Sam Newman Independent Consultant, Sam Newman & Associates
Sam Newman is an independent consultant specialising in helping people ship software fast. Sam has worked extensively with the cloud, continuous delivery, and microservices and is especially preoccupied with understanding how to more easily deploy working software into production. For the last few years, he has been focusing in the area of microservice architectures. He has worked with a variety of companies in multiple domains around the world, often with one foot in the developer world and another in the IT operations space. Previously, he spent over a decade at ThoughtWorks and then left to join a startup, before setting up his own company. Sam speaks frequently at conferences and is the author of Building Microservices and Monolith to Microservices (O’Reilly).
In this talk Liz introduces different ways of looking at the world that help us choose the right approach, including Cynefin, a framework for making sense of situations depending on certainty or uncertainty; Wardley Mapping, which lets us understand our organizational and technical structure as it evolves; and Real Options, the principles of which help us to postpone decisions until we have more information.
Find out how these lenses and their associated tools are helping leaders and technologists to navigate their changing landscapes and ecosystems with clearer insight, less frustration, less risk and faster delivery.
Liz Keogh Lean and Agile consultant, Lunivore Limited
Liz Keogh is a Lean and Agile consultant based in London. She is a well-known blogger and international speaker, a core member of the BDD community and a passionate advocate of the Cynefin framework and its ability to change mindsets. She has a strong technical background with 20 years’ experience in delivering value and coaching others to deliver, from small start-ups to global enterprises. Most of her work now focuses on Lean, Agile and organizational transformations, and the use of transparency, positive language, well-formed outcomes and safe-to-fail experiments in making change innovative, easy and fun.
Robots are going to take our jobs eventually – in fact it’s already started. This is a comical, yet real, look at what the future looks likes and ways to future-proof yourself and your business.
Anne-Marie Imafidon Co-Founder, Stemettes
From child prodigy to MBE, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon is Head Stemette and co-founder of Stemettes, the award-winning social enterprise inspiring the next generation of females into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) roles via a series of impactful events and opportunities.
One of the youngest ever to be awarded a Masters’ degree in Mathematics & Computer Science by the University of Oxford at age 20, Anne-Marie, unsurprisingly, continued to soar. In 2018 alone, she was listed among the top 50 women in tech in the world by Forbes, voted the 5th most influential woman in IT by Computer Weekly and was the recipient of the prestigious Barclays UK ‘Woman of the Year’ award.
2017 saw her featured among the top 50 most inspiring women in tech by Inspiring Fifty (an accolade she received for a second time in 2018). In recognition of her significant influence and achievements, Anne-Marie was awarded an MBE in the 2017 New Year’s Honours for services to young women and STEM sectors. In June of the same year she was also made an Honorary Fellow at Keble College, Oxford.
Not only a champion of getting women into STEM positions, Anne-Marie has previously worked with Goldman Sachs, Hewlett-Packard, Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers, amassing a wealth of experience. She is also a recognised thoughtleader in the tech space, regularly appearing in the media as a talking head, and giving talks at tech giants such as SXSW and Founders Forum.
Serverless technology is no longer new. But we're quickly reaching the point where it's becoming the default way to build applications. And it's having a profound effecton how do good software architecture. Serverless means big changes in how we must manage performance, state, scale, cost, and so much more. It's a huge, and exciting, opportunity.
The BBC now has seven years of serverless experience. Dozens have projects have been made in a serverless way, using either AWS Lambda or in-house solutions. There have been some painful moments - it has not been an easy adoption. But the technology is maturing and best-practice is becoming clearer. Serverless is now the default way that many of the BBC's website and APIs are made. It's faster to develop, more flexible, and can scale to the big moments.
So what does good serverless architecture look like? And is it really as performant as containers or servers? In this session we'll explore the potential and the pitfalls. The best-practice, the opportunities, and what it means to software architecture. The serverless revolution is here - let's get the architecture right.
Matthew Clark BBC
In this anecdotal talk I discuss seven lessons that I learnt whilst working as a DevOps Engineer on a mobile app project for a financial institution.
Zac Rubin Scott Logic
Chaos Engineering - The unexpected benefits of designing everything to fail. Explains why you would want to implement this into your application from the beginning and how designing systems that fail gives you the freedom to experiment and bring in expertise from outside the software engineering circle.
Peter Grainger Arup
This talk aims to provide the audience with an introduction to property-based testing and the practical steps on how to incorporate Property-Based Testing into a TDD workflow.
Applications written using Functional Programming languages and patterns are becoming more and more mainstream. Clojure, Scala and Haskell are among the growing numbers of purely functional programming languages appearing in Government and hugely successful private sector applications. Even Java is increasing focus on the Functional paradigm with the inclusion of lambda functions in version 1.8.
One of the cornerstones of Functional Programming is pure functions and Property-Based Testing is an exceptionally powerful tool for testing this kind of function. The ability to have the computer generate example tests and verify the output has led to the discovery of serious bugs in some of our most established libraries.
A TDD workflow involves the continual addition of small amounts of tested behaviour into either a new or existing application. The smaller the steps the developer can take, the better. Driving development with property tests has the tendency to force you to write more behaviour code than your simple example tests would.
Following the talk an attendee should have an understanding of what property testing is, where it's useful and what tools are available to implement it.
They will see how I incorporate Property-Based Testing into my TDD workflow and how it changes the way I drive my development.
David Sarginson Opencast Software
It should be number one word in any software developer's dictionary. SIMPLICITY...but it unfortunately isn't. If you do this, if you manage to master simplicity then the rest quite simply doesn't matter, everything else falls into place as if by magic - even your reputation as a software developer!
Why on earth is simplicity so important? How do we approach it? How do we make simplicity transpire in every aspect of software development? What is the difference between doing the easiest thing Vs doing the simplest thing?
In this talk I will do my absolute best to answer all the questions above and anything else related with it. I will talk about the importance of Test Driven Development to achieve this and also the importance about not philosophising about where things might change in your code, but focusing on making change simple by letting real examples guide you and forgetting about silly outdated guidelines like SOLID.
Avoiding "death by object orientation" is a must, the main reason for the mess most codebases end up in is over engineering. It is your duty as a Software Developer to challenge this behaviour and I hope that with this talk will empower software developers to pursue simplicity by focusing on the "now" and "what actually is needed" and then from there, making a judgement on what the simplest implementation possible is.
Juan Rodriguez Opencast Software
An action-research piece sharing the practice and lessons learnt by the Design team at Grid as they collaborate with the construction industry, local authorities and government to develop a new project. Detailing the design-led approach taken through Grid’s first few phases of our product development process.
Introduction to Nate; Who I am? Why am I speaking? Purpose of the talk
Introduction to Grid: The Company, what we do
Introduction to “Freight Traffic Control” project: The problem/opportunity, project partners and collaborators.
Grid Process Overview: Our process
Explore: Objectives, Interventions, Participants, Output, Reflections
Research: Objectives, Interventions, Participants, Output, Reflections
Prototype: Objectives, Interventions, Participants, Output. Reflections
Define: Objectives, Interventions, Participants, Output. Reflections
Summary: Output, feedback from the crossfunctional team, business leadership?
Key reflections and lessons learnt
Q+A
Nate Sterling Grid Smarter Cities
Building an Architecture that can adapt to change is challenging. This talk will explore what are the critical factors in an evolutionary architecture & what should be in place to support them.
Chris Howe-Jones DevCycle
It's about how we built an application to help disabled passengers get through airports easier. The crux of the talk is about Serverless but I also touch on various aspects of AWS.
Dan Pudwell Grid Smarter Cities
The mantra of 'move fast and break things' has dominated over the past 10 years and whilst it may work in small organisations, how do you do that if your organisation is massive? UX teams may encounter resistance from managers, developers and even customers, how do we foster a positive relationship where UX is put at the centre of development without becoming a blocker to others?
How can we build successful UX cultures in larger organisations and teams without causing civil war?
This talk looks at the stakeholders involved with approaches and tips to build positive user centred teams of all sizes.
Jason Bell
Micro-services have changed the world, we can ship good software with less hassle than ever. However we are left with lots of smaller repos to maintain. At SaleCycle we use “the best tools for each job”. This includes programming language. We have AWS lambdas, Batch jobs, and ECS services written in C#, F#, Java, Kotlin, Typescript, Javascript, Go, and probably others I don’t know about.
So how do we promote a culture of sharing and collaboration between teams using such a range of languages and technologies?
We begin by defining a generic set of coding principles in which data (arrows) flows through services (boxes). We then discuss how these principles can be applied to different languages, and more remarkably, to both the objective and functional paradigms. The result is that developers can reuse patterns and techniques irrespective of which language or environment they are using.
Tom Hodgson
TDD helps software engineers learn, understand, and internalise the key principles of good modular design. Testing is good at finding and fixing issues before deploying to production. I was working for companies that the goal is to have 100% test coverage - unit tests, acceptance tests, selenium tests … They are just not enough!
And yet there are still bugs in production. When they are found it’s the greenhouse for the blame culture, the creation of laziness. Moreover, waiting for hour-long selenium tests to finish before production release is intolerable.
To fix the problem and build it right, we, in Uswitch engineering team, make trade-offs between testing and monitoring. For instance, when writing the server application, we don’t need to have a test to mock the server starts. Instead, we ping the production page every minute to ensure HTTP status 200.
Also beneficial from our microservice architecture, we can monitor the percentage of ingress 200 responses to guarantee servers availability. Let alone the bug reporting systems that we use like sentry and airbrake.
Servers working doesn’t mean the business is working. No unit tests can ensure that. To be honest, as long as the company still making profits the CEO won’t care even the servers are down. Therefore on the business level, we have daily analysis reports to track the important KPIs - daily impressions, clicks and conversions.
We should build the testing and monitoring right, test the essential complex business logics while monitoring the crucial things. Having the unit tests to cover core business logics are reasonable, the stock trading backend system definitely needs unit tests for rounding errors before losing thousands of pounds. Trade-off the selenium tests to monitor website 5XX rates would make the frontend development so much easier and can release faster. So, build it right with testing and monitoring.
Jiazhen Xie Uswitch
The last two decades have seen the customer take control of the buying process. The growth of digital platforms means they have more choice of how, when and from whom they buy than ever before. And, it's not just the product that will keep them coming back. From finding your company on Twitter to evangelising your brand, the whole experience and every interaction should shine.
What are the ingredients required to turn your customers into advocates and how, even on the smallest budget, can you keep your new product shiny well after launch?
Helena Hill Helena Hill Consulting
Is it selfish to look after ourselves? We all use up our energy (physical, mental & emotional) in different ways at work. How much thought do you give to how you recharge that energy?
We'll explore the concept of self care, some of the things that might fall into it and what companies can to do help their staff.
We'll also have an interactive exercise to encourage you to think about what you do for self care and reflect on what you could do differently.
Jon McNestrie Northern Shore Consulting
A lot of us will know a little about our services, why they should be accessible, and what kind of things we should be doing to make them accessible.
You might know you need to ‘add alt text’ or ‘have a heading hierarchy’, but if you haven’t done them before, will you know or feel confident in implementing them? How do your designs cater for them, and how do you research them with the users they’re intended for? With feedback from your users, how do you adapt your designs if necessary, before building them into your service? And how do you communicate about them with the rest of your team?
Sarah and Mark, a User Researcher and UX Designer with a few years of government experience, will share practical advice about how you design and research these with your users - offering an interactive insight into how research might work.
Sarah Stokes Difrent
A lot of us will know a little about our services, why they should be accessible, and what kind of things we should be doing to make them accessible.
You might know you need to ‘add alt text’ or ‘have a heading hierarchy’, but if you haven’t done them before, will you know or feel confident in implementing them? How do your designs cater for them, and how do you research them with the users they’re intended for? With feedback from your users, how do you adapt your designs if necessary, before building them into your service? And how do you communicate about them with the rest of your team?
Sarah and Mark, a User Researcher and UX Designer with a few years of government experience, will share practical advice about how you design and research these with your users - offering an interactive insight into how research might work.
Mark Wright Difrent
From Graphic Design to Web Design to UX/UI over to AI and UR the demand for the right person for the job is ever-changing. Gone are the days of just having 'that one creative person' who can 'somehow' do everything. Teams are becoming more specialised and niche and skillsets are becoming more diverse.
With the creative/tech industry constantly evolving, I often wonder, how do we keep up? Above I inadvertently mentioned how my roles over the years have changed.
In my talk I would like to talk about the importance of UX, UR and UI in any creative business. How developers can work better with UX and how to better sell your idea to stakeholders and difficult project managers.
Takeaways will improve
Ade-Lee Adebiyi
Fiona Hobbs Opencast Software
Building your first capability, a retrospective - Fiona Hobbs
Behind the fourth wall - James Leftley
Are personas dead? - Emily Hewitson
Build high performing teams by aplying a product mindset - Ryan Greenhall
It’s all about the Culture - Mark Jose
The fresh prince of the testing atelier - Stephen Mounsey
James Leftley Scott Logic
Building your first capability, a retrospective - Fiona Hobbs
Behind the fourth wall - James Leftley
Are personas dead? - Emily Hewitson
Build high performing teams by aplying a product mindset - Ryan Greenhall
It’s all about the Culture - Mark Jose
The fresh prince of the testing atelier - Stephen Mounsey
Emily Hewitson Sage
Building your first capability, a retrospective - Fiona Hobbs
Behind the fourth wall - James Leftley
Are personas dead? - Emily Hewitson
Build high performing teams by aplying a product mindset - Ryan Greenhall
It’s all about the Culture - Mark Jose
The fresh prince of the testing atelier - Stephen Mounsey
Ryan Greenhall RVU
Building your first capability, a retrospective - Fiona Hobbs
Behind the fourth wall - James Leftley
Are personas dead? - Emily Hewitson
Build high performing teams by aplying a product mindset - Ryan Greenhall
It’s all about the Culture - Mark Jose
The fresh prince of the testing atelier - Stephen Mounsey
Mark Jose Scott Logic
Stephen Mounsey
The concepts and practices of Site Reliability Engineering are changing the way we build and operate our platforms and enabling us to have more meaningful conversations about availability, service-level objectives, and cost. But what are the benefits for the engineer holding the pager? Can we add a human element to our error budgets? Join Hannah Foxwell to look at Site Reliability Engineering practices through a human lens. Hannah combines SRE with HumanOps and explains how to use SRE practices to improve the health and well-being of your team.
Hannah Foxwell Associate Director for Platform Services, Pivotal Software
Hannah Foxwell is Associate Director for Platform Services at VMware, where she helps build wildly successful platform teams. A HumanOps champion, a HugOps evangelist, and a DevOps believer, Hannah has spent her career building Platform Teams and using technology to help create great environments for engineers to do their best work.
As time goes on, do you feel like retrospectives have become boring, uninspiring and less effective? Does it seem like the team are going through the motions? Are retrospectives an hour of moaning, with nothing ever changing? Does it feel like these 'Agile' ways of working just aren't delivering what was promised?
Let's start from the ground up and fix this for good.
Retrospectives are crucial to self-improving teams. To really make them shine, we'll delve into the surprising cross-disciplinary history of retrospectives, gaining an appreciation of the power we can harness.
We'll talk about psychological safety - how to make sure that retrospectives are inclusive and diverse sessions where everyone is comfortable to contribute.
We'll detail the structure of a retrospective and how we can go beyond the traditional three acts of "what went well, what didn't, what can we do better", choosing activities that generate powerful insights, establish common understanding and focus on building meaningful change.
Finally, we'll talk about how we can make sure the actions raised during a retrospective actually get done. This goes beyond making 'SMART' objectives, focusing on the psychology of change, highlighting where we can go awry and how to stay on track through guiding principles.
You'll learn how to create fun retrospectives and you'll leave with a renewed sense of focus and passion for improving how we work together, to build great things.
Sam Hogarth Tesco Bank
Sam is fascinated with making teams work together better, and keeping up with the ever-changing world of software engineering. He has a decade's worth of experience in highly-regulated environments, across finance, biotech and energy. Whether it's mobile, desktop, web, server or cloud, he has the battle scars. In his spare time, he can run a fine game of Dungeons and Dragons!
As engineers we tend to analyse needs so we can provide solutions, and look for problems so that we can fix them. When it comes to hiring, this backfires: most engineers walk into a hiring process looking for reasons to say "No" to each candidate; instead, we should be looking for reasons to say "Yes".
In this session we look at how that small twist in mindset affects our assumptions in each hiring stage, and the practical changes we make - especially in tech interviews - when we select for Yes.
We also look at some new problems that this creates, and how we can mitigate or solve them.
Adam Martin CTO Consultant
Adam has been a CTO for more than 15 years, specialising in fast growth tech startups (robotics, games, travel, edtech). He is currently writing a book on how to hire the first 100 people to a new tech org, based on his experiences in leading and building tech teams.
A presentation on the microservice architecture in an enterprise, big data application utilising eventual consistency. We will talk about the pitfalls of scaleup and the why cutting corners can destroy a platform. We will look at the change in thought process from traditional coding to coding in a microservice architecture. We will discuss tools for the job, including Docker/Kubernetes and container orchestration.
Steve Heasman Cubic
Steve is a Lead Software Engineer at Cubic Transportation Systems; Steve has a wealth of experience in enterprise applications in varying fields across a 15-year career. Steve has a BSc Computer Science Degree from Teesside University and has a passion for enterprise architecture and software solutions.
Bruno Perez shared insights into this fast-growing practice and why inclusive design is essential in today’s environment and how it generates business value. He reflected on specific examples from the Healthcare sector and discussed how reframing our concept of the user can create more compelling customer pathways, leading to positive trickle-down effects in society.
Bruno Perez BCG Platinion
Bruno is a proven Design leader with over 20 years of experience. As a strong advocate of inclusive design, he adds this dimension to all of the work he does. He has worked within a broad range of industries which includes automotive, financial services and retail. Prior to BCG, Bruno spent time at Accenture, and in 2013 became one of the first Fjordians in São Paulo, helping Fjord to grow an entirely new team from the ground-up. Bruno also spent 1 year building the Service & Experience Design capability within KPMG’s flagship Customer Practice in London.
Lisa Moran NHS BSA
Often when we have a problem to solve we immediately want to solve it using resources we know might solve the problem. But will this meet the user need? The importance of research and design iteration is often overlooked. We would like to share examples of why iterative research and design is so important.
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage and lead well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects ofbeing a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices of leading and managing that take most managers years to discover.
Ron Lichty Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc.
Ron Lichty has been managing and recently consulting in software development for over 30 years at companies like Apple, Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Stanford, and dozens of startups of all sizes, from first level manager to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles. As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering roles, trains teams and executives in scrum, and coaches leaders in managing software people and teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
Addison Wesley recently released the 2nd edition of his fifth book, 'Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams', compared by many readers to programming classics 'The Mythical Man-Month' and 'Peopleware'. He also co-authors the periodic 'Study of Product Team Performance'.
Do you pick technologies & tools for Java projects? And can you learn by looking at & running code? Then this talk is for you!
In this talk, we'll explore why we pick more technologies & tools today. We'll then look at how generating Java projects with JHipster makes that easier. JHipster is an open-source code generator for Java.
Karsten Silz Senior Java Developer
Karsten Silz has been a Java developer for 21 years. He has worked in Europe and the U.S. Last year, he moved from Stuttgart, Germany, to Milton Keynes, UK.