Software is complicated. Machine learning, microservice architectures, message queues… every few months there’s another revolutionary idea to consider, another framework to learn. And underneath so many of these amazing ideas and abstractions is text. When you work in software, you spend your life working with text. Some of those text files are source code, some are configuration files, some of them are documentation. Editors, revision control systems, programming languages - everything from C# and HTML to Git and VS Code is based on the idea that we’re working with “plain text” files. But… what if I told you there’s no such thing?

When we say something is a plain text file, we’re relying on a huge number of assumptions - about operating systems, editors, file formats, language, culture, history… and, most of the time, that’s OK. But when it goes wrong, good old plain text can lead to some of the weirdest bugs you’ve ever seen. Why is there Chinese in the SQL event logs? Why has the city of Aarhus disappeared? And why does Magnus Mårtensson always have trouble getting into the USA? Join Dylan Beattie for a fascinating look into the hidden world of text files - from the history of mechanical teletypes, to how emoji skin tones actually work. We’ll look at some memorable bugs, some golden rules for working with plain text, and we’ll even find out the story behind the strange saying “PIKE MATCHBOX” – and what it has to do with driving in the USSR.

After some time searching for the best programming language for my projects, I wondered: is there a programming language that does not use any English keyword? Of course, the short answer is no, but where do all the other non-English-based programming languages hide? How did we end up using that idiom for writing code? Let's explore these questions during this talk!

Do you know Git? I bet you do. I also bet you use it, like 90% of the developers who answered last year’s StackOverflow survey. For sure you know all the basic commands to commit, pull, push… You might even rebase regularly, cherry-pick or bisect whenever it’s needed. Good for you, it’s not what this talk will be about! In this talk, we’ll focus on the rest of Git. The forgotten bits of trivia, the little-known, not-for-everyday commands. You won’t leave with much to apply directly in your terminal, but with plenty to talk about on your company’s messaging platform! We’ll jump from Git’s history to its core data structure, passing by some useful commands that you won’t resist trying out for yourself. If that sounds like fun to you, come on in!

Hackathons are a hot topic to drive innovation. Organizations across the globe have discovered that it enables them to help their digital transformation endeavors through unleashing hidden potential within the organization or across an industry. For individuals, hackathons can help to dive into a new subject matter, empowering to work on subjects they always wanted to work on, and in some cases hackathons have changed career paths. This session will discuss topics around hackathons: What different types of hackathons exist? What value do hackathons have for organizations and for participants? How does one best prepare for a hackathon?

Most importantly, hackathons are about culture and in some cases helping to change culture in a positive way. The best hackathons are inclusive and empower people to succeed.

Attendees will learn about the value of hackathons for organizations and individuals, and tips will be shared how to run or participate in a successful hackathon. This session is for everyone who cares about innovation, digital transformation, and how to disrupt and reinvent themselves.

APIs are a huge part of our connected world - they drive our apps and are the points of integration between applications. There are a number of technologies available that have emerged as major players in the API space, from REST to GraphQL to gRPC - but with them comes a lot of hype, dogma, and misinformation. How do you best evaluate which technology to use when building out a new API?

In this session, Spencer will compare and contrast three major API technology options, their ecosystems, and their adoption and learning curves. We'll discuss each technologies' strengths and optimal use cases, along with the weaknesses/challenges found with adopting any of the technologies.

May the best API win…! (Hint: there isn't one.)

Getting started with unit tests should be simple – it is just a matter of writing code to test other code. If that is right why so many talented developers fail implementing unit tests in their daily job. I have started using unit tests 8 years ago and failed miserably. It took me 2 years and the right company to start over and learn how to use unit tests and TDD as development tools. However, it was not always clear sailing and as I progresses I found more than my share of pitfalls than blind alleys as well as a fair amount of successes. In this talk, I will cover the non-trivial facts I learnt over the years about unit testing and the tips that I use to this day.

In 2019 we found ourselves in a situation where we needed to produce a huge amount of data to be injected into a Kafka cluster so it can be consumed by an application and run a load testing. Data should follow a defined structure in AVRO format; and also should have certain values in order to follow some Bussiness logics. We didn´t find anything in the market which match our requirements, so we started to build an solution which is easily integrated in JMeter.

Many systems begin their lives with a relational model at their core - as their database.

But over time, as the needs of users change, the relational model can cause more problems than it solves when building web-scale systems.

In this session, I’ll take you on my journey transforming a traditional SQL database model into a document model using Cosmos DB; a managed schema-less database where data denormalization rids us of joins and complicated queries.

Using a real-world example of a warehouse system, we'll run through creating our new model, along with different ways of materializing data using Change Feeds and Azure Functions.

Come and see how we can use Cosmos DB to get the most out of our software.

During this talk, I will give an overview of how ThreeJS works and show you how to bring 3D into the browser in a powerful and creative way. A first step would be to create a simple object, then see what steps are involved to re-create a (realistic) visual to sparkle a nice 3D experience to your visitors. A lot of inspiration will be given, as well as resources to go deeper into the field if the audience wants to go further!

Do you want to become an infrastructure wizard overnight? Then this talk is for you.

With most tools for Infrastructure as Code, we describe our infrastructure in a declarative configuration language. But there is another way: We can use a general-purpose programming language like TypeScript, Java or C#.

This talk gives an overview of this alternative approach to IaC and answers some of the most burning questions: Can we finally get rid of tons and tons of YAML and JSON files? What are the pros and cons of coding instead of configuring? What tools can we use, what are their differences? And most importantly, do they help us to build infrastructure like a boss without 30 years of experience?

Developing software based on micro services architecture is extremely easy when you use spring boot and spring cloud. Just throw in a few lines of code and you can have a micro service up and running. But when you have many micro services it’s not easy to run and maintain all of them locally, so you use a central deployment. But if all developers do it, how can they work simultaneously on the same central spring cloud environment and still not interrupt each other? In this talk, I will you show you how and boost your productivity along the way.

We all know and love our micro service architectures. As every service has ownership of its own code base and data, we can iterate on each service separately.

However, a problem arises when we need to combine data from different services.

For instance, taking the standard e-commerce example, suppose we want to display the most successful product in an area. To do that, I'll need sales data owned by "Sales", combined with address data from the "Customer" service, and probably some pricing data from the "Product" service.

In a monolith, it could be a single SQL join. In most micro service systems, this is not easy to do efficiently. This aspect tends to be overlooked when discussing micro services: Try as we might to decouple systems into sensible domains, sooner or later there will be a business requirement that does goes right across those boundaries and we will need to find a way to reunite this data.

So can we join data from different services inside different databases? Luckily, the answer is yes.

To make this more concrete, we will look at Debezium, a change capture solution by Red Hat, and Apache Flink, a stream processing framework, and of course a little bit of Kafka.