Raju Gandhi

Systems thinking

9:00 AM MDT

Albert Einstein once said — “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

As developers, architects, managers, tech-leads, our job entails solving big problems. However, our systems are composed of parts, and it is the interaction of those parts that ensure the system works, and tells us where to go looking when things fail. What does it mean to think in systems? What are the benefits, and what are tools are available to us? If any of this intrigues you (and it should) come join me as we explore a new way of thinking about problems, both big and small.

In this session we will take a page from Donella H. Meadows fantastic book “Thinking in Systems” and attempt to get an understanding of what makes up a system, how we can tease apart the moving parts of the system, and get into the mindset of a “systems thinker”.

Refactoring to Modern JavaScript Workshop

1:00 PM MDT

JavaScript now has a yearly release cycle. Every release introduces new features that aim to make us (JavaScript developers) more productive, while making our code succinct, expressive, and (potentially) bug-free.

By the end of this workshop you will be intimately familiar with the newer set of JavaScript features, and ready to dive into your next JavaScript project with confidence.

This workshop allows you to explore many of the new features that we use on a daily basis, including

• let and const
• Default parameters
• The new “fat arrow” function syntax
• Template strings
• Object and array de-structuring and spread
• The newly added Map / Set data-structures
• The new class syntax as well as static/private members and methods
• Promises and async/await
• Modules
• Optional catch binding
• Nullish coalescing operator / Optional chaining operator

This workshop uses tests to verify and validate all of your changes, so you can be confident in your changes as you go about refactoring your code to use modern JavaScript language features.
Each section of the workshop builds on the previous one, allowing you to continuously refactor code and get tons of practice.

If you want to be fully caught up with all of the changes that have landed in JavaScript between 2015 and 2021, this is the workshop you want to attend!

Refactoring to Modern JavaScript Workshop

3:00 PM MDT

JavaScript now has a yearly release cycle. Every release introduces new features that aim to make us (JavaScript developers) more productive, while making our code succinct, expressive, and (potentially) bug-free.

By the end of this workshop you will be intimately familiar with the newer set of JavaScript features, and ready to dive into your next JavaScript project with confidence.

This workshop allows you to explore many of the new features that we use on a daily basis, including

• let and const
• Default parameters
• The new “fat arrow” function syntax
• Template strings
• Object and array de-structuring and spread
• The newly added Map / Set data-structures
• The new class syntax as well as static/private members and methods
• Promises and async/await
• Modules
• Optional catch binding
• Nullish coalescing operator / Optional chaining operator

This workshop uses tests to verify and validate all of your changes, so you can be confident in your changes as you go about refactoring your code to use modern JavaScript language features.
Each section of the workshop builds on the previous one, allowing you to continuously refactor code and get tons of practice.

If you want to be fully caught up with all of the changes that have landed in JavaScript between 2015 and 2021, this is the workshop you want to attend!

Microservices and DomainDriven Design — The strategic parts

5:00 PM MDT

We live in a world of microservices. Yet, what is a microservice? What defines the boundaries of a microservice? How do we define the relationships between microservices? Thankfully domaindriven design gives us the concepts and practices to better design and decompose our services.

In this session we will consider many of the concepts of DDD — How bounded contexts use Ubiquitous language to model the domain, how context maps can be used to establish the interconnections between services as well aggregates and domains events, all of which will service us well as we go about creating our microservices.

Domain-Driven Design - Where Rubber meets the road

9:00 AM MDT

In this session we will go further with DDD, considering aspects like aggregates, domain events, factories and repositories, and consider how DDD can be represented in architecture, be that hexagonal, REST or RPC.

If you need a deeper dive into DDD, then this is the session for you.

Terraform-ing your cloud

11:00 AM MDT

A large part of embracing DevOps involves embracing automation. Over the last decade we have seen the emergence of “as Code” — Build-as-Code, Configuration-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code. The benefits to utilizing such tools are huge! We can codify the state of the world around our applications, giving us the ability to treat everything that our code needs like we treat the code itself. Version control, release management, tagging, even rolling backs are now possible. Terraform, an open-source tool from HashiCorp allows us to build, control and modify our infrastructure. Terraform exposes a Domain-specific language (DSL) that we can use to express what our infrastructure should look like. Terraform can work with all the major cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Google GCP and Microsoft Azure. If you are curious about what this tool has to offer, this session is for you. Come on in, and let's learn how to terraform your cloud.

This session will focus on Terraform. We will look in to how this tool works, explore its capabilities, and see how it can play a pivotal role in our Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) strategy. With lots of code and demos, this session will certainly give you enough fodder for thought, and provide a baseline so you can decide if Terraform is right for you.

Composing your containerized microservices

1:00 PM MDT

Docker compose has been a part of the docker ecosystem since the beginning. It allows us to “stitch” together our services so that we can deploy all our services and related infrastructure using the “one” button. Furthermore, we can now use docker-compose to target Kubernetes, exemplifying the role that docker compose has to play in our day to day interaction with Docker.

If you are new to docker-compose then this is the session for you. Lets take a look at the capabilities of docker-compose, see what it takes to use it for local development and testing, and finally see how we can target Kubernetes so we can mimic our production deployment on our laptops.

Container Usage Patterns

3:00 PM MDT

Embraced containers yet? If so, that only presents the beginning of the journey. Designing your images to be lean, and your containers configurable requires us to leverage Dockerfiles to their maximum potential. At scale, everything matters—build times, testing, multi-stage builds, conventions around tagging and logging. There is a whole ecosystem of tools around how we can best build our images and containers.

In this session we will learn many a trick on how we can leverage Docker's own tooling as well as third-party tools to ensure that our first steps in the container world are the right ones.