The YOW! Podcast

The most complicated state in an application is time. Like cooking a bag of microwave popcorn, modern web applications desperately try to keep up with their state through an orchestrated chaos of asynchronous operations popping off in indeterminate cadence. No question, coordinating all this concurrency is hard. But there's a pitfall at the heart of asynchrony that stays mostly unaddressed. When an operation doesn't finish right away, synchronously, it's possible the operation may never finish. Or, it may be destined to finish eventually, but a second operation may be raised which means we no longer care about the first. Whatever the case, we need to be able to cancel it. This critical check ultimately protects users from the vagaries of unpredictable systems. Cancellation should be core to our async programming; no asynchrony should run without it. Too often, such handling is just a corner case exception. Without a cancellation strategy, your applications are incomplete at best. We'll discuss use-cases for async cancellation and various approaches to managing them.

Kyle Simpson is an evangelist of the open web, passionate about all things JavaScript. He writes books, teaches JavaScript, speaks, and contributes to the world of OSS.

Programming is a series of frustrations. Everything we do, we could do better or faster if we only had our tools set up just so. If our error messages were a little better, our code a little cleaner, our tests a lot wider. When we spend time on this, it's known as "yak shaving," and it can get messy. How do you balance the work you’re supposed to be doing with the work that makes your work, work? Dive into the yak stack with me. We'll see five different species of yak, and discuss how and when to tackle each one. At the bottom of the yak stack, we might find the Golden Yak, with secret wisdom engraved on its skin. This session will give you reasons to spend time smoothing your development experience, and clues for where to spend that time in ways that help your whole team.

Jessica Kerr is a developer of development systems. She works remotely from St. Louis, for Atomist, where she writes automations and automation infrastructure in TypeScript, Clojure, and whatever else is needed. She is a back-end developer who believes the front-end is most crucial. Jessica speaks at conferences in the US and Europe; find her on the Code podcast (greaterthancode.com)

Before you can evaluate a method, you have to understand its goals. Before you can evaluate a style of software engineering, you have to understand its goals. Quick execution of experiments? Rapid scaling in the face of unexpected bottlenecks? Sustained, profitable growth? Each goals requires a different style and yet we talk about software engineering as if it should be one thing. This talk introduces 3X and the ways software development, quality assurance, design, management, financing, planning, and staffing change depending on the goal of development.

Kent Beck is currently affiliated with Three Rivers Institute and Agitar Software, and is the author of many Addison-Wesley titles.

Microsoft issued me a Mac when they hired me to help people use Linux on Azure. If this sounds like the beginning of a nerdy joke, it’s because we need to question long-held opinions, let go of deeply-cherished stereotypes, and welcome this new era of open collaboration. Let’s take the 10,000 foot tour of today’s cloud, containers, and orchestration landscape before diving into specifics we can use when making calls on microservices, backing data stores, and app decomposition. We’ll talk public cloud, containers, and k8s from the “Open at Microsoft” perspective!

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if 'cloud' can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, she traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the devops community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts at Arrested DevOps, blogs at bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

From autonomous vehicles, 3D printed rocket engines, and “affordable” consumer-owned satellites to rapid advances in AI and secure, decentralized electronic currencies, the past several years have shown us that the only prediction we can confidently make about the future is that it will arrive more quickly than any of us imagined. Yet with all of these major technological advances, the way we develop, test, deploy, and manage software has been incrementally changing over the years. Many of the most forward-thinking paradigms, practices, and technologies are based on concepts and even implementations created decades ago. How can software development itself benefit from the disruptive changes in technology in recent years? This talk will explore influences, tech trends and coming innovations which will change how we as an industry approach to software creation, maintenance, management, and even employment.

Chad Fowler writes books, writes and plays music, writes software, leads organizations (currently for Microsoft), invests in startups, speaks at conferences, teaches, learns, organize conferences, etc. He started and co-organized a couple of Ruby-related conferences including The International Ruby Conference and RailsConf.