Build Stuff'16 Lithuania

For years, Ruby on Rails has been the web application framework of choice for software developers who need to *Get Things Done*. We can rapidly prototype, and then effortlessly ship. But what happens when the complexity of the system inevitably grows? We write tests, and more tests, and even more tests, and still we're on our knees, fighting fires and debugging. We need better tools. We need our machines to automatically verify the fundamental correctness of our systems. These tools have been around for a while, but until recently the “Getting Started” material has been thin on the ground. In this talk I will show you how to get up and running and ready to build stuff with a Rails-like framework underpinned by one of the fastest and most stable languages in the industry: Haskell. The talk will cover everything from setting up a development environment, to integrating with a database and deploying to a VPS. Although this is a Haskell talk, it's from an angle of pragmatism and not academia. You do not need to know Haskell to enjoy this talk.

The Wix platform hosts over 80 million websites, with billions of visitors per day, all built using the Wix Editor. In this talk I will cover how we measure performance, and the techniques and methodologies we use to improve it. I'll examine the tools and frameworks that we use, and discuss what worked for us and what didn't.

When we talk about scaling, we usually mean up (bigger machine) or out (more machines). However, there is another alternative, which is changing our workload in a way that makes it inherently more parallelizable and then taking advantage of specialized hardware that's very good at handling that sort of thing. Most of us have exactly this type of hardware just sitting in our computers, doing very little most of the time. I'm talking, of course, about the GPU. General-purpose computing on the GPU (GPGPU) is no longer the domain of pure academic research. It is being used in real-world applications such as image processing and face recognition, cryptography, big data analysis, and Bitcoin mining. In this session we will examine the available GPGPU frameworks, learn how to integrate C++ AMP and OpenCL into regular .NET and Java applications, how to debug mixed .NET and GPGPU code in Visual Studio, and how to use the Aparapi framework to seamlessly mix regular CPU and GPGPU code in Java. We’ll even look at using GPGPU from server and client-side JavaScript with WebCL. We will discuss the kinds of tasks that can benefit from graphics card processing, how best to parallelize workloads, and what some of the performance trade-offs are.

Most of us are familiar with the architectural style known as REST, but even experienced developers often find it difficult to translate REST's architectural principles into running code. In this talk, we'll explore the elements of REST related to hypermedia and the principle of "hypermedia as the engine of application state" (HATEOAS) - we'll talk about why they matter, and when you might want to implement them in your own systems. We'll look at some of the tools that exist to help you design, deliver and debug your HTTP APIs, and we'll do some hands-on coding to show you how to implement lightweight, flexibile hypermedia patterns in your .NET web applications using the NancyFX HTTP framework and the HAL hypermedia application language.