In this week's podcast, QCon chair Wes Reisz and Werner Schuster talk to Caitie McCaffrey. McCaffrey works on distributed systems with the engineering effectiveness team at Twitter, and has experience building the large scale services and systems that power the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, Microsoft Game Studios, and HBO. McCaffrey's presentation at QCon New York was called The Verification of a Distributed System.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Twitter's engineering effectiveness team aims to help make dev tools better, and make developers happier and more efficient.
- Asking someone to speak at your conference or join your team solely because of their gender does more harm than people think.
- There is not one prescriptive way to make good, successful technology.
- Even when we don't have time for testing, there are options to increase your confidence in your system.
- The biggest problem when running a unit test is that it is only testing the input you hard code into the unit test.

Notes and links can be found on http://bit.ly/2al6BRp

Engineering Effectiveness

1:24 - The purpose of the engineering effectiveness team is to help make dev tools better, and to make Twitter's developers happier and more efficient.
2:44 - The team is trying to make infrastructure so that not every team has to solve the distributed problem on their own, and give developers some APIs and tools so that they can build systems easily.

More on this:

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2al6BRp

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InfoQ Podcast

Show notes

Caitie McCaffrey on Engineering Effectiveness, Diversity, & Verification of Distributed Systems

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

Show Notes

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

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