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“All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer.” That’s how Woody Zuill - who coined the term Mob Programming - describes it. He is our esteemed guest on the podcast, and we spend some time digging into his own experiences mobbing.

This is a fun episode for folks looking for novel ways to improve the certainty of their software. 

Remember to like, share and subscribe on soundcloud or iTunes. It helps us reach more people!

Show notes:

The first Mob Programming Conference is happening May 1 & 2 at the Microsoft NERD Center at MIT in Cambridge MA. - http://mobprogramming.org/mob-programming-conference-may-1-and-2-2016/.

Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach (Book, work in progress) - https://leanpub.com/mobprogramming

We’re mobbing daily at Cucumber HQ and our host Steve Tooke put a post together at the end of last year  - https://cucumber.io/blog/2015/12/21/the-mob-rules-ok


Mob Programming

Today we’re going to be talking about communities of practice and how they can support learning in your company . Communities of Practice are “formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor” [1] 

In the organisations we work with, we encourage those with similar skill sets - testers for example - to get together with others in similar roles, who work in different departments. This wider pool of individuals can then support one another in their day-to-day work. 

It could therefore be said agile faces a paradox; we have all battled for smaller, cross-functional teams to improve communication and learning, but are we now losing out on the wider knowledge held in other departments?

Communities of Practice is addressing this. 

To join us to discuss the subject we’ve invited Emily Webber, an independent agile and lean consultant, who has recently published her book “Building Successful Communities of Practice”. This week’s host, Matt Wynne, is also joined by our podcast regulars, Arti Mathanda and Seb Rose.

You can find out more about Communities of Practice and Emily’s book on her website - http://emilywebber.co.uk/building-successful-communities-of-practice

Let us know your own experiences and thoughts on twitter @cucumberbdd or in the comments below.

You can also find this episode on iTunes - itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/cucumber-podcast-rss/id1078896635

[1] http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/


How Communities of Practice can support learning in your company

Jonas Bonér, CTO of LightBend and creator Akka, discusses using Akka when developing distributed systems. He talks about the Actor Model, and how every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system to be successful. 

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Akka is JVM-based framework design for developing distributed systems leveraging the Actor Model - an approach for writing concurrent systems that treat actors as universal primitives and the most successful model with abstraction has been streaming
 - Circuit breakers in Akka are a backup and retry policy; they protect you by capturing failure data and allow you to roll back 
 - Every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system, it needs to have multiple parts that run on different machines in order to function and be fully resilient - thus is a Microsystem
 - Two different trends have emerged when it comes to hardware and environments: one is the trend toward Multi-core, the is a movement toward virtualized environments and the cloud
 - Saga pattern of managing long running transactions in a distributed system fits very well with messaging style architectures

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

Akka
The Actor Model
When Akka and the Actor Model is the perfect choice
Circuit breakers patterns in distributed systems
Two trends toward Multi-core
Reactive Manifesto
Event Driven vs. Message Driven
Reactive Programming and Streams
Microliths to Microsystems
What do you have to get right before you start trying to deploy a distributed systems?
Working with ML / AI at Lightbend to understand tracing through distributed system
Saga Pattern

More on this:
Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Jonas Bonér on the Actor Model, Akka, Reactive Programming, Microservices and Distributed Systems

A monthly podcast for people who want to find new ways to deliver high-quality software products. We talk to practitioners, authors, and interesting people who are trying to make a positive difference.

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