Back in February, over 200 savvy developers descended on the Watershed for a one-day Voxxed Days Bristol event that combined a series of tech talks covering everything from cloud and big data to Java SE.
Voxxed Days help local community groups across the world organise tech events sharing the Devoxx philosophy – that content comes first. So with South West high-tech supporters High Tech Bristol and Bath CIC (HBB) taking the reins for the Bristol Voxxed Days conference, it was certainly a day to remember with a huge variety of top local and international speakers.
It would have been a shame to miss out – but luckily you don’t have to! There’s a whole host of catch-up videos featuring all the day’s talks and interviews. So of course, we’ve put them all in one place to share with you all.
All the below descriptions include extracts from the speakers bio and abstract. For the full bios and abstracts, please visit the Voxxed Days website or click on the video link directly.
VoxxedDays Bristol Interviews and Overview
HBB’s Network Manager, John Bradford, introduces Voxxed Days Bristol – plus interviews with some of the Voxxed Days Bristol speakers.
Sarah Saunders – Technical Archaeology
Sarah, a senior developer at Capgemini, specialises in the use of leading-edge technology and Agile delivery processes to develop effective solutions to business problems.
Abstract: “Get out your khakis and your shovels, we will be digging down through a typical modern distributed architecture stack to uncover the bones of antipatterns buried within! With one eye on the history of technical architecture and one eye on the technologies of the present, we will review how some of the patterns we ingrain in our architectures are in fact the dinosaurs in our midst.”
Nakul Mishra – Microservice (no fluff the REAL stuff)
Nakul is a senior software developer and a consultant around JVM and related technologies.
Abstract: “In this talk, we will walk through the key concepts like service discovery & registry, circuit breaker, API gateway, distributed tracing and edge service. Build a bunch of microservices demonstrating practical implementation of these patterns using open source components like Eureka, Zuul, Hystrix, Zipkin and powered by spring cloud.”
Andy Seaborne – A tale of 2 graphs, RDF and Property
Andy is an open-source enthusiast who works in the area of storage and query of linked data.
Abstract: “In this talk, we will introduce Property Graphs and the Resource Description Frameworks and look at some uses to show where they are (and are not) used. We will look at contrasting features of the data models by looking at use cases and then discuss how ideas from one can usefully be applied to the other.”
Steve Loughran – Hadoop and Kerberos: the madness beyond the gate
Steve Loughran is an R&D engineer at Hortonworks, where he works on leading-edge developments within the Hadoop ecosystem.
Abstract: “This talk goes into the depths, to the knowledge which you need to write applications in a secure Hadoop cluster, knowledge that may drive you insane. Forever more, you shall fear voices calling out in the night, voices saying things like “we have an urgent Kerberos-related support call – can you help?”
Matthew Bates – Kube all the Things
Matthew is the co-founder of Bristol-based container startup Jetstack. He has a background in solutions for the acquisition, management and exploitation of large-scale data, across a variety of industries.
Abstract: “Kubernetes is an open source container cluster manager that is based on Google’s experiences of using containers to power their infrastructure for over a decade.
This talk explains the core concepts and deep-dives on how these neatly fit together to enable Google-like infrastructure that function smoothly and efficiently (without 4am call-outs) and can scale. There are real-world experiences of how it is being used and the talk also features the latest developments from the project that will help us to ‘Kube All the Things’.”
Simon Ritter – Preparing for JDK 9 with Zulu and OpenJDK
Simon is the European CTO of Azul Systems. He helps people to understand Azul’s Java virtual-machine technologies and products.
Abstract: “JDK 9 is the next major release of the Java platform, which will include significant changes over earlier versions. Unlike JDK 8 where most changes were in the language and class libraries, JDK 9 will bring big changes to the platform itself. The biggest of these is project Jigsaw that modularises Java, making deployment more flexible. This session looks at the main changes in JDK 9 and uses the free binary distribution from Azul Systems, Zulu, to show how developers can take advantage of and prepare for them.”
Johan Janssen & Jaap Papavoine – REST no more, use an actor
Johan works as a Java architect and competence center Java lead at Info Support. Jaap was a DevOps engineer way before it was hip. Starting his IT career as a systems administrator 12 years ago, he now works as a continuous delivery expert at Info Support in the Netherlands.
Abstract: “Normally we use Java or Scala to build applications for large organisations running on servers. We wanted to find out if we could use the same languages and tools on IoT hardware. We also wanted to investigate whether or not (remote) actors could replace REST endpoints.”
Luke Marsden – Behind the scenes with Docker plugin volumes
Luke has 12 years of experience building web apps and running a web hosting company. Inspired by the practical operational problems faced running web apps in production, he started ClusterHQ.
Abstract: “A story of cross-company and cross-continent open-source collaboration. Last June at DockerCon in San Francisco, Solomon announced experimental support for Docker volume plugins, making it possible to build add-ons to Docker that manage persistent storage. The run-up to that announcement was a frenetic 9 months of cross-company and cross-time zone collaboration. At ClusterHQ, we were deeply involved in building the interface, and we also made our own Docker volume plugin Flocker available for migrating data volumes between nodes in a cluster. “
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“In this talk, I share stories on what it was like working with the Docker team and others in the ecosystem to build this API. We cover how you also can take advantage of Docker volume plugins to leverage stateful containers. I guide you through the Docker plugin model and show off some of the existing plugins so you can see how to enable stateful containers for your own use cases”
Robert Rees – Interactive data wrangling
Robert Rees is a development manager at the Guardian and former startup CTO and ThoughtWorks consultant.
Abstract: “Recently I wanted to generate a dataset for some colleagues that required cross-referencing primary keys from an SQL database with the result of a HTTP API call, then applying a transformation on the combined result and writing just the information needed to a file.”
“Using Clojure made the job easy because as a general programming language it can be a HTTP client, interact with the file system and quickly process in-memory data. As a bonus its REPL allowed me to play around with individual pieces of data in an ad-hoc way or write a tested function and load it into my current session.”
“So let me walk you through the problem and the open-source code I wrote to solve my problems. I’ll also introduce any key Clojure syntax I use along the way so if you’re interested in data wrangling, but don’t know Clojure, you’ll be okay.”
Professor Dave Cliff (Plenary) –The View from an Ivory Tower/Cloud and Big Data at the University of Bristol
Dave is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, where he is also Head of the Merchant Venturers School of Engineering – home to the university’s departments of Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Engineering Mathematics.
Abstract: “This talk is a fast-paced overview of all that is going on at the University in Cloud and Big Data, intended for anyone who would like to know what they’re up to, or who would like to get more involved.”
James Strachan – Continuous Delivery of Microservices with Kubernetes
James Strachan created the Groovy programming language and Apache Camel and is the cofounder of the following open-source projects: fabric8, hawtio, Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix.
Abstract: “This talk gives an overview of Kubernetes and how it can be used to provision, cluster, scale and manage your microservices based on Docker containers and immutable container images – running either on premise, public or hybrid cloud.
The talk then describes various open-source tools (such as Jenkins Workflow, OpenShift & Fabric8) to help Java developers create and deploy microservices with a completely open source and integrated Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery platform.”
Mark Rittman & Mike Durran – Oracle’s Enterprise-ready Big Data Cloud
Mark Rittman is the co-founder and technical director for Rittman Mead, an Oracle Gold Partner specialising in BI, data warehousing, data integration and performance management.
Mike joined Oracle in 1996 after completing a PhD in computational chemistry. He worked in Oracle consulting for 4 years gaining experience of the complete business intelligence project lifecycle.
Abstract: “We present an overview of Oracle’s enterprise-ready big data cloud – and then dive into and demonstrate a few services.”
Philipp Krenn – Databases, the choice is yours
Philipp Krenn is running everything database related, as well as the cloud infrastructure, at Vienna-based company ecosio.
Abstract: “We start off with a brief look at the theoretical background of distributed systems and databases in particular. After that, we discuss possible scenarios as well as the advantages and disadvantages of several databases:
– Why SQL is in fashion (again)
– Why MongoDB’s document structure fits object-oriented programming so well
– How you can capture visitor hits with Redis efficiently
– Why Cassandra is so scalable and fail-safe
– How full-text search works with Elasticsearch”.
Jakob Korab – Magical Messaging Fabric
Jakub is an independent consultant specialising in open-source messaging and integration, working exclusively with a suite of tools from the Apache Software Foundation, of which Apache ActiveMQ is a corner stone.
Abstract: “In this session we compare and contrast the approaches taken by two similar but fundamentally different messaging platforms – Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Kafka. We discuss how their underlying philosophies impact message distribution, reliability, scalability and performance.
“Along the way we dip into how IOPS, latency and bandwidth affect throughput, why messaging doesn’t play nicely with containers, and the unicorn of once-and-only-once delivery in distributed systems.”
Kai Davenport – Container Orchestration
Kai has worked on internet-based systems since 1998 and currently spends his time programming in Node.js and Go.
Abstract: “Containers have fundamentally changed the way we deploy processes and managing large numbers of them across many servers is a challenge. Automating the data-centre is a mission for ops teams and the following problems arise when doing so with containers: scheduling different types of work onto healthy machines, connecting micro-services together, detecting and reacting to failures.
This talk will first give an overview of the challenge and then highlight 3 of those tools:
Swarm (by Docker)
Mesos & Marathon (by Mesosphere)
Kubernetes (by Google)
Each of these tools take a different approach to solving the problem and we will focus on the key aspects of each that distinguishes it from the others. The objective is to provide you with enough context to make informed decisions about which to investigate further.”
Dominic Perini – An introduction to Erlang, WhatsApp’s secret sauce
Dominic is a software architect and a scalability expert at Erlang Solutions.
Abstract: “In this talk, Dominic introduces Erlang from behind the trenches, looking at how its history influenced its constructs and demonstrates the benefits of concurrency-oriented programming. He describes how Erlang, and more specifically, concurrency was done in 1995 when the limit of processes was 30,000, with an evolution as to how concurrency is used and applied today, when the limit of simultaneous processes in in the magnitude of millions per virtual machine.
Dominic explains three ways of clustering Erlang nodes within the server side domain, describing how these systems have evolved as the concurrency model and the underlying hardware got more powerful.”
Adrian Colyer – Out of the Fire Swamp
Adrian is the author of The Morning Paper, where he discusses a new research paper every weekday. He’s also a venture partner with Accel Partners in London where he helps to find and build great technology companies, and an advisor to companies such as ClusterHQ, Weaveworks, and Skipjaq.
Abstract: “Drawing on distributed and database systems research from the last few years, we’ll take a look at what’s possible, what’s practical, and what distributed-transaction processing might look like in the data centre of the future.”
Martin Thompson – Adventures with concurrent programming in Java
Martin is a Java champion with over two decades of experience building complex and high-performance computing systems. He is most recently known for his work on Aeron and SBE.
Abstract: “This talk covers some fundamental theory of concurrency and then compares various approaches to the same problem to measure the impact on latency. It also shows how some of these algorithm implementations get more interesting given the new features in Java 8.
This talk is aimed at programmers interested in advanced concurrency who want to develop algorithms with predictable response times at all levels of throughput which push our modern CPUs to the limit.”
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Shona Wright
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