In this podcast, QCon Chair Wesley Reisz talks to Julien Viet. Viet is the project lead for Vert.x and a principal engineer at RedHat having taken over as project lead for Vert.x from Tim Fox in January 2016. They talk about the newly released Vert.x 3.5.0, and the plans for Vert.x 4.0. Why listen to this podcast: * Vert.x adds RxJava2 support for streams and backpressure. * Vert.x is a polyglot set of APIs, custom aligned for the specific language. * It is unopinionated and can be used with any...
Oct 23, 2017•30 min
What can software learn from industries like aerospace, transportation, or even retail during national disasters? This week’s podcast is with Emil Stolarsky and was recorded live after his talk on the subject at Strangeloop 2017. Interesting points from the podcast include several stories from Emil’s research, including the origin of the checklist, how Walmart pushed decision making down to the store level in a national disaster, and where the formalized conversation structure onboard aircraft o...
Oct 15, 2017•23 min
In this podcast, recorded live at Strange Loop 2017, Wes talks to Charity, cofounder and CEO of honeycomb.io. They discuss the social side of debugging and her Strange Loop talk “Observability for Emerging Infra: What got you Here Won't get you There”. Other topics include advice for testing in production, shadowing and splitting traffic, and sampling and aggregation. Why listen to this podcast: - Statistical sampling allows for collecting more detailed information while storing less data, and c...
Oct 07, 2017•35 min
Nora Jones, a senior software engineer on Netflix’ Chaos Team, talks with Wesley Reisz about what Chaos Engineering means today. She covers what it takes to build a practice, how to establish a strategy, defines cost of impact, and covers key technical considerations when leveraging chaos engineering. Why listen to this podcast: - Chaos engineering is a discipline where you formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and evaluate the results afterwards. - Injecting a bit of failure over time is g...
Oct 01, 2017•43 min
Shubha Nabar is a senior director of data science for Salesforce Einstein. Prior to working for Salesforce, she was a data scientist at LinkedIn and Microsoft. In the podcast she discusses Salesforce Einstein and the problem space that they are trying to solve, explores the differences between enterprise and consumer for machine learning, and then talks about the Optimus Prime Scala library that they use in Salesforce. Why listen to this podcast: * The volume of data, and hardware advances have ...
Sep 29, 2017•26 min
This week's podcast features Simon Brown well known for his work training software architects. Topics include the differences between a tech lead and an architect, how much documentation is enough and what that looks like in a continuous delivery environment. What you'll learn on this podcast: • As an industry we seem to have lost our knowledge of how to do architecture well in the context of modern agile software teams. • Architecture is about the expensive decisions; things that are costly to ...
Sep 23, 2017•29 min
This week's podcasts features Yao Yue of Twitter. Yao spent the majority of her career working on caching systems at Twitter. She has since created a performance team that deals with edge performance outliers often exposed by the enormous scale of Twitter. In this podcast, she discusses standing up the performance team, thoughts on instrumenting applications, and interesting performance issues (and strategies for solving them) they’ve seen at Twitter. Why listen to this podcast: * Performance pr...
Sep 18, 2017•30 min
On the InfoQ Podcast this week, Wes Reisz talks with the Queen of Patterns, Linda Rising. Linda discusses her thoughts on the importance of patterns, she answers questions about what really is a pattern, and how she became involved in working with them. Throughout the podcast she discusses a variety of organizational and personal patterns and finally wraps with patterns to apply when driving change and innovation. Why listen to this podcast: - You have to realise that there’s nothing you can do ...
Sep 08, 2017•35 min
Wesley Reisz talks with Sam Newman about microservices. They explore the current state of the art with regards the architectural style and corresponding tooling and deployment platforms. They then discuss how microservices increase the surface area of where sensitive information can be read or manipulated, but also have the potential to create systems that are more secure. Why listen to this podcast: - Different organisations have different risk appetites for new technology, so what may be appro...
Aug 18, 2017•36 min
Wesley Reisz talks with Jessica Kerr about her focus on developer productivity. Topics include her work at Atomist building Slack Chatbots, an approach to categorizing Yak Shaving (in an effort to prioritize and automate development dependencies), how an innovation culture drives diversity, and, finally, the role of 10x developers in the lifecycle of a company or product. Why listen to this podcast: - There are five kinds of Yak to shave - Atomist uses a Slack chatbot to automate and track commi...
Aug 11, 2017•33 min
Werner Schuster talks to Martin Hadley, data scientist at University of Oxford. They discuss the state of the R language, the rich R ecosystem that covers development (RStudio), notebooks for publication (R Notebooks, RPubs), writing web apps (Shiny), and the pros/cons of the different data frames implementations. Why listen to this podcast: - R is the tool for working with rectangular data - Modern data frame implementations are Tibble and data.table (for large amounts of data) - RMarkdown and ...
Jul 21, 2017•27 min
In this podcast Charles Humble talks to Sylvan Clebsch, who is the designer of the actor-model language Pony programming and now works at Microsoft Research in Cambridge in the Programming Language Principles group. They talk about the inspirations behind Pony, how the garbage collector avoids stop-the-world pauses, the queuing systems, work scheduler, and formal verification. Why listen to this podcast: * Pony scales from a Raspberry Pi through a 64 core half terabyte machine to a 4096 core SGI...
Jul 07, 2017•34 min
Why listen to this podcast: - Kotlin is an officially supported language on Google Android platforms - Kotlin Native and Kotlin JS will allow code reuse between server, client and mobile devices - Type safety means that references can be checked for nullability Great tooling is a driver in what kind of language features are (and aren’t) adopted - Coroutines provide a way of creating maintainable asynchronous systems More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2sHyxqQ Y...
Jun 22, 2017•29 min
Wesley Reisz talks to Sid Anand, a data architect at cybersecurity company Agari, about building cloud-native data pipelines. The focus of their discussion is around a solution Agari uses that is built from Amazon Kinesis Streams, serverless functions, and auto scaling groups. Sid Anand is an architect at Agari, and a former technical architect at eBay, Netflix, and LinkedIn. He has 15 years of data infrastructure experience at scale, is a PMC for Apache Airflow, and is also a program committee ...
Jun 09, 2017•26 min
Wesley Reisz talks to Sachin Kulkarni, Director of Engineering at Facebook, about the engineering challenges for Facebook live, and how it compares to the video upload platform at Facebook. Why listen to this podcast: - Facebook Infrastructure powers the board family of apps including the Facebook app, Messenger and Instagram. It is largely a C++ shop. There is some Java and Python, and the business logic is all done in PHP. The iOS apps are written in Objective C and the Android apps are in Jav...
May 26, 2017•32 min
Wesley Reisz talks to Martijn Verburg, co-founder of the London Java Community and CEO of jClarity, about the JCP EC “no” vote on the Java Platform Module System (JPMS), which is due to be shipped as part of Java 9. The talk about what JPMS offers, how it works, what the no vote means and what happens next. Why listen to this podcast: - Jigsaw isn’t dead - The “no” vote was based on the submission being a bit early, and without expert group consensus that it should be submitted - Since the vote ...
May 19, 2017•23 min
Wesley Reisz talks to Daniel Bryant on moving from monoliths to micro-services, covering bounded contexts, when to break up micro-services, event storming, practices like observability and tracing, and more. Why listen to this podcast: - Migrating a monolith to micro-services is best done by breaking off a valuable but not critical part first. - Designing a greenfield application as micro-services requires a strong understanding of the domain. - When a request enters the system, it needs to be t...
May 12, 2017•37 min
Rossen Stoyanchev talks to Wesley Reisz about blocking and non-blocking architectures, upcoming changes in Spring including Spring WebFlux, the reactive web stack in Spring framework 5, due this summer. He also discusses the differences between rxJava and Reactor. Why listen to this podcast: - Spring Framework 5 is due to be released June 25 2017 - Spring Web Flux provides a web programming model designed for asynchronous APIs - Back-pressure is important in a server environment; less so within ...
May 05, 2017•34 min
Why listen to this podcast: - Using a compiler to catch errors at compile time instead of at runtime means much easier refactoring of code. - Incrementally replacing small parts of an existing JavaScript application with Elm is a safer strategy than trying to write an entirely new application in Elm - Elm packages are semantically versioned and gated by the publishing process, so minor versions cannot remove functionality without bumping the major version. - The UI in an Elm application results ...
Apr 28, 2017•40 min
Jean Barmash is Director of Engineering at Compass, Founder & Co-Organizer, NYC CTO School Meetup. Live in New York City. He has over 15 years of experience in software industry, and has been part of 4 startups over the last seven years, 3 as CTO / VPE and one of which he co-founded. Prior to his entrepreneurial adventures, Jean held a variety of progressively senior roles in development, integration consulting, training, and team leadership. He worked for such companies as Trilogy, Symantec, In...
Apr 14, 2017•32 min
Eric Horesnyi, CEO @streamdata.io, talks to Charles Humble about how hedge funds are applying deep learning as an alternative to the raw speed favoured by HFT to try and curve the market. Why listen to this podcast: - Streamdata.io was originally built for banks and brokers, but more recently hedge funds have begun using the service. - Whilst Hedge Funds like Renaissance Technologies have been using mathematical approaches for some time deep learning is now being applied to markets. Common techn...
Mar 24, 2017•30 min
Greg Murphy is the COO of Gamesparks, a cloud-based platform providing and a rich mobile back-end service for game developers to engage with their users. Greg takes us inside Gamesparks discussing the architecture, machine learning and what it’s like to launch in the China market. Why listen to this podcast: Gamesparks Engagement Engine Tuning the Gaming Experience The Architecture SDK’s and Real-time Data Transfers Server-side Scripts Managing Noisy neighbours and Security The Developer Experie...
Mar 10, 2017•30 min
Wesley Reisz talks to Slava Oks, who has worked at Microsoft for over 20 years on flagship products, including SQL Server. He also led the kernel team who worked on the Midori operating system. More recently, he has worked on bringing SQL Server to Linux. Why listen to this podcast: - Microsoft SQL Server runs on Linux through a containerised approach called Drawbridge - Drawbridge implements a Linux loader and a minimal set of ABI calls to allow an in-process NT user mode kernel to run - SQL Se...
Feb 24, 2017•30 min
Jonas Bonér, CTO of LightBend and creator Akka, discusses using Akka when developing distributed systems. He talks about the Actor Model, and how every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system to be successful. Why listen to this podcast: - Akka is JVM-based framework design for developing distributed systems leveraging the Actor Model - an approach for writing concurrent systems that treat actors as universal primitives and the most successful model with abstraction has been streaming - Circ...
Feb 16, 2017•39 min
Peter Bourgon discusses his work at Weaveworks, discovering and imlemeting CRDTs for time-stamped events at Soundcloud, Microservices in Go with Go Kit and the state of package management in Go. Why listen to this podcast: - We’ve hit the limits of Moore’s law so when we want to scale we have to think about how we do communication across unreliable links between unreliable machines. - In an AP algorithm like Gossip you still make forward progress in case of a failure. In Paxos you stop and retur...
Jan 27, 2017•40 min
In this week’s podcast Wes Reisz talks to Neha Batra, a software engineer at Pivotal Labs. Neha spoke about pair programming in her recent QCon San Francisco 2016 presentation, and has taken time to discuss techniques to get started with the practice as well as tips for implementing it on your team. Neha also touches on vulnerability based trust and how it can help effectively build a trusting team environment. Why listen to this podcast: - If you successfully start with pair programming, other ...
Jan 06, 2017•29 min
In this week’s podcast, Robert Blumen talks to Oliver Gould at QCon San Francsico 2016. Oliver is the CTO of Buoyant where he leads open source development efforts. Prior to Buoyant he was a Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Twitter where he was technical lead on Observability, Traffic, Configuration and Co-ordination teams. Why listen to this podcast: - Stratification allows applications to own their logic while libraries take care of the different mechanisms, such as service discovery and load ...
Dec 30, 2016•33 min
In this week’s podcast, Thomas Betts talks with Chris Richardson, a developer, architect, Java Champion and author of POJOs in Action. Before his workshop on Microservices w/ Spring Boot and Docker at QCon San Francisco 2016, Richardson took time to discuss his ideas on how to use DDD and CQRS concepts as a guide for implementing a robust microservices architecture. Why listen to this podcast: - "Microservice architecture" is a better term than "microservices". The latter suggests that a single ...
Dec 23, 2016•25 min
In this week’s podcast, QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Keith Adams, chief architect at Slack. Prior he was an engineer at Facebook where he worked on the search type live backend, and is well-known for the HipHop VM [hhvm.com]. Adams presented How Slack Works at QCon SanFrancisco 2016. Why listen to this podcast: - Group messaging succeeds when it feels like a place for members to gather, rather than just a tool - Having opt-in group membership scales better than having to define a group on th...
Dec 16, 2016•36 min
In this week’s podcast, Thomas Betts talks with Haley Tucker, a Senior Software Engineer on the Playback Features team at Netflix. While at QCon San Francisco 2016, Tucker told some production war stories about trying to deliver content to 65 million members. Why listen to this podcast: - Distributed systems fail regularly, often due to unexpected reasons - Data canaries can identify invalid metadata before it can enter and corrupt the production environment - ChAP, the Chaos Automation Platform...
Dec 09, 2016•25 min