software engineer

“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

"Incremental change may be good theory, but in practice you have to have a big enough stick to hit everybody with to make everything move at once". So shares Adrian Cockcroft, who helped lead Netflix's migration from datacenter to the cloud -- and from monolithic to microservices architecture -- when their streaming business (the "stick"!) was exploding.

So how did they -- and how can other companies -- make such big, bet-the-company kind of moves, without getting mired in fanatical internal debates? Does organizational structure need to change, especially if moving from a more product-, than project-based, approach? What happens to security? And finally, what happens to the role of CIOs; what can/should they do?

Most interestingly: How will the entire industry be affected as companies not only adopt, but essentially offer, microservices or narrow cloud APIs? How do the trends of microservices, containers, devops, cloud, as-a-service/ on-demand, serverless -- all moves towards more and more ephemerality -- change the future of computing and even work? Cockcroft (who is now a technology fellow at Battery Ventures) joins this episode of the a16z Podcast, in conversation with Frank Chen and Martin Casado (and Sonal Chokshi) to discuss these shifts and more.

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The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
 
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.

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a16z Podcast: All About Microservices

In Episode 4 of JAMstack Radio, Brian and Ryan are joined by engineer David Wells who explains the Serverless Framework and automation using AWS Lambda. The three cover topics including potential pain points of complex microservices, advantages of event-driven architectures, and writing Kanye skills for Amazon's Alexa. Plus a new round of JAMPicks.

Producer: Ted Carstensen
Editor: Lucas Oswald

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JAMstack Radio - Ep. #4, The Serverless Framework & AWS Lambda

In this week’s podcast Wes Reisz talks to Neha Batra, a software engineer at Pivotal Labs. Neha spoke about pair programming in her recent QCon San Francisco 2016 presentation, and has taken time to discuss techniques to get started with the practice as well as tips for implementing it on your team. Neha also touches on vulnerability based trust and how it can help effectively build a trusting team environment.
Why listen to this podcast:

 - If you successfully start with pair programming, other tenants of XP are pulled along with you
 - Ways to get creative with remote pairing to make it work
 - The daily retro
 - Overcoming hesitance with managers when trying to implement pair programming full time
 - Vulnerability based trust building

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2i2a0sJ

How has Pair Programming Evolved Over the Years? 

6m:17s - A lot of the fundamentals are the same, but with XP we take it to the extreme to be able to do it  eight hours a day.
6m:24s - To pair for eight hours a day we adapt to a lot of other process to create a simpler way of working, giving us an easier level to default to.
6m:44s - We use phrases in the team to make sure we agree on a test, that there are no false positives, when to refactor etc. This helps us avoid accruing code debt since we don’t do code reviews.

More on this:
Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2i2a0sJ

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

Neha Batra - Pivotal Labs Pair Programming

Peter Bourgon discusses his work at Weaveworks, discovering and imlemeting CRDTs for time-stamped events at Soundcloud, Microservices in Go with Go Kit and the state of package management in Go.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - We’ve hit the limits of Moore’s law so when we want to scale we have to think about how we do communication across unreliable links between unreliable machines.
 - In an AP algorithm like Gossip you still make forward progress in case of a failure. In Paxos you stop and return failures.
 - CRDTs give us a rigours set of rules to accommodate failures for maps, sets etc. in communication that result in am eventually consistent system.
 - Go is optimised to readers/maintainers vs. making the programmers’ life easier. Go is closer to C than Java in that it allows you to layout memory very precisely, allowing you to, for example, optimise cache lines in your CPU. 
 - Bourgon started a project called Go Kit, which is designed for building microservices in Go. It takes inspiration from Tiwtter’s Scala-based Finagle which solved a lot of Micoservice concerns. 
 - Go has a number of community-maintained package managers but no good solution; work in ongoing to try and resolve this.

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kaHC9k

Work at Weaveworks
Gossip vs. Paxos
CRDTs at SoundCloud
Go
Go in large teams
Go and Java package management
Microservices in Go with Go Kit
Logging and tracing in a distributed environment

More on this:
Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/2kaHC9k

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

Peter Bourgon on Gossip, Paxos, Microservices in Go, and CRDTs at SoundCloud

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

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

In this episode of the O’Reilly podcast, Jon Bruner sat down with Rahul Kamdar, director of product management and strategy at TIBCO Software. They discussed the shift from the centralized enterprise service bus (ESB) to a distributed data architecture based on microservices, APIs, and cloud-native applications.

From Enterprise Service Bus to Microservices

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk serverless architecture with Mike Roberts, engineering leader and co-founder of Symphonia, a serverless and cloud architecture consultancy. Roberts will give two presentations—Serverless Architectures: What, Why, Why Not, and Where Next? and Designing Serverless AWS Applications—at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, October 16-19, 2017, in London.

software engineer

Pavel Sheynkman