Blurb sent me off to QCon SF 2014 for three days.

Notes

I took a series of notes each day in attendance:

• Day One: Architectures, Functional
• Day Two: Rx Systems, API Platforms
• Day Three: Microservices, Culture

Summary

• Big trends in continuous delivery and deployment – deploy more often, smaller feedback loops
• A lot of emphasis on event driven architectures + microservices. Lots of emphasis on DDD as a design tool.
• Reactive systems with functional implementations were widely discussed as a scaling tool (backpressure-sensitive) and as a coordination tool between multiple async services.
• Big data/realtime streaming talks were interesting – my personal experience with them is limited, but it seems there is a debate over the merits of existing Lambda architecture practice.
• A lot of talk about microservice orchestration tools – acknowledging the pain of configuration and management of many services.
• Scala got a lotttt of attention. Probably because of its presence in bigger companies like Netflix, Twitter, LinkedIn. Wonder what smaller startups are using.
• Web Components were a big upcoming trend in frontend technologies. Strong modularization of views + behaviors in HTML documents.

Questions

• If I could do a startup over again, would I begin an app in Rails? Where is the sweet spot for that sort of application architecture?
• How can I design systems such that they can be extractible into focused components/services as early as possible?
• How can we plan for failures (fault injection)?
• How does one implement change in software engineering organizations? Bottom-up (organic initiatives bubbling up through management) vs top-down (management/software leaders direct org to implement).
• How are we doing with encouraging women and minorities who traditionally are underrepresented in our industry?
• What are places in our hiring funnels that, unbeknownst to us, may be turning away or detracting women and minorities?