Good morning day 3. So much to absorb already from Day 1 and 2 but it isn’t over yet.

This morning’s Keynote “Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones” from Simon Wardley is a must see. This was a very educational look at the value of maps, and the importance of knowing the landscape, looking at Evolutionary Flow and not just Process Flow when looking at optimisations. I would recommend the talk from Susanne Kaiser “Preparing for a future Microservices journey” from the day before as a nice companion to this keynote talk, as she used “Wardley Maps” to specifically look at the evolution towards microservices. (Though this keynote also shows that journey towards the end as well).

“Exploring your Microservices Architecture Through Graph Theory” from Nicki Watt was a great look at applying Graph Theory to distributed systems, especially with Microservices to gain insight into where architectural smells may exist using different analysis metrics.

The before lunch slot was “Awesome CI/CD Data Pipelines for Distributed Data-Sources” from Chris Burrell. This was a walkthrough of mining data sources (load and transform) from Microservices into RedShift in a pipeline approach.

“An Engineer’s Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep” had Nicky Wrightson giving a great Engineers Guide to Ops approach to building software, with 5 rules for building better systems so you don’t have to be woken up at 3 am. Slides available here: https://speakerdeck.com/nickywrightson.

Matthias Noback presented “Beyond Design Principles and Patterns: Writing Good Object-Oriented Code” which was a great look at Object-Oriented code done right, in a nice succinctly laid out path from the ground up. I want to steal the whole thing as a blog post it was so well put together. Although there were code examples (Java?), the concepts given transcended across any OO language and presented in a nice language-agnostic way. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn anything new, and I also had nothing to disagree with either.

Mufrid Krilic gave an interesting Lightning Talk: “Domain Model in Multi-Language Environment with Examples from Healthcare” which was a brief conversation about ubiquitous language when your code is in English but your domain is in Norwegian. This was from experience with a hospital software system.

To round out the weeks Lightning Talks was “Don’t Rebuild your Monolith!” by Peter Anning. An epic tale of transformation from Monolith, to Microservices, regrets and reaffirmations. An entertaining watch with the takeaway that processes like DevOps, Agile and Ubiquitous Langage that come out of moving to microservices must be maintained and assimilated, lest we forget and the monolith grows back.

And last but not least, we have the final Keynote: “Temporal Modelling” from Mathias Verraes. A really good overview conversation into Event-based systems, Event Storming and why modelling the Events of your system is of greater benefit than to use Entity Modelling instead. Another recommended one to expand your thinking.

Summary

And that’s a wrap! 2019 µCon is done and dusted. Lots to take in, lots to revisit from the recordings, and a bunch of sessions missed that need to be watched.

The amazing crew doing the filming have been working away getting all the videos up as quickly as possible (on the day recorded for the most part!). You can head over to Skills Matter and watch them all from the links provided off of the Schedule here. Take this and the previous part as a guide for where to begin but continue through all the other amazing talks I didn’t have time to attend in person as well.

Happy Learning!