The InfoQ Podcast

Summary: In this week's podcast QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Mads Torgersen who leads the C# language design process at Microsoft, where he has been involved in five versions of C#, and also contributed to TypeScript, Visual Basic, Roslyn and LINQ. Before he joined Microsoft a decade ago, he worked as a university professor in Aarhus, Denmark, doing research into programming language design and contributing to Java generics.
Why listen to this podcast
•	The overall theme for C# 7 will be features that make it easier to work with data, including language level support for tuples. 
Roslyn, the compiler and API, allows a much more agile evolution of the language.
•	The Omnisharp initiative aims to facilitate easier editing of C# code in other editors, including VS Code.
•	IoT and Artificial Intelligence are emerging as key disruptive trends.
•	The release may also include pattern matching for type switching.
•	C# 7 is the first new release of the language to be completely built in the open.

More on this
•	You can access our whole coverage on C#7 http://bit.ly/1ZlM4NI or have an overview on what's new on C# in general http://bit.ly/1rx6SGM.
•	You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. http://bit.ly/24x3IVq
•	Attend Mads Torgersen's session at QCon New York 2016, Jun 13-17. http://bit.ly/1YcBgAY


Show Notes

Mads Torgersen on C# 7 and Beyond

In this week's podcast QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Matt Ranney who is the Chief Systems Architect at Uber, where he's helping build and scale everything he can. 

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Expanding a company and team at this rate is genuinely hard. Lots of mistakes have been made along the way.
 - Microservices allow companies to grow rapidly but have a cost in terms of aggregate velocity.
 - Uber is gradually moving its marketplace development from Node.js to Go and Java. Java is used for the map services.
 - Aggressive failure testing is used extensively in Uber.
 - Some early design choices - like using JSON over HTTP - make formal verification basically impossible.

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/1TH8app

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

Attend Matt Ranney's session at QCon New York 2016, Jun 13-17: http://bit.ly/1TH75ht

Uber's Chief Systems Architect on their Architecture and Rapid Growth

In this week's podcast QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Heather Fleming, who is the VP of product and program management at GILT, where she is responsible for not only the customer-facing website, but also back office things from distribution to order processing.

Why listen to this podcast:

- GILT treats every person as an individual, with a skillset that is outside their responsibilities.
- You should be able to be your authentic self wherever you are.
- Google found creating a psychologically safe work environment was key to high performing teams.
- You can kill a great team by taking away their autonomy and empowerment.
- Great engineers that want to be managers are fearful of losing their skill, and great engineers that don't want to be managers are put in those roles and are terrible managers.

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/1U2Wgq9

1m 49s - One of the things that makes the culture at GILT so special is the "ingredients framework" that considers every person an individual, with a skillset that is outside what their title might say and what their role and responsibilities might be.
3m 29s - One of the team ingredients is called "motivator" - the ability to make sure that the team understands what they're working on, and more importantly the "why" and how it's driving business or customer value.
4m 35s - The relationship you have with your co-workers should be deeper than many of us are allowing them to be, because they are like your second family.

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/1U2Wgq9 

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

Attend Heather Fleming's session at QCon New York 2016, Jun 13-17: http://bit.ly/1U2f3og

Show notes

GILT VP Heather Fleming on Unlocking the "Secret Sauce" of Great Teams

In this week's podcast Richard Seroter talks to James Shore, author of The Art of Agile Development and one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. Also on the podcast are Llewellyn Falco, creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests and co-founder of Teaching Kids Programming, and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, inventor of Responsibility-Driven Design, as well as the author of books including Designing Object: Oriented Software and Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities and Collaborations.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - A lot of people know how to do TDD and refactoring for the back end, but not for the font, but the basics are the same.
 - The basics of Test-Driven Development are the same for the front or back end.
 - If you don't know what's wrong, you don't know how to fix it.
 - The most common code smells, according to Llewellyn Falco: Clutter, long lines, long methods, duplication, and inconsistency.
 - How do we make, in an agile way, the architectural work visible, and not ignore it?
 - How do you have an incremental architecture and get measurements? If I say to you I'm going to go away for six months and figure it out, that's not very measurable.

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/1Pse2r1

1m:10s - The talk 'Agile Engineering for the Web' was about how do you bring typical Agile engineering ideas like TDD and refactoring to the front-end languages.
1m:33s - A lot of people know how to do these things on the back-end, but when you get to the front end a lot of people just throw up their hands.
2m:24s - I see CSS bugs all the time, because it's very hard to refactor CSS without breaking something.

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/1Pse2r1

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

James Shore, Llewellyn Falco, and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on TDD and Architecture

In this week's podcast, professor Barry Burd talks to Shuman Ghosemajumder. Ghosemajumder is VP of product management at Shape Security and former click fraud czar for Google. Ghosemajumder is also the co-author of the book CGI Programming Unleashed, and was a keynote speaker at QCon New York 2016 presenting Security War Stories.

Why listen to this podcast:

With more of our lives conducted online through technology and information retrieval systems, the use of advanced technology gives criminals the opportunity to be able to do things that they weren't able to do.

 - Cyber-criminals come from all over the world and every socioeconomic background, so long as there's some level of access to computers and technology.
 - You see organised cyber-crime focusing on large companies because of the fact that they get a much greater sense of efficiency for their attacks.
 - Cyber-criminals are getting creative, and coming up with ways to interact with websites we haven't thought of before.
 - You can have very large scale attacks that are completely invisible from the point of view of the application that's being attacked.
 - The context of what are you are using software for is more important than just going through an understanding of the code level vulnerability.

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

The People Behind Cyber-Crime

5:28 - There are all kinds of different personalities and demographics involved. Cyber-criminals come from all over the world and every socioeconomic background, so long as there's some level of access to computers and technology. Even in cases where a cyber criminal doesn't know how to use technology directly, or how to create something like a piece of malware, they can still be involved in a cyber-criminal's scheme.
6:29 - A scheme which uses large groups of individuals and which doesn’t necessarily need to have skills itself, is stealing money from bank accounts. Being able to transfer money using malware on people’s machines from one account to another account that the cyber-criminal controls still involves getting that money out. That last step can involve a set of bank accounts that are assigned to real individuals.

More on this:

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

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

InfoQ Podcast

Shuman Ghosemajumder on Security and Cyber-Crime

In this week's podcast InfoQ’s editor-in-chief Charles Humble talks to Data Scientist Cathy O’Neil. O'Neil is the author of the blog mathbabe.org. She was the former Director of the Lede Program in Data Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Tow Center and was employed as Data Science Consultant at Johnson Research Labs. O'Neil earned a mathematics Ph.D. from Harvard University. Topics discussed include her book “Weapons of Math Destruction,” predictive policing models, the teacher value added model, approaches to auditing algorithms and whether government regulation of the field is needed.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - There is a class of pernicious big data algorithms that are increasingly controlling society but are not open to scrutiny.
 - Flawed data can result in an algorithm that is, for instance, racist and sexist.  For example, the data used in predictive policing models is racist. But people tend to be overly trusting of algorithms because they are mathematical.
 - Data scientists have to make ethical decisions even if they don’t acknowledge it. Often problems stem from an abdication of responsibility.
 - Auditing for algorithms is still a very young field with ongoing academic research exploring approaches.
 - Government regulation of the industry may well be required.

Notes and links can be found on http://bit.ly/2eYVb9q

Weapons of math destruction

0m:43s - The central thesis of the book is that whilst not all algorithms are bad, there is a class of pernicious big data algorithms that are increasingly controlling society.
1m:32s - The classes of algorithm that O'Neil is concerned about - the weapons of math destruction - have three characteristics: they are widespread and impact on important decisions like whether someone can go to college or get a job, they are somehow secret so that the people who are being targeted don’t know they are being scored or don’t understand how their score is computed; and the third characteristic is they are destructive - they ruin lives.
2m:51s - These characteristics undermine the original intention of the algorithm, which is often trying to solve big society problems with the help of data.

More on this:

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2eYVb9q

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Cathy O'Neil on Pernicious Machine Learning Algorithms and How to Audit Them

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

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

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

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Martin Hadley on R and the modern R ecosystem

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

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

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

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Security Considerations and the State of Microservices with Sam Newman

Nora Jones, a senior software engineer on Netflix’ Chaos Team, talks with Wesley Reisz about what Chaos Engineering means today. She covers what it takes to build a practice, how to establish a strategy, defines cost of impact, and covers key technical considerations when leveraging chaos engineering.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Chaos engineering is a discipline where you formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and evaluate the results afterwards.
- Injecting a bit of failure over time is going to make your system more resilient in the end.
- Start with Tier 2 or non-critical services first, and build up success stories to grow chaos further.
- As systems become more and more distributed, there becomes a higher need for chaos engineering.
- If you’re running your first experiment, get your service owners in a war room and get them to monitor the results of the test as it is running.

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

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

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Nora Jones on Establishing, Growing, and Maturing a Chaos Engineering Practice

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

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

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

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

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 


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Simon Brown on the Role of the Software Architect in a Continuous Delivery Environment

Shubha Nabar is a senior director of data science for Salesforce Einstein. Prior to working for Salesforce, she was a data scientist at LinkedIn and Microsoft.  In the podcast she discusses Salesforce Einstein and the problem space that they are trying to solve, explores the differences between enterprise and consumer for machine learning, and then talks about the Optimus Prime Scala library that they use in Salesforce.

Why listen to this podcast:
* The volume of data, and hardware advances have made it possible to do machine learning to do them a lot faster.
* AI is a science of building intelligent software, encompassing many aspects of intelligence that we tend to think of as human.
* If you can’t measure something, you can’t fix it.
* You have to think about what you can automate, rather than having a human to try and engineer out all those features.
* Get feedback on design.

Nora Jones, a senior software engineer on Netflix’ Chaos Team, talks with Wesley Reisz about what Chaos Engineering means today. She covers what it takes to build a practice, how to establish a strategy, defines cost of impact, and covers key technical considerations when leveraging chaos engineering.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Chaos engineering is a discipline where you formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and evaluate the results afterwards.
- Injecting a bit of failure over time is going to make your system more resilient in the end.
- Start with Tier 2 or non-critical services first, and build up success stories to grow chaos further.
- As systems become more and more distributed, there becomes a higher need for chaos engineering.
- If you’re running your first experiment, get your service owners in a war room and get them to monitor the results of the test as it is running.

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

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 extended shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2xK7OxR

Shubha Nabar Discusses Einstein, the Machine Learning System in Salesforce

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