Build Stuff'16 Lithuania

The beautiful thing about software engineering is that it gives you the warm and fuzzy illusion of total understanding: I control this machine because I know how it operates. This is the result of layers upon layers of successful abstractions, which hide immense sophistication and complexity. As with any abstraction, though, these sometimes leak, and that's when a good grounding in what's under the hood pays off. The second talk in this series peels a few layers of abstraction and takes a look under the hood of our "car engine", the CPU. While hardly anyone codes in assembly language anymore, your C# or JavaScript (or Scala or...) application still ends up executing machine code instructions on a processor; that is why Java has a memory model, why memory layout still matters at scale, and why you're usually free to ignore these considerations and go about your merry way. You'll come away knowing a little bit about a lot of different moving parts under the hood; after all, isn't understanding how the machine operates what this is all about?

Surprise! Your app is totally jacked up!

No one anticipated #npmgate. Though unlikely to happen again, npm’s unpublish loophole is a clear reminder of the meaning of “free as in puppy” when it comes to open source reuse. It’s an excellent opportunity to have a conversation about coupling, dependency management, responsible engineering and open source citizenry.

In this talk, I’ll share techniques for managing dependencies in your Node.js applications at several levels: third party, architectural/design, and implementation. I’ll demonstrate several tools you can incorporate into your testing practice, continuous deployment pipeline and development workflow. Lastly, we’ll examine proven object-oriented patterns and functional composition techniques that help us control coupling in the code we own.