Build Stuff'14

Come watch the unveiling of the magic behind developing drugs and making music in a way simple enough to inspire even a 5 year old. We will explore how this provides us with lessons in writing scalable, maintainable code, and how it allows us to tackle problems in new ways. Yes, there will be experiments. Yes, there will be live-coded music. And yes, you really can make cleaner and more scalable code when you think about solutions through the eyes of a child. 

Customer Insight is a key element of Storebrands business strategy and it is an area that Storebrand has invested heavily in the last couple of years. The talk will share the experience we have gained so fare covering how to combine traditional structured data in a DWH with unstructured data in noSQL, big data databases. It will also cover how we use massive parallel datawarehouse appliances to boost the analytical capabilities and the exploitation of open source software as part of a powerful analytical platform. The talk will also touch on how to integrate the gained Customer Insight into critical business processes and how this drives the need for more real time analytics.

Wikipedia defines a prototype as “an early sample, model or release of a product built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from. “ It sounds perfectly simple yet all too often a prototype quickly turns into a complex beast of new technologies, shiny new frameworks and takes three times as long as planned. This session goes back to basics and looks at the art of prototypes and how to quickly build them to test and validate your early assumptions.

Based on Ben’s real world experience of building prototypes and MVPs for various different startups, this session takes a deep dive at where to begin along with the mind-set and tooling required to quickly and effectively create the prototypes. These will give you the ability to learn quickly and start mapping out the future faster than building the application. The examples will take the form of mobile applications but the tips and tricks will apply to web applications.

The key takeaways will include:
- How to identify the questions you want the prototype to answer
- How to find a clear answer and decision about what to do next
- How to fake it before you make it
- How to go from prototype, to MVP, to full product
- How not to completely screw yourself and end up with bad data

Prototypes are all about doing just enough, by the end of the session attendees will have a clear idea of what just enough is and how they can embrace it!

While many developers have heard about the benefits of the loosely-coupled event-driven approach of writing software, and may even have used a queuing system before, there are some cases where the publish/subscribe style seems applicable, but really isn’t. Join Udi for a look at why different kinds of pub/sub need to be used for specific domains like healthcare, finance, “internet of things”, and some kinds of retail. There’s more to pub/sub than you might think.

 

In this session, I will talk about entertaining examples of architectural disasters in software projects. We will see how excellent ideas can turn into nightmares, how one can slowly but thoroughly introduce incredible complexity, and how a merge between organizational and technical failures can grind productivity to a halt. Names and irrelevant details have been changed to protect the somewhat innocent, but everything is based on actual things I had to experience – and sometimes helped create – in the real world.

This talk is for:

- people wanting to understand how to make money by developing an open source product
- the different business models and licence choices with open source software
- developers that want to create an successful open source product

There's something good you can say about every programming language.

But that's no fun.

Instead, let's take the worst features of all the languages we know, and put them together to create an abomination with the worst syntax, the worst semantics, the worst foot-guns and the worst runtime behaviour in recorded history. Let's make a language so bad it would make people run screaming to Visual Basic for Applications.

This is going to be an interactive session, so bring your voice, your opinions and your pet peeves (but please leave all automatic weapons in the cloakroom).