Neal Ford

Continuous Delivery Workshop

Tue 9:00 AM

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.

Building Microservice Architectures

Wed 8:30 AM

Inspired by success stories from companies such as Amazon and Netflix, many organizations are moving towards microservice architectures at a brisk pace. This session provides a thorough overview of the pros and cons for microservice architectures, when it is applicable, and some nascent best practices.

Microservice architecture is important because it’s the first architecture to fully embrace the Continuous Delivery and DevOps revolutions. In this session, I cover the motivations for building a microservice architecture (including making the distinction between “regular SOA” and microservices), some considerations you must make before starting (such as transactions versus eventual consistency), how to determine service partition boundaries, and ten tips to dowse you towards success. I also discuss the role of polyglot development, enterprise governance, how data and databases fit into this new world, and tooling to help ensure consistency between core services like logging and monitoring. This session provides a thorough overview of the pros and cons for microservice architectures, when it is applicable, and some nascent best practices.

Continuous Delivery for Architects Hands-on workshop

Wed 3:15 PM

Architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery.

Yesterday’s best practice is tomorrow’s anti-pattern. Architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery. I first set context for the information you must master before delving into the nuances of modern architectural concerns. I discuss the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven Design’s Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce intra-component/service coupling, the tension between coupling and cohesion, microservices architectures, and other engineering techniques.

This hands-on workshop allows you to apply techniques either against a sample codebase…or bring one of your own. Exercises include using metrics to learn more about the structure of your class, how to determine how to partition a mono-lithic architecture into a service-based ond, and Architectural Katas with Devops added.

Continuous Delivery for Architects Hands-on workshop

Wed 5:00 PM

Architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery.

Yesterday’s best practice is tomorrow’s anti-pattern. Architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum, a painful lesson developers who built logically sound but operationally cumbersome architectures learned. Continuous Delivery is a process for automating the production readiness of your application every time a change occurs–to code, infrastructure, or configuration. Some architectures and practices yield code that works better in this environment. This session takes a deep dive into the intersection of the architect role and the engineering practices in Continuous Delivery. I first set context for the information you must master before delving into the nuances of modern architectural concerns. I discuss the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven Design’s Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce intra-component/service coupling, the tension between coupling and cohesion, microservices architectures, and other engineering techniques.

This hands-on workshop allows you to apply techniques either against a sample codebase…or bring one of your own. Exercises include using metrics to learn more about the structure of your class, how to determine how to partition a mono-lithic architecture into a service-based ond, and Architectural Katas with Devops added.

Build Your Own Technology Radar

Wed 8:00 PM

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.

ThoughtWorks’ Technical Advisory Board creates a “technolgy radar” 3 or 4 times a year. It is a working document that helps the company as a whole make decisions about what technologies are interesting and where we should be spending our time. This is a useful exercise both for you and your company. This session describes the process we use and how to adapt it to both your company and, more importantly, yourself. For career risk mitigation, you must know what the next big thing is, or at least be able to narrow it to a reasonable list. Attendees will leave with tools that enhance your filtering mechanisms for new technology and help you (and your organization) develop a cogent strategy to make good choices.

Cryptocurrency: How It Works and Why It Matters

Thu 8:00 PM

This session takes a deep dive on the design and implementation of the proof of work algorithm at the heart of most cryptocurrencies, along with details of how difficult it is to spoof, how transactions work, what happens when all the coins have been mined, and other practical considerations.

Bitcoin has generated a lot of both negative and positive buzz, but it’s important to differentiate between the different aspects of cryptocurrency: the algorithm, the commodity, and the implications. This session takes a deep dive on the design and implementation of the proof of work algorithm at the heart of most cryptocurrencies, along with details of how difficult it is to spoof, how transactions work, what happens when all the coins have been mined, and other practical considerations. I also discuss the use of the proof of work algorithm to implement a wide variety of other types of distributed trust: legal documents, voting systems, and a modification of the entire commerce structure that has existed since medieval times. Don’t be confused by the hype around specific implementations: this algorithm will have wide reaching, tectonic repercussions.