NDC started as a small developer conference in Norway in 2008, extended to London in 2013, and I attended the first one in Sydney in 2016. It has kept to its roots as a small and friendly conference.
I attended a two-day workshop before the conference, the three days of the conference, and the tiny informal PubConf on the last evening.
The technical level of the talks and the audience was fairly high. This is better than other conferences I’ve been to which have been at more of a beginner’s level.
The recurring themes of the conference were:
Watch this space for the videos to become available.
This workshop was given by Sam Newman, the author of the authoratative book “Building Microservices”. It was about the theory and best practices of Microservices, not about any specific implementations. The slides for the workshop are available here.
My main takeaways are:
Conclusion: services should be logically separated and independant.
This was the first talk I went to on cloud functions, but it set the scene for several of the following talks. He was the first of many to use the buzzword serverless that kept recurring throughout the conference. It means that you only need to think about the code and not the servers - it scales automatically, no need to worry about failover, no need to have backup machines etc.
There are three main cloud function providers which are basically interchangeable, in order of popularity:
The premise of the talk was that AWS is free for the first million requests, and then $2 per million after that. He used AWS and Node.js for his example, but the principal is the same for any other technology choice.
Functions can be triggered by anything - eg file saved, message queue, record added to database, schedule, web request, or some complex condition - which means you don’t need to write the code that triggers the function.
VMs are incentivized to keep the machine busy, whereas functions are incentivized to write small, isolated, loosely coupled modules - which is exactly the definition of a microservice.
I got the impression that Akka.Net is a low level design of microservices. It doesn’t describe the deployment scenario. For a more managed implementation you could use Azure Service Fabric.
How to gradually start using functional programming features in the languages you already use.
C# Linq names functions using SQL terms rather than normal FP terms, eg select instead of map, but the concepts are the same.
In JavaScript use lodash to get similar functional constructs:
var _ = require('lodash')
_.first(...).skip()....etc
The slides and examples are available here.
Machine learning was previously the domain of data scientists, but these are in short supply and very expensive, so Azure Machine Learning makes it accessible for developers.
Steps:
Use drag’n’drop to design experiments. There are lots of modules to choose from, eg select columns, clean missing values, etc. It’s an experiment! If in doubt, just try something, then try something else.
Once you have a trained model, deploy it as a web service to use for prediction.
If prediction accuracy is better than random then it’s worthwhile, eg when predicting one of four categories, better than 25% accuracy is good.
Very good talk about coding best practices that need to be enforced in object-oriented programming but come naturally in functional programming.
FP defines a pure function as a function that has the same output for the same input, and no side effects. You can’t call an impure function from a pure function (in Haskell it won’t even compile), which means that functions that perform I/O (impure) will be on the outside and business logic will be in the center. Pure functions can be easily tested. A function can take another function as input, eg getting a value from a database - so the function is testable without having to, for example, mock a repository.
Power BI makes a nice dashboard with nice data visualizations out of any data sets.
The aim of .Net Core is to make .Net as easy to run as JavaScript etc:
dotnet init
dotnet new
dotnet restore
PCL seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s the lowest common denominator.
.Net Core is not a replacement for .Net 4.6 etc. Things like WPF, WinForms, etc will never be in Core.
.Net Core got a bad press because of the re-organizations leading up to the 1.0 release, but that was due to re-organizations within Microsoft.
The talk included “microservice” in the title but I think that was just to be buzzword-friendly. It was about security in general.
Good resources:
The conference ended with a series of light-hearted lightning talks in a pub. The idea for PubConf came out of the philosophy “always do when you’re sober what you say when you’re drunk”. The format is 20 slides in 5 minutes. There’s one code of conduct rule: what happens in PubConf stays in PubConf. That means no photos and no quotes.
The star of NDC, and of PubConf, was Troy Hunt. He was the subject of many of the jokes, and he gave a nice talk on the lighter side of security.
PubConf ended with music from Dylan Beattie who said “two good things came out of Australia 40 years ago - Troy Hunt and AC/DC” before playing a version of “Have I been pwned?” to the tune of “Highway from Hell”. He also played his hilarious hit “We’re Gonna Build a Framework”.