The InfoQ Podcast

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Simon Brown on the Role of the Software Architect in a Continuous Delivery Environment Sep 23, 2017

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This week's podcast features Simon Brown well known for his work training software architects. Topics include the differences between a tech lead and an architect, how much documentation is enough and what that looks like in a continuous delivery environment. What you'll learn on this podcast: • As an industry we seem to have lost our knowledge of how to do architecture well in the context of modern agile software teams. • Architecture is about the expensive decisions; things that are costly to change later. • Ideally architects should code in the production code base. If you are not able to do this at least be involved in quality reviews and peer reviews in the production code so you can get feedback on your designs. • It is often said the the code is the only documentation you need but the code can’t tell you everything. You do need to document the things you can’t get from the code such as the architectural drivers, they key quality attributes and so on along with some high level diagrams and how you operate the system. • As you step into the role of architect go and find a mentor or a local meet-up. The major change is that you have to influence and lead people. This podcast is sponsored by AppDynamics. Software architects play a critical role in designi¬¬¬ng, executing, and migrating large infrastructures to the cloud. Download AppDynamic’s FREE eBook “10 Tips for Enterprise Cloud Migration” and launch your migration project with a proven plan. Download the eBook now at http://infoq.link/web_sndcld_appdynamics Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2xvq7qM

Twitter's Yao Yue on Latency, Performance Monitoring, & Caching at Scale Sep 18, 2017

Show notes

This week's podcasts features Yao Yue of Twitter. Yao spent the majority of her career working on caching systems at Twitter. She has since created a performance team that deals with edge performance outliers often exposed by the enormous scale of Twitter. In this podcast, she discusses standing up the performance team, thoughts on instrumenting applications, and interesting performance issues (and strategies for solving them) they’ve seen at Twitter. Why listen to this podcast: * Performance problems can be caused by a few machines running slowly causing cascading failure * Aggregating stats on a minute-by-minute basis can be an effective way of monitoring thousands of servers * Being able to record second-by-second is often too expensive to centrally aggregate, but can be stored locally * Distinguishing between request timeout and connection/network timeouts is important to prevent thundering herds * With larger scale organisations, having dedicated performance teams helps centralise skills to solve performance problems More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2wnBemB You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2wnBemB

Linda Rising on the Importance of Patterns, Her Journey, & Patterns for Driving Change/Innovation Sep 08, 2017

Show notes

On the InfoQ Podcast this week, Wes Reisz talks with the Queen of Patterns, Linda Rising. Linda discusses her thoughts on the importance of patterns, she answers questions about what really is a pattern, and how she became involved in working with them. Throughout the podcast she discusses a variety of organizational and personal patterns and finally wraps with patterns to apply when driving change and innovation. Why listen to this podcast: - You have to realise that there’s nothing you can do about other people. The only person you can affect is yourself. - A pattern is not a band-aid that you use once. You use it in a context where you use it in conjunctions with other patterns. - Take baby steps when driving change in an organisation, and seek out a pocket of receptive people to drive it. - Slack is an important part to have in life, so that if something comes along you can absorb it without having to stop doing something else. - Listen, Listen, Listen. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2vLIsMC You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2vLIsMC

Security Considerations and the State of Microservices with Sam Newman Aug 18, 2017

Show notes

Wesley Reisz talks with Sam Newman about microservices. They explore the current state of the art with regards the architectural style and corresponding tooling and deployment platforms. They then discuss how microservices increase the surface area of where sensitive information can be read or manipulated, but also have the potential to create systems that are more secure. Why listen to this podcast: - Different organisations have different risk appetites for new technology, so what may be appropriate for one organisation may not be appropriate technology choices for another. - If you are deploying micro services then you need to know why you are doing it and what benefits you expect to get from deploying them. - Micro services are defined by their independently deployable units rather than their size. - Using a cryptographic token that is verifiable off line is a common pattern for passing authentication contexts around to different services. - Serverless architectures redeuce the need to monitor server patching but does not diminish the need for monitoring application runtime or library dependencies from security patching. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2v8NJg6 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2v8NJg6

Jessica Kerr on Productivity, Slack Chatbots, Yak Shaving, & Why Diversity Matters for Innovation Aug 11, 2017

Show notes

Wesley Reisz talks with Jessica Kerr about her focus on developer productivity. Topics include her work at Atomist building Slack Chatbots, an approach to categorizing Yak Shaving (in an effort to prioritize and automate development dependencies), how an innovation culture drives diversity, and, finally, the role of 10x developers in the lifecycle of a company or product. Why listen to this podcast: - There are five kinds of Yak to shave - Atomist uses a Slack chatbot to automate and track commits, builds, push requests etc. - Agile retrospectives are a great way to encourage an innovation culture - Diverse teams flourish in innovation cultures - 10x developers are great for launching products, but teams are needed as products scale up More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2uO60PR You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2uO60PR

Martin Hadley on R and the modern R ecosystem Jul 21, 2017

Show notes

Werner Schuster talks to Martin Hadley, data scientist at University of Oxford. They discuss the state of the R language, the rich R ecosystem that covers development (RStudio), notebooks for publication (R Notebooks, RPubs), writing web apps (Shiny), and the pros/cons of the different data frames implementations. Why listen to this podcast: - R is the tool for working with rectangular data - Modern data frame implementations are Tibble and data.table (for large amounts of data) - RMarkdown and R Notebooks allow to explore data and then publish it the results and (interactive) visualization - Use Shinyapps to publish server side R applications - Tidyverse is the place to look for modern R packages More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2twOXWJ You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hotest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2twOXWJ

Pony Language Designer Sylvan Clebsch on Pony’s Design, Garbage Collection, and Formal Verification Jul 07, 2017

Show notes

In this podcast Charles Humble talks to Sylvan Clebsch, who is the designer of the actor-model language Pony programming and now works at Microsoft Research in Cambridge in the Programming Language Principles group. They talk about the inspirations behind Pony, how the garbage collector avoids stop-the-world pauses, the queuing systems, work scheduler, and formal verification. Why listen to this podcast: * Pony scales from a Raspberry Pi through a 64 core half terabyte machine to a 4096 core SGI beast * An actor has a 256-byte overhead, so creating hundreds of thousands of actors is possible * Actors have unbounded queues to prevent deadlock * Each actor garbage collects its own heap, so global stop-the-world pauses are not needed * Because the type system is data-race free, it’s impossible to have concurrency problems in Pony More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2tZXcKE You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2tZXcKE

Kotlin Lead Language Designer Andrey Breslav on Android Support, Language Features and Future Plans Jun 22, 2017

Show notes

Why listen to this podcast: - Kotlin is an officially supported language on Google Android platforms - Kotlin Native and Kotlin JS will allow code reuse between server, client and mobile devices - Type safety means that references can be checked for nullability Great tooling is a driver in what kind of language features are (and aren’t) adopted - Coroutines provide a way of creating maintainable asynchronous systems More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2sHyxqQ You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2sHyxqQ

Sid Anand on Building Agari’s Cloud-native Data Pipelines with AWS Kinesis and Serverless Jun 09, 2017

Show notes

Wesley Reisz talks to Sid Anand, a data architect at cybersecurity company Agari, about building cloud-native data pipelines. The focus of their discussion is around a solution Agari uses that is built from Amazon Kinesis Streams, serverless functions, and auto scaling groups. Sid Anand is an architect at Agari, and a former technical architect at eBay, Netflix, and LinkedIn. He has 15 years of data infrastructure experience at scale, is a PMC for Apache Airflow, and is also a program committee chair for QCon San Francisco and QCon London. Why listen to this podcast - Real-time data pipeline processing is very latency sensitive - Micro-batching allows much smaller amounts of data to be processed - Use the appropriate data store (or stores) to support the use of the dataIngesting data quickly into a clean database with minimal indexes can be fast - Communicate using a messaging system that supports schema evolution More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2rJU9nB You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2rJU9nB

Sachin Kulkarni Describes the Architecture Behind Facebook Live May 26, 2017

Show notes

Wesley Reisz talks to Sachin Kulkarni, Director of Engineering at Facebook, about the engineering challenges for Facebook live, and how it compares to the video upload platform at Facebook. Why listen to this podcast: - Facebook Infrastructure powers the board family of apps including the Facebook app, Messenger and Instagram. It is largely a C++ shop. There is some Java and Python, and the business logic is all done in PHP. The iOS apps are written in Objective C and the Android apps are in Java. - The video infra team at Facebook builds the video infrastructure across the whole company. Projects include a distributed video encoding platform which results in low latency video encoding, video upload and ingest. - Facebook Live does encoding on both the client and the server. The trade-off between encoding on the client side and the server side is mostly around the quality of the video vs. latency and reliability. - Facebook gets around 10x speed-up by encoding data in parallel compared to serial. - They also have an AI-based encoding system which resulted in 20% smaller files than raw H.264. You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2qrseG5 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2qrseG5 Want more? Read InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2dcHmpu

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