Abdelmonaim Remani

I have yet to meet a software engineer who jumps out his or her chair in excitement at the thought of fixing one of his or her bugs let alone other people's. It can be one frustrating of a task, and sometimes “twice as hard as writing a program in the first place” in the words of Brian Kernighan who needs no introduction. In this session, you will be exposed to a more systematic and rigorous approach to debugging, and will be introduced to a number of techniques and methods inspired by modern studies in cognitive psychology, the philosophy of science, and other fields. A survey of the available tooling will also be conducted.

Come to the session to join the coalition forces on the war on bugs. You never know, you might end up changing your mind about your favorite part of being a software engineer after all.

The rise of NoSQL is characterized with confusion and ambiguity; very much like any fast-emerging organic movement in the absence of well-defined standards and adequate software solutions. Whether you are a developer or an architect, many questions come to mind when faced with the decision of where your data should be stored and how it should be managed. The following are some of these questions: What does the rise of all these NoSQL technologies mean to my enterprise? What is NoSQL to begin with? Does it mean “No SQL”? Could this be just another fad? Is it a good idea to bet the future of my enterprise on these new exotic technologies and simply abandon proven mature Relational DataBase Management Systems (RDBMS)? How scalable is scalable? Assuming that I am sold, how do I choose the one that fit my needs best? Is there a middle ground somewhere? What is this Polyglot Persistence I hear about?

The answers to these questions and many more is the subject of this talk along with a survey of the most popular of NoSQL technologies. Be there or be square.

Enforcing the cloud presence of an organization by exposing a RESTfull API is of extreme importance. It is a demanding and formidable task that can turn out to be either a great asset or a dire liability. This challenge is amplified by the vagueness of what a REST architecture is, and the diversity in approaches and opinions among the leading Web APIs.

This session attempts a balance between the spirit and philosophy behind REST, and the practicality and elegance inspired by the principles of modern API design. This very idea is highlighted through a series of concrete issues that frequently surface while building or evolving a mature REST interface whose goal is not only to be complete and feature-rich, but also intuitive and practical.

Metaprogramming is the dirty little secret behind the success of many Java frameworks such as Spring and Struts2, and forms the backbone of many of the most fundamental APIs across the JEE technology stack. This session aims to introduce the topic and highlight, with code examples, the different mechanisms and techniques to take advantage of this underused feature of the Java Programming Language.

This session will adopt a learn-by-example approach that combines the philosophy and theory behind metaprogramming with concrete code examples. No previous knowledge or exposure to the topic is required, but an intermediate understanding of Java SE is expected.

You spend your precious time building the perfect application. You do everything right. You carefully craft every piece of code and rigorously follow the best practices and design patterns, you apply the most successful methodologies software engineering has to offer with discipline, and you pay attention to the most minuscule of details to produce the best user experience possible. It all pays off eventually, and you end up with a beautiful code base that is not only reliable but also performs well. You proudly watch your baby grow, as new users come in bringing more traffic your way and craving new features. You keep them happy and they keep coming back. One morning, you wake up to servers crashing under load, and data stores failing to keep up with all the demand. You panic. You throw in more hardware and try optimize, but the hungry crowd that was once your happy user base catches up to you. Your success is slipping through your fingers. You find yourself stuck between having to rewrite the whole application and a hard place. It's frustrating, dreadful, and painful to say the least. Don't be that guy! Save your soul before it's too late, and come to learn how to build, deploy, and maintain enterprise-grade Java applications that scale from day one.

Topics covered include: parallelism, load distribution, state management, caching, big data, asynchronous processing, and static content delivery. Leveraging cloud computing, scaling teams and DevOps will also be discuss. P.S. This session is more technical than you might think.