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QCon London - Day Two

·2 mins

Following on from yesterdays post, some notes on the second day of QCon London 2014.

“Forty Years of Teams” by Tim Lister #

A nice, inspirational keynote drawing from Tims 40+ years of experience.

“A Big Data Arsenal for the 21st Century” by Matt Asay #

A very good talk discussing how to choose the tools we use when building our Big Data infrastructure.

One of the key points was to build on open source tools. This is important for many reasons - one of which is to avoid large upfront costs, as that increases the cost of failures.

Almost all of the new data technologies in the past 10 years are open source (the only exception is Splunk). Open source has moved from imitator to innovator.

You also want something flexible, as data is messy, and getting messier. NoSql technologies are a much better fit for this than traditional databases.

“From Development to Production with a Free (and Fun) Cloud Stack” by Baruch Sadogursky #

A demonstration of using Bintray to host your open source software tools. I was hoping part of the solution would be applicable to internal software, but unfortunately this wasn’t the case.

“New Opportunities for Connected Data” by Ian Robinson #

A nice introduction to Neo4j with examples. They also gave away copies of the Graph Databases book at their exhibition stand.

Like the ElasticSearch talk yesterday, I would like to try using this on some real data - maybe event data.

“Migrating to Microservices” by Adrian Cockcroft #

Adrian spoke about the microservices architecture used at Netflix and the benefits it has brought them. A contrast to the Etsy talk from yesterday. Looks like a great way to work when creating an application the size of Netflix.

“I-Tier: Breaking Up the Monolith” by Brian McCallister #

Following on from Adrian’s talk, Brian talked us through how Groupon are moving from one monolithic Rails application to a microservices architecture.

“Lambdas & Streams: Taking the Hard Work Out of Bulk Operations in Java SE 8” by Simon Ritter #

A run-through on the new Lambdas and Streams features coming up in Java SE 8. Looks like a good implementation that I look forward to using.

A side effect of implementing Lambdas is that Java now has something that looks a lot like Roles in other languages. Will be interesting to see how this feature gets used by Java developers, and if it will cause more problems that it solves.