Keynote: The Role of an Architect

Ted Neward

What is the role of an architect in a software project? This question has plagued many a software organization (and even those who do the job), and provided loads of entertainment. In this presentation, we aim to explore the intersection of software architect with the worlds of architecture, psychology, business, and even music. By the end, though, you'll have a clear idea of what an architect is, does, and needs.

About Ted

Ted Neward is an industry professional of twenty years experience. He speaks at conferences all over the world and writes regularly for a variety of publications across the Java, .NET, and other ecosystems. He currently resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, dog, four cats, eight laptops, seven tablets, nine phones, and a rather large utility bill.

Keynote: The Future of Programming

Jimmy Miller

As professional developers, most of our time is spent thinking about the near future. We are cemented into our current workflow by policy, social cohesion, or pragmatic considerations. While we may be constantly seeking to improve, new tools and libraries come with a certain amount of cost. It is simply not practical to completely change the way we are doing things and so we end up with small incremental improvements.

We will look at what could happen if we gave up these small incremental improvements and looked at radically different ways of programming. We will explore three languages that cast a particular vision of programmings future. The first, Idris, explores the idea of code that can guarantee that is free of all sorts of bugs. With Idris, we may in the future be able to have a proof that our program is secure. Next we will explore Unison, a language that allows us to control thousand of machines in just a few lines of code. No longer would we need microservices, a new service is a just a line of code away. Finally we will look at Eve, an experiment in language design that asks what our programs would be like if 1) code ordering didn't matter 2) all our programs were edited live 3) we could write the same systems in order of magnitude less code and less time.

About Jimmy

I started programming at the age of 10. My bother always hogged the computer, so I found my own out by the dumpster. Many hours and burned CDs later, I had a working Ubuntu machine. Ever since, my life has involved programming, whether that was skipping class in high school to go to the computer science room or reading Philip Wadler papers until early hours of the morning. I currently work at healthfinch where I do Clojure fulltime.

Keynote: Exploring Parallelism With Raspberry Pi

Ray Hightower

Moore's Law is running out. Still, customers want more computing power, more performance. Parallelism offers a way for software developers to deliver more. This talk offers an intro to parallelism, including some inexpensive ways to study the topic using that well-known single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi.

About Ray

Ray Hightower founded and ran a technology company for twenty-one years before selling the company to 8th Light in 2016. Today, Hightower serves as Director of the 8th Light office in Los Angeles, California. Hightower is a perpetual student, currently exploring parallelism, quantum computing, and IoT. He studied Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and completed his BS in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Hightower is invited to speak at tech conferences around the world, and he blogs on technology and business growth at RayHightower.com.

Keynote: Microservices, Micronaut And Your Digital Future

Jeff Brown

The modernization of a sophisticated technology stack is a delicate balancing act that rests on understanding how any one change will affect the entire ecosystem. Business leaders who oversee mature technology stacks are particularly confounded by the demand to make changes quickly (and correctly) while simultaneously increasing the complexity of their applications. Microservices promise to alleviate this burden by decomposing complex applications into a set of manageable services that are much faster to develop and much easier to understand and maintain, but there are challenges associated with this type of application architecture. It is important to recognize the challenges and to understand how best to manage those challenges.

About Jeff

Jeff Scott Brown is the co-founder of the Grails and Micronaut frameworks, leads the Grails and Micronaut practices at Object Computing (objectcomputing.com), and is also a Partner. He has been doing JVM application development for as long as the JVM has existed. He has spent most of the last decade focused specifically on work related to the Grails framework, is a key contributor to the frameworks’ core development, and recently co-founded the Micronaut framework.