Build Stuff'16 Lithuania

As the microservice train thunders into town, it is bringing with it an old enemy - the Remote Procedure Call. Libraries like Thrift are being used for client-server communication and no one seems to be looking back to the past to understand why we ran screaming from RPC last time. Drawing on bitter experience of DCOM, .NET remoting and Web Services, and his very British desire for a decent cup of tea, in this talk Ian Cooper will explain the anti-patterns of RPC and look at the alternatives which will ensure your system stays stable and he gets a decent brew.

If you've played games or worked in any one of a number of popular programming languages you're likely to have relied on a software machine written by a small but dedicated team of virtual machine enthusiasts. And unless you've taken a course in programming language implementation you probably have only a loose idea of what software machines are, how they work, or how easy it is to write your own. My interest in this field was sparked during the era of home micros when I chanced upon an article in a programming magazine on how to implement Forth in Basic. That article with its inscrutable magic became an obsession that lead to a career in coding and much else beyond. In this fast-paced introduction I'll use code written in C and Go to explain the basic building-blocks with which we can model computing machines in software, covering as many of the main architectural features as possible in the time: stacks; heaps; dispatchers; clocks; registers; instruction sets. I've rated the session as intermediate because it has a lot of code (and some mildly gnarly C), but if you're a beginner who wants to see a little of the magic underneath the tools you use, I'll hopefully have you covered to.