Neal Ford

Build Your Own Technology Radar Workshop for Architects

8:30 PM MDT

A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company. This talk discusses using the radar for personal breadth development, architectural guidance, and governance.

ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board creates a “technology radar” twice a year, a working document that helps the company make decisions about interesting technologies and where we spend our time. ThoughtWorks then started conducting radar-building exercises for our clients, which provides a great medium for technologists company-wide to express their opinions about the technologies they use every day. For companies, creating a radar helps you document your technology decisions in a standard format, evaluate technology decisions in an actionable way, and create cross-silo discussions about suitable technology choices. This session describes the radar visualization and how to conduct a radar building session for yourself. After a brief introduction, the bulk of the workshop consists of attendees building a radar for the group, following the same procedure you'll use when you do this exercise at your company. At the end, we'll have created a unique Radar for this event and practiced doing it for yourself.

Continuous Delivery All-day Workshop, Pt. 1: Deployment Pipelines

9:00 AM MDT

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

In this workshop we take the unique approach of moving from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback so as to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible. At the heart of the workshop is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization's value stream for delivering software. We spend the first half of the workshop introducing this pattern, and discussing how to incrementally automate the build, test and deployment process, culminating in continuous deployment.

Continuous Delivery Pt 1: Deployment Pipelines

11:00 AM MDT

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the Deployment Pipeline concept from Continuous Delivery.

In this workshop I move from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback so as to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible. At the heart of the workshop is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization's value stream for delivering software. I spend the first half of the workshop introducing this pattern, and discussing how to incrementally automate the build, test and deployment process, culminating in continuous deployment.

Continuous Delivery All-day Workshop Pt 2: Agile Infrastructure

1:30 PM MDT

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

In the second half of the workshop, we introduce agile infrastructure, including the use of Puppet to automate the management of testing and production environments. We'll discuss automating data management, including migrations. Development practices that enable incremental development and delivery will be covered at length, including a discussion of why branching is inimical to continuous delivery, and how practices such as branch by abstraction and componentization provide superior alternatives that enable large and distributed teams to deliver incrementally.

Continuous Delivery All-day Workshop Pt 2: Agile Infrastructure

3:15 PM MDT

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

In the second half of the workshop, we introduce agile infrastructure, including the use of Puppet to automate the management of testing and production environments. We'll discuss automating data management, including migrations. Development practices that enable incremental development and delivery will be covered at length, including a discussion of why branching is inimical to continuous delivery, and how practices such as branch by abstraction and componentization provide superior alternatives that enable large and distributed teams to deliver incrementally.

4 Practical Uses for Domain Specific Languages

5:00 PM MDT

Domain Specific Langauges seems like a cool idea, but where's the payoff? This talk provides an overview of how to build both internal and external DSLs (including the state of the art tools), stopping along the way to show how this is practical to your day job.

This talk defines of DSLs (Domain Specific Languages), distinguishes the types of DSLS (internal and external), and shows examples of building DSLs of several kinds. It shows how to utilize DSLs for externalizing configuration (which you're already doing, whether you realize it or not), how to make your code readable to humans, how DSLs make developer tools better (and how to use DSL techniques to build your own tools), and how DSLs can provide your users unprecedented flexibility and power, by building DSLs customized to their job. This talk provides a good foundation for the subject if you've never seen anything about it, but keeps the focus on practical goals.

Emergent Design

9:00 AM MDT

Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers the theory behind emergent design and shows examples of how you can implement this important concept.

This session describes the current thinking about emergent design, discovering design in code. The hazard of Big Design Up Front in software is that you don't yet know what you don't know, and design decisions made too early are just speculations without facts. Emergent design techniques allow you to wait until the last responsible moment to make design decisions. This talk covers four areas: emergent design enablers, battling things that make emergent design hard, finding idiomatic patterns, and how to leverage the patterns you find. It includes both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, metrics, visualizations, tests) approaches to discovering design, and discusses the use of custom attributes, DSLs, and other techniques for utilizing them. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping you code in sync with the problem domain. This talk shows lots of examples of how to make this concept work in your environment.

Functional Thinking in Java 8, Clojure, Groovy, and Scala

10:45 AM MDT

Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.

Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning
to think under a different paradigm is hard. This session
helps you transition from a Java writing imperative programmer to a
functional programmer, using Java, Clojure and Scala for
examples. This session takes common
topics from imperative languages and looks at alternative ways of
solving those problems in functional languages. As a Java developer, you know how to achieve code-reuse
via mechanisms like inheritance and polymorphism. Code reuse is
possible in functional languages as well, using high-order
functions, composition, and multi-methods. I show examples from my book Functional Thinking of shifting your perspective on problems, ceding messy details to the language, working smarter, not harder, and how to deal with multiparadigm languages.

Introduction to Clojure

1:30 PM MDT

Clojure is a powerful dynamic language that compiles to many target environments, including the JVM, JavaScript, and the CLR. In this talk, you will learn how to think in Clojure, and why you should want to.

Clojure encourages functional style with persistent data structures, a rich library of pure functions, and powerful processing support via the seq and reducer abstractions. Clojure implements a reference model for state, where references represent atomic successions of values, and change is encapsulated by value and reference constructors. This reference model is more substantive and suitable to application development than individual techniques such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) or actors.

The most important single principle behind Clojure is simplicity. Clojure's abstractions are simple and orthogonal. A la carte polymorphism, careful support for names and namespaces, the reference succession model, and a wide selection of small, composable protocols make Clojure programming swift, surgical and accurate.

Clojure's expressiveness does not mean that you have to compromise on power. It is an explicit design goal of Clojure to provide access to the power of the underlying platform, and for programmers never to have to “drop down” to the platform level for performance-sensitive work.

On the Web

• Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway and Aaron Bedra

Introduction to Clojure

3:15 PM MDT

Clojure is a powerful dynamic language that compiles to many target environments, including the JVM, JavaScript, and the CLR. In this talk, you will learn how to think in Clojure, and why you should want to.

Clojure encourages functional style with persistent data structures, a rich library of pure functions, and powerful processing support via the seq and reducer abstractions. Clojure implements a reference model for state, where references represent atomic successions of values, and change is encapsulated by value and reference constructors. This reference model is more substantive and suitable to application development than individual techniques such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) or actors.

The most important single principle behind Clojure is simplicity. Clojure's abstractions are simple and orthogonal. A la carte polymorphism, careful support for names and namespaces, the reference succession model, and a wide selection of small, composable protocols make Clojure programming swift, surgical and accurate.

Clojure's expressiveness does not mean that you have to compromise on power. It is an explicit design goal of Clojure to provide access to the power of the underlying platform, and for programmers never to have to “drop down” to the platform level for performance-sensitive work.

On the Web

• Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway and Aaron Bedra