Neal Ford

Continuous Delivery Workshop

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.

Keynote: This is Water

7:30 PM MDT

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?“

David Foster Wallace, from This is Water

A fish is swimming along, having some breakfast, when suddenly he's snatched out of his world by his food, abruptly ejected into a bright world where it's hard to breathe, landing on the bottom of a boat, where strange alien creatures make strange sounds. Overhead, he sees an airplane flying at 500 mph. Suddenly, one of the creatures picks him up, removes the hook, and, just as suddenly, he's back home. Yet, when he regales his friends with this tale, no one can believe such a strange world could exist.

This keynote describes the water you swim in but cannot see anymore, like relational databases and application servers. And, it jerks you out of this water (briefly) to describe a strange, fantastical world with things like immutable database servers and phoenix machines. You may have trouble getting your friends who didn't attend to understand.

Continuous Delivery for Architects

1:30 PM MDT

This multi-disciplinary session takes a deep dive into
the confluence of topics required to fully understand the intersection
of Continuous Delivery and architecture, including evolutionary
architecture and emergent design, with an emphasis on how
architectural decisions affect the ease in changing and evolving your
code, the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven
Design's Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce
intra-component/service coupling, and other techniques.

Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production
readiness of your application every time a change occurs – to code,
infrastructure, or configuration. In the Continuous Delivery world,
rather than hone skills at predicting the future via Big Design Up
Front, Continuous Delivery emphasizes techniques for understanding
and changing code with less cost during the process. Some architectures
and engineering practices yield better designs for this
environment. This multi-disciplinary session takes a deep dive into
the confluence of topics required to fully understand the intersection
of Continuous Delivery and architecture, including evolutionary
architecture and emergent design, with an emphasis on how
architectural decisions affect the ease in changing and evolving your
code, the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven
Design's Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce
intra-component/service coupling, and other techniques.

Introduction to Clojure Workshop Part 1

3:15 PM MDT

Clojure is the most interesting new language on the JVM, both from a syntactic and capabilities standpoint. This workshop teaches attendees Clojure syntax, Java interoperability, and how to build applications, both Swing and Web, using Clojure.

After spending time with Clojure, you gradually realize that it isn’t really a new language, but rather a vision for how to write robust applications that could only be realized via a new language — called Clojure.

Clojure is the most interesting new language on the JVM, both from a syntactic and capabilities standpoint. This workshop teaches attendees Clojure syntax, Java interoperability, and how to build applications, both Swing and Web, using Clojure.

Come see why there is so much buzz around the most innovative new language in a decade.

Introduction to Clojure Workshop Part 2

5:00 PM MDT

Clojure is the most interesting new language on the JVM, both from a syntactic and capabilities standpoint. This workshop teaches attendees Clojure syntax, Java interoperability, and how to build applications, both Swing and Web, using Clojure.

Continues the topics introduced in Part 1 of the workshop

Come see why there is so much buzz around the most innovative new language in a decade.

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.