Blog / 2014 / March / 9

QCon London 2014 - Thursday

March 9, 2014

See also: Wednesday. Video links are designed for conference attendees only, though some will become public over the next few months.

Forty Years of Teams - Tim Lister

If writing code isn't fun, it's time to move on. The Magic Finger. Dead Fish.

Maneuverable Architecture - @Michael Nygard

Talk based on the ideas of John Boyd, a fighter pilot who was influential in development of the modern fighter plane.

Have scripts at a known URL. Each version of the script creates a new URL for that script. [You could HTTP 301 from a generic URL to the latest version]

Using hashes for perpetual strings, shopping carts. Break monoliths. Use URIs with abandon

Interesting ideas here for architecting generic components rather than just building to the requirements. For example build a service that does "At date time call this URL" rather than building specific scheduler code.

If you have a bare ID (customer serial) it has no context, it's just a number. If you have a URI, it has context - you know it's a customer.

Mobile Web Performance - Getting & Staying Fast! - @Andy Davies, @Aaron Peters

BBC now has more traffic from mobile than from desktop. The internet is in our own image - obese, and pages are getting bigger. Out of 77 million mobile phone connections, only 2-3 million are 4G.

SVG is good. Icon font good. Can reduce size of webfont by removing glyphs. CSS Gradient Good. Do less requests, and less redirects.

160k of extra JavaScript at Etsy meant 12% bounce rate increase on mobile

Facebook experiment - Facebook branded spinner, users blamed facebook for slowness. Native looking spinner, people blamed the phone.

Enterprise Integration Using REST: A Case Study - @Brandon Byars

Choroegraphy not orchestration. Version as a last resort. A test is a second client for the service.

Migrating to Microservices - @Adrian Cockcroft

Simple platforms automated by tooling. Amazon web services. Deploy each microservice separately, and leave the old version running. Write a client library yourself, or someone else will (badly).

Put company code on GitHub - it's the store front for developer recruitment.

Move from tomcat to netty for non blocking io.

The DevOps Maturity Curve - where are you on it? Chris Rowett

Use service virtualisation, and mock external resources that aren't always available. Remove the bottleneck of an external dependency.

Five levels of continuous deployment: 1 - Manual 2 - Scripting; brittle 3 - Automation; typically 2-3 weeks work from level 2 4 - Continuous; end to end process. This is an organisational transformation and can take weeks or months. 5 - Optimisation

Director sponsorship required for success. Pick a first project to evangelize.

Test team need to code tests, rather than manual testing.

Drive continuous improvement from devops metrics. Defect escape rate.

Organizational Change Myths - Introduction and Sustainability - @Linda Rising

Great presentation listing four myths of organisational change:

Myth #1: Smart People are Rational. Be an evangelist not a fanatic. I don't know, I believe it will work. Cold learning cycle.

Myth #2: Good always triumphs over evil. Fight for it. Feed them.

Myth #3: If I just had power I could make people change. Compliance not change. "What's in it for me?"

Myth #4: You should sack people who won't listen. Use resistance to your advantage. Champion sceptic -> devils advocate.

Myth #5: You're smart, you don't need help from others. Just say thanks

Keynote: Back to the Future - @Emma Langman

  • No permission to publish video

A presentation about lessons from history that can be applied to 21st Century problems. W. Edward Deming. Russell Ackoff. Kaoru Ishikawa.

Emma took audience suggestions on what to do if there was a bear loose in London. Answers ranged from "Run faster than the guy next to me" to "Let it eat me to save you all." This was a tech conference, so "I'd write an Android bear tracking app" definitely wins!

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