Agenda

Ten years ago, I wrote the first edition of The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development. At the time, it represented my best understanding of how a normal person could move from a typical career path to a remarkable one. You learn a lot in 10 years. Old patterns to out to have not been patterns after all. New patterns emerge. And the cliché fits: less is more.

In this talk, I'll tell you what the > 40 year old me would advise the 30 year old who wrote that book. How does one create a remarkable career? What is the least I have to know and do?

Writing cool and pretty code is easy — anyone can do that! Hm, or maybe not. But we‘re all great at laughing about really scary code, although it can be useful to spend some time thinking about it as well… in this talk we’ll look at anti-patterns and similar constructs that can scare a C# developer. There will be laughter, promise!

Test-Driven Development is about writing a test first, then the code that satisfies the test. Or... is it? Classic TDD has been crucial in my growth as a developer; and yet, as I started using F# more and C# less, my coding practices have evolved dramatically. Nowadays, I barely test first, but spend my days in the scripting environment. In this talk, I will examine how I write code in F# today, in a style I consider very much inspired by TDD; I will also discuss how exploring two paradigms (C# and F#) forced me to re-examine my beliefs, and evolve a slightly different (and perhaps less language specific) undertanding of some of the same core principles.

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript framework for building responsive, interactive applications in HTML. In this session we’ll see how to construct an application using the various features of Aurelia, including routing, dependency injection, custom elements, and data binding. Along the way, you might also learn about a few cutting edge JavaScript tools like the Babel transpiler, and the jspm package manager.

The world of open source software has never been more exciting than it is right now. Communities spanning all platforms are thriving and more inclusive than ever, with like minded individuals and organisations, small and large, working together to produce great software for everyone. In particular, Microsoft are making huge strides into OSS with frameworks, runtimes, compilers and more being publicized on GitHub at unprecedented rate.

In November last year I unexpectedly became the first community member to have a PR accepted for the .NET core framework. With my 15 minutes of fame now over, I'd like to reflect on the journey that took 'that Czechoslovakian guy' from a curious OSS onlooker to a passionate OSS addict and share my views on the future of OSS. We'll discover what OSS is, why it works and just how easy it is to get involved, perhaps even with a contribution or two. OSS is not just about coding and there are plenty of other ways to contribute, so even if you're not a coder, this talk is still for you.

So you’re building the web, right? And you’re having fun, right? Inventing the wheel each and every time when you create this “float-right” class, right? Feeling the warmth of a thousand suns when you design yet another form, right? That’s not so fun anymore, eh? Feel sad no more! Twitter Bootstrap is a comprehensive CSS framework that makes all of the usual web design stuff much easier. It’s so good you might enjoy CSS once again! Come to the session to see what Twitter Bootstrap is, why it is so awesome, and how you create smooth looking web sites in a matter of minutes!

In the modern world, you have access to vast amounts of data about everything. International organizations like World Bank collect thousands of indicators about all countries of the world, Open Government Data initiatives publish data sources about environment, transport, society and much more.

In this talk, you'll see how F# and type providers make it easy to access the data around you and build interesting visualizations that help you understand the world. We won't be limited just to public open data sources though - you can use the same ideas for working with any XML and CSV files or JSON-based REST services.

However, we will go a bit further than that - what if every data analysis or news report that comes with a chart was actually a little script that you could re-run and modify to validate its correctness and dig a bit deeper if you were curious about the topic?

Securely setting up a web stack today is a tricky balancing act, as you gingerly balance frameworks and services and tools all atop one another, ever higher, to get all mod cons happily running together safely and correctly. One security flaw though, and the whole pile tumbles down on you to throw your customer passwords to the world. In this talk we take a stroll down through a modern web stack and examine some recent major security breakages in each layer to see how they work and why. With any luck we can work out how to avoid this sort of thing in future too, when either using or building such tools, but if all else fails we can at least relax from all the careful balancing with a little schadenfreude.

NoSQL/Document databases have changed the way we build things - whether you like it or not. Even if you’re a diehard relational person - you’ve been touched by their impact. Many people dislike these NoSQL systems and their casual approach to writing data “eventually” as well as their quirky administration. RethinkDB is trying to change this. Safe writes by default, a simple, straightforward administration scheme, and a functional query language - RethinkDB is redefining NoSQL, in a good way. In this talk Rob Conery will show you the most compelling features of RethinkDB 2.0, and why it deserves consideration for your next project.

When Microsoft moved their compilers and framework to an open source model, they gave us unparalleled access to a real world, large scale managed code base. Inside the source code repositories there are many lessons to learn, and lots of useful bits of code we can borrow. In this session, we’ll explore the code base and look for hidden gems. Some of these gems are useful, other bits make for interesting trivia, and some classes are so bizarre you’ll have to see them to believe them. Expect equal levels of entertainment and education in this whirlwind tour of C# code.

Elastic cloud capability enables new levels of business agility and rapid innovation, but can be a complex process to orchestrate. Manimaran Chandrasekaran from DevOpsGuys, will demonstrate the power of Octopus 3.0 and PowerShell DSC to facilitate elastic environment support including Configuration Management, Application Deployment and Deployment Strategies. Using these great techniques you will learn how to greatly accelerate app delivery schedules and achieve enterprise-wide agility.

Tribes, communities of practice, organizations, and societies accrete symbolic systems that forge a common language over time to accomplish tasks usually related to the preservation, extension of power, and access to resources needed to continue to flourish and allow the social graph within boundaries to feel a sense of agency and empowerment. Indeed, when one group or tribe within a larger ecosystem feels threatened or produces radical new ideas, the heretical rebels leverage common metaphors, symbols, and tactics to achieve strategic goals - at first rebelling against the existing power structure (writing manifestos, throwing maltov cocktails), supplanting the existing “high priests”, and eventually developing the same rituals that previous power structure utilized to maintain and extend it’s power base - the heretics eventually become the high priests of a new caste system and then anoint their own saints.

We have seen this evolution in social systems and the accretion of cultural norms in the context of IT in general and software design and development in particular. Clifford Geertz said, “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs.” What we must understand is that with each new ideologically principled-based movement within IT, from RUP to Agile, to Lean Software, to LeanUX, DevOps, and more recently Lean Startup, is that each new ideologically based tribe has the need to extend it’s power base beyond the context for which it was originally intended. Even if each ideology with methods and practices made sense at a given time and place, does not necessarily mean it’s appropriate or strategic from a systems, wholistic, societal perspective.

This is important in making strategic decisions from an enterprise perspective in terms of which ideology to deploy, how to allocate resources, and how to ensure that across the portfolio of potential ‘bets’ the appropriate methods are deployed. This tension - between tribes that wish to enjoy greater agency by proselytizing their ideology and methods into other domains, and the needs of the organization, which seeks balance across multiple competing factions to actually achieve enterprise-wide goals, is the primary challenge faced by leaders.

We’ll explore the fractal nature of tribal-methods and seek to understand the various roles, practices, methods, and principles that are either local-optima or more global to seek to provide a framework for decision-making in uncertain and turbulent times. We’ll unpack the relationship between different horizons from exploration to exploitation work, and provide some heuristics for when things like Design thinking or LeanUX are most appropriate, and when Agile or ITIL frameworks might be the most authentic satisficing lens through which to make decisions.