Clustering and Distributed Data: The Winning Combination?
Ahead of our upcoming meetup “Clustering and Distributed Data: The Winning Combination?” on Thursday 21st February , we caught up with our speaker, Patrick Altaie, to find out what we can expect from his talk.
Patrick is a consultant for Icon Solutions, a financial services consultancy, working with some of the world’s leading financial services organisations. Recently he’s been working on IPF – Icon’s flagship real-time payments processing platform. IPF is built using reactive concepts and leading open-source frameworks, including Akka. You can follow him on Twitter at @paltaie.
Who do you think should come along and why?
The talk is centred around designing reactive systems. Whether you’re a Java dev who’s completely new to building reactive systems, or whether you live and breathe the stuff on a day-to-day basis, there will certainly be something for you at my talk. I’ll introduce the base concepts and build upon those to finally reach a great finale (no pressure!)
What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?
I think the top three questions that my talk will answer are:
1. What is the actor model and the Akka’s implementation?
2. What are some good reactive design principles to follow?
3. How can we combine two Akka features – clustering and distributed data – to provide a resilient and fault-tolerant system?
I hope that there will be something for everybody – even for those who aren’t Java devs – to take away from the talk.
Why do you think this presentation is important for people?
Resiliency and availability are big requirements of any modern software system which we build today, and there are many ways to solve these problems. This talk will introduce the concept of the actor system, the Akka framework, Akka clustering and distributed data, and how a combination of these things can help us create a reactive system which is highly resilient, available and responsive. So whether you’ve heard of any, all, one or none of these things, there’s something for you!
Any advice for junior developers entering the industry?
Never stop learning! Just because you’ve been able to land a position doesn’t mean that learning time is over! We should all look to improve our skills – amateurs and seasoned pros alike – so that we’re up-to-date on the latest and greatest. Our industry moves at a faster pace than most others, and so it’s important to try to keep on top of the relevant news and trends.
Secondly, try to get some experience by contributing to open-source projects. You may not be able to contribute significantly at first, but it’s quite useful to familiarise yourself with such a community. You get to see what “good” Looks like, and might be able to learn a thing or two! My first open source contribution was a documentation update to Apache Ant, and it was equally welcome and well-received as any other “significant” changeset!
If you’d like to come along, we’ll be at Skills Matter, EC2M 7EB on Thursday 21st February at 18:30. You can find the full details and RSVP here.