What time is it? It's Devoxx time! [Day 3 / Summary]
Great final of Devoxx Poland 2016 conference.
Continuous Delivery with Kubernetes
Adriana Vasiu - Sky
Sky and their standardization of Continuous Delivery pipeline. In short, all their projects use Gradle (even non jvm ones) and some in house plugin which utilizes generic Jenkins job to create whole CI pipeline with testing and showcase environments. Said Kubernetes is used to simplify this process - when everything uses containers infrastructure isn't your concern. Despite this standardization sounds promising I think there are some engineers mad at all of this. I could have asked about this but I haven't. What can you do, that was the first talk of the day, too early for questions if you ask me.
Microservices and Conway's Law
James Lewis - ThoughtWorks
Are ThoughtWorks mass producing those speakers or what? I was mesmerized by Neal Ford's presentations and James Lewis wasn't a letdown. Again we are taking dive into the world of Melvin Conway and his famous law.
You fools!. I've told you in 1968!
James noticed that companies are like game of Snake and Ladders, every task travels through multiple departments, sometimes in circles. Each one of such transitions is like sending a message to the other team's queue and every queue introduces latency as it needs to be properly handled.
There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. - Peter Drucker
Speaker proposed decrease of latency and elimination of queues by composing cross-functional teams with shift from build it to run it. However it's nothing new and Lewis went one step further. In order to knock out even more queues one should colocate anyone involved in product (no project!) life-cycle in one room or office. That means not only developers and testers cooperate in one team but also business, sales, etc.
I can't niggle to anything, great talk.
oDDs & enDs
Vaughn Vernon - for{comprehension}
Oops I did it again. I attended to Vaughn Vernon's lecture even though I complained so much the last time. He talked about stuff that appeared on other talks so I won't go much into details (Conway's Law, big ball of mud, direct cooperation).
Beyond that he introduced a concept of Event Storming as a good alternative for creating architectural requirements and high level planning. If you'd like, my dear reader, know my opinion about this talk you should check out day two from this series and Reactive Microservices with DDD and Actors, got the same vibe as from this one.
The JVM and Docker, a good idea?
Christopher Batey
Maybe good, maybe not but you need to know your toolkit. Or thats what I've learned from this lecture. Christopher presented few convenient, or even essential, tools for managing Docker (and more). Example of those tools are systemd-cgls (something like *nix ls), ystemd-cgtop (top), jcmd and cAdvisor. Lecturer warned of default settings of multithreaded environments. Such case can be Jetty or Java ForkJoinPool which by default sets number of threads basing on available cores. This approach can be troublesome in containerized applications as each container can compete for resources.
Speaker showed few techniques to prevent such events using Docker's configuration parameters like pu-shares and cpu-quota. Maybe I'm not the sharpest knife in the cupboard when it comes to Docker but during this talk I've learner a couple of interesting facts about Docker and JVM performance.
Solid, nothing more, nothing less. Christopher Batey gave impression of a man with knowledge and skills to transfer it.
The Climb
Bruce Tate - icanmakeitbetter.com
Another tale from Bruce Tate. This time he compared software development to Mount Everest climb. He stated that every project, in particular community ones, need their Sherpas and everyone should also be one in some project. Again he mentioned Elixir and that gets me jollies, maybe more people will recognize this lovely language.
Pragmatic architecture
Ted Neward - iTrellis
At the end Ted Neward made an appearance with his hilarious talk about architects. But this wasn't just jokes and laughs.
He said that architects have no easy task. They need to form set of rules that developers would follow and fall into a pit of success. He also reminded that that best practices don't exist since you can't apply them in any situation. You need to think what's relevant in certain situations and if it's worth the effort.
In Ted's opinion architect should define simple rules making mistakes harder to make but at the same time he can't kill all the creativity. Architect can't finish his job and move on to another task but his responsibility should be being reactive, adapt to changes.
Speaker also stated that architect can't fall into coolness trap but explore things valuable to the project. Personally I think the last remark should apply to any of us developers.
would_recommend_talk? => true
Summary
Phew. I haven't expected so much text. If anyone made it through, best regards. Nonetheless I think it worked out pretty ok despite my notes being 3 times longer than all this series all together.
Enough about me, let's talk about the conference. It was probably one of the best I've attended to. ICE Congress Centre is a great choice for this kind of events and the auditorium is fabulous. Sometimes when I didn't feel like going anywhere I would just go there and relax.
Food was ok, I guess, and queues weren't to troublesome.
Quite a lot of company stands, some raffles but nothing that would get my attention. I've achieved my goal that was to collect every sticker I could find. Socks and powerbanks are still lit in the conference fashion but there is a new FOTM - bartenders. Some businesses hired bartenders to make coffee (quite nice) and smoothies (also good).
As far as speakers are concerned I was pleased. It was great to meet authors of your favorite books and blogs.
All in all I can recommend Devoxx Poland. It there's an occasion to participate in next year's edition I'll go for sure.
Here's some small gallery from the conference.