write code together, discuss designs in the context of your projects: that’s how you can grow faster than you’d ever imagine. It may seem like a big step, but most senior developers love to share what they’ve learned and want to see you succeed as well.

If you’d like to come along, the talks are happening on Tuesday 22^nd January, 18.00 at David Game College, EC3N 2ET. You can find the full details and RSVP here.

P.S. you can find Sander on Twitter @Sander_Mak or via his blog branchandbound.net

Believe it or not, we’re preparing for our last event of 2018! We’re delighted that we’re going to be joined by Dr Steffen Zschaler (@szschaler) for his talk ‘Rolling Your Own: Domain-Specific Languages in Java’.

Domain-specific languages, DSLs, or “little languages” as they’re sometimes known, can have great benefits for making your source code more readable, correct, maintainable and overall provide improvements to the efficiency of the whole team. Everybody has seen and used DSLs before, be it good old SQL, or languages like Docker, Kubernetes, Fn Flow, Terraform, or GraphQL. But isn’t it difficult to build and maintain your own language?

In this talk, through a series of live-coding examples, Steffen hopes to convince you otherwise.

For those of you not familiar with him, Steffen is a senior lecturer in computer science at King’s College London. He’s been researching domain-specific languages, software modelling, and code generation for almost 20 years. He’s built a number of tools, as well as developing foundational theory. Steffen is always looking to convert people to the benefits of using domain-specific languages as part of their development workflow and is happy to discuss this at length with or without drinks at hand…

Ahead of the session we chatted to Steffen to find out a bit more about what we can expect and who will benefit the most from the talk.

Who do you think should come along and why?

Developers primarily, but also for example people with an interest in UX might find this interesting. DSLs can be useful for many users:

• Developers can build DSLs to bring complex problems to a higher level so that they can be expressed, maintained, and solved more efficiently. This can bring down error rates, make it easier to understand the code, and thus improve maintainability and extensibility.
• Another, potentially even more interesting use of DSLs (especially with the modern tools available for building DSLs), is to build DSLs into your applications for use by the application users. I won’t be showing DSLs like this in the talk, but the technologies I will be showing apply there as well and I will be very happy to discuss such use cases.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

1. Why should I consider building a DSL (and am I perhaps already doing it)?
2. What are the elements of DSLs?
3.  How can I efficiently develop, test, and maintain a DSL in an agile Java world?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?

DSLs have been around for a long time. But while there seems to be some general agreement that they’re useful, there’s also always been a feeling that building good DSLs takes a lot of effort and substantial specialised expertise. I hope to be able to show that this has changed substantially over the last decade or so with the introduction of language workbenches, which have really matured now. So, perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate these feelings about DSLs…

Do you have an interesting DSL fact you can share with us?

The entire Dutch tax system is now programmed in a DSL, including unit tests etc. As a result, they can test out proposed changes to tax rules and analyse their potential impacts before turning them into law. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-XMjfz3RcU

If you’d like to join us, the event is happening on Tuesday 18^th December, 18.30 @ Skills Matter, EC2M 7EB. You can find the full details and register here.

There’s just over a week to go until our next meetup, ‘Banking in the Cloud: Ultra-High Reliability Architectures’ with guest speaker Jason Maude (@jasonmaude).

For those of you not familiar with Jason, he’s a coder, coach, debater and public speaker. He has over a decade of experience working in the financial sector, primarily in creating and delivering software. He’s passionate about explaining complex technical concepts to those who are convinced that they won’t be able to understand them. Currently he works at Starling Bank as their Head of System Analytics and host of the Starling podcast.

Ahead of the talk we chatted to Jason to find out a bit more about what attendees can expect.

Who do you think should come along and why?

This talk will be of interest to anyone in the LJC, but particularly those people who work in finance (or any other highly regulated environment), who want to implement techniques such as continuous deployment but keep being told “that’s not how the industry works”.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

• Do I have to make a trade-off between reliability and speed of deployment?
• How can you avoid propagation of bugs in a distributed system?
• What do I say to the people who keep throwing regulations at me as a reason we can’t do things in a better way?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?

It’s important as it’ll show how you can create an incredibly reliable system without sacrificing speed of delivery (I’ve given away the answer to the first question above, but oh well).

It’ll also give people a great insight into Starling Bank, one of the most successful fintechs in the industry right now.

Any advice for junior developers entering the industry?

Make sure you balance development of your technical skills with development of empathy and communication skills. Both are required if you’re going to be successful.

If you’d like to come along, the event is happening on Thursday 6^th December, 18.30 at Skills Matter, EC2M 7EB. You can find the full details and register here.

Ahead of her ‘Journeys to Cloud Native Architecture: Sun, Sea and Emergencies’ talk next week, we were fortunate enough to chat to Nicki Watt (@techiewatt) about what we can expect from the event.

For those of you who don’t know Nicki, she is the CTO at OpenCredo where she helps organisations to embrace, build and discover innovative solutions to their problems. Nicki is also a co-author of Neo4j In Action, a comprehensive guide to the graph database, Neo4j.

Who do you think should come along and why?

This talk is for all levels, engineers and managers alike, looking to get some behind the scenes insight as to what kind of challenges an organisation faces when they embark on moving towards a new cloud native (read microservices) architecture.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

– What are some of the common challenges faced when moving to this new way of building applications?
– What should I look out for if I am starting this journey?
– What tools and approaches will help me or my organisation if we are starting out on this journey?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?
In short knowledge sharing and collaboration! Many organisations are moving towards developing systems via this new paradigm. It provides an opportunity for engineers and managers alike to learn and gain insight from others who have taken this journey before, gaining some tips and insight along the way, and hopefully being able to provide some of their own insights too!

Any advice for junior developers entering the industry?
Whilst technical skills are very important, I believe it is just as important to develop skills around being able to communicate well, specifically to be able discuss, explain and explore technical topics and concepts with people at different levels. Don’t just focus on learn new programming languages, master the art of explanation and communication – this will take you far!

Don’t forget we’re also going to be joined at the session by Allan Kelly (@allankellynet) who is going to present his talk ‘Why Devs hate Agile and what to do about it’.  You can find out more about Allan’s talk in his interview here.

If you’d like to come along, we’ll be at Skills Matter, EC2M 7EB on Wednesday 14^th November at 18:30. You can find the full details and RSVP here.

Next week it’s our Introduction to Stream Processing event in conjunction with Hazelcast and the Hazelcast Joint User Group. At the session Neil Stevenson, Senior Solution Architect at Hazelcast will discuss ‘Easy and Fast Stream Processing’.

In this session we’ll learn all about directed acyclic graph (DAG) and why it’s so powerful for Big Data processing. We’ll walk through the evolution of Big Data computing from sequential to DAG as well as other techniques such as SP/SC, Cooperative Multithreading, Data Locality, In-Memory sources and sinks, and WaitFree algorithms that power the third generation of Big Data processing.

Before the talk we chatted to Neil to find out a bit more about what we can expect.

Who do you think should come along?

Developers and architects looking to gain an understanding of both the theory and practicalities surrounding stream processing.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

Why are streams important?

What are the performance implications?

What does this mean for architecture?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?

Data is getting bigger, we’re collecting more and more of it at a faster and faster rate. So what we need is a paradigm shift that enables us to process the input stream prior to storage. This is the key difference of stream processing, we store the output not the input.

Any advice for junior developers entering the industry?

If you’ve been asked to do something, ask yourself why the company needs it. Try and wear a business and a technical hat. That should provide you with the bigger picture which will help you get a better result. Technology never stops developing, if you think you’ve got a handle on it, something new will appear which will provide new challenges. Ride the wave and enjoy it.

If you’d like to join us, the session is happening next Wednesday, 7th November, 18:00 @ David Game College, EC3N 2ET. You can find the full details and register here.

In anticipation of our ‘Why Devs hate Agile and what to do about it’ talk this November, we caught up with speaker Allan Kelly to gain some insight into the session.

First though, for anyone who isn’t familiar with Allan, he helps companies large and small enhance their agility and boost their digital offering. Clients include: Virgin Atlantic, Qualcomm, The Bank of England, Reed Elsevier and many more. He’s the author of “Dear Customer, the truth about IT” and books including “Project Myopia”, “Continuous Digital”, “Xanpan” and “Business Patterns for Software Developers”.

Who do you think should come along and why?

This is a talk for developers who are fed up with Agile and perhaps those who manage developers and want to understand why developers are fed up with Agile.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

– If not Agile then what?
– How can we fix Agile?
– How do I make my manager understand this?

Plus…

– Where do I get the time to do all these things?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?

When Agile is used for evil nobody’s happy – developers feel it’s another rod to beat them, managers
don’t get the results they desire, analysts keep on writing documents nobody reads and testers spend all their time reporting bugs. If companies are to see the real benefits of Agile, then developers need to believe in Agile and help ensure it’s used for good.

Any advice for junior programmers entering the industry?

It’s a cliché to say “keep learning” so let me say learn by doing. It’s great to read books, go to meetups and especially conferences. It’s also great to do things, keep trying new ideas, then explain them to others – write your own blog or online articles, do a meetup or conference presentation. When you explain things to other people you’re the person who learns the most.

If you’d like to get involved the event is happening on Wednesday 14^th November, 18:30 @ Skills Matter, EC2M 7EB. You can find the full details and RSVP here.

To read more about Allan’s work, check out his blog and he’s also on twitter @allankellynet

There are just a couple of weeks until our ‘How low can you go? Ultra low latency Java in the real world’ event. We wanted to speak to the presenter Daniel Shaya (@DanielShaya) to find out a bit more about what we can expect.

For those who don’t know Daniel, he has been coding in Java since it was in beta. For the past 10 years he’s been working on ultra low latency banking systems. Previous to his consulting roles at investment banks, Daniel spent a number of years working at Chronicle, the open source low latency Java framework.

Who do you think should come along and why?

Beginners wanting an insight into the world of low latency programming. Experienced professionals wanting to understand my take on how microservices fit into the low latency space.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?

• Where Java fits into the low latency landscape.
• Identifying the challenges of low latency programming with Java.
• The role of microservices in low latency programming.

People can waste an enormous amount of time going down blind alleys in this unchartered world. Hopefully this talk will point people in the right direction to create successful projects in this space.

Any advice for junior programmers entering the industry?

Spend as much time as possible looking at good code in open source projects and the JDK and learning from it. For example, instead of just using an ArrayList spend some time to see how it is implemented. See if you can get your code shape to match that of experienced pros.

Come along to the talk and join us for a discussion of coding techniques and best practices for extreme low latency coding.

The event is happening on Wednesday 31^st October, 18:00 @ WeWork Chancery Lane – The Cursitor, WC2A 1EN. You can find all the details and register here.

We’re getting ready for our Functional Tic-Tac-Toe: Speedrun and Java EE: Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah! Stayin’ Alive! event next week.

The first talk of the evening will be Richard Wild presenting ‘Functional Tic-Tac- Toe: Speedrun’. Most of us are familiar with the game tic-tac-toe. It’s frequently used as a coding exercise, to implement the rules of the game in a computer program. But how quickly can it be done? And how about in a functional style, how fast can it be implemented while avoiding mutating state?

Codurance crafter Richard thinks it can be done in 45 minutes, while driven completely by tests. Along the way he demonstrates the power of the functional programming features introduced in Java 8 for writing concise, straightforward code and also that a problem domain and its solution do not always have to closely resemble each other.

Ahead of the event, we were fortunate enough to catch up with Richard.  He told us more about what we can expect from his talk and gave us some great advice for new developers

Who do you think should come along and why?

Java developers if they are interested in functional programming and want to know more about how
to adopt this style of programming in their language. Also, if they do not practice test-driven development but are interested in it and would like to see a demonstration of this technique in action by an experienced practitioner.

What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this talk will answer?

1. What is functional programming really all about?
2. Is FP really compatible with object-oriented programming?
3. How can FP techniques be applied to my Java code and why would I want to do this?

Why do you think this presentation is important for people?

It will demonstrate the power of the functional features that were added in Java 8. If you are programming in Java and not making full use of these features then you are missing out on some great opportunities to enhance the expressivity and conciseness of your code. Writing Java in the functional style allows a reduction in the noise and clutter that Java is infamous for and the purpose of your program will shine through much more brightly.

Similarly, test-driven development is a poorly understood technique; many people have heard of it and
all of those will no doubt have heard it said that automated test suites are “executable documentation”, but this result is only realised when you actually practice TDD with that objective in mind. The presentation will demonstrate the Codurance “house style” TDD technique that all of our craftspeople learn and teach.

Any advice for junior programmers entering the industry?

Try to learn as many programming languages as possible. Specialise in one language and go as deep as you can in it, but try to learn one other language every year if you can. If you do, then gradually you will discover that with only a few exceptions, the similarities between them are much greater than the differences. This will stand you in good stead for keeping abreast of the constant changes that sweep through our industry.

Always strive for simplicity in everything you do. The simplest possible solution is invariably more reliable than a cleverer, more complex solution. Remember that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Commit to lifelong self-improvement. When looking back on code you wrote in the past, you always want to see that it is less good than code you would write today. This means you are not stagnating.

Invest time in learning your tools. Strive to be a virtuoso.

If this has left you wanting more, Richard’s talk is happening on Tuesday 16th October, 18:30  @ Skills Matter, EC2M 7EB.  You can find the full details and register here.