Build Stuff'16 Lithuania

It‘s not the case anymore, that a good start-up needs an idea and an app. In pursue of success today we need more ingredients and new business processes. During this presentation you will hear examples and recommendations, on how to build a successful start-up: business process + idea + app.

These days "full-stack development" means more than simply coding stuff ranging from pretty UI down to DB access. Sometimes it's required to be able set up set of staging/production boxes, automate deployments and then maintain this infrastructure setup over time. Let me show you Ansible and start setting up your infrastructure like a pro. This talk will be based on my experience from real life project, where we used Ansible to build multi-server cloud infrastructure from scratch and set up production-like deployment for simple app.

This talk has nothing to do with security. Nginx is a great load balancer and it's functionality can be extended by writing custom modules. In C. I'll not only show how to do this, but also share our experiences developing and running it in production. 

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.

From the mathematicians and scientists of the 20th centuries to today's ninja craftsmen/craftswomen, Software community hast lost something along the way. Instead of carefully observing scientific methods and maintaining objectivity, we have tangled ourselves in web of hype, and celebrity culture - as if adopting today's YOLO motto. We have completely forgot how to reason scientifically about matters of technical dispute, instead, whoever is more opinionated or shouts louder wins - as if software is an abstract art where you can only form an opinion. This talk is a critique of the status quo. With a survey of the history of software, we will try to find our roots highlighting the wrong footsteps we have taken as an industry. It also shines a ray of light with the recent rise in adoption of scientific methods as a result of pick up in Machine Learning and Data Science. A sobering talk yet not without sprinkles of fun and sense of humour...

Let's face it - concurrency is hard. Deadlocks, race conditions - these make your head hurt quite often, and trying to debug those issues only adds up more pain. Why don't we try to avoid those and still have our programs run concurrently? But can we do that? YES! Meet Pony. Pony is an object-oriented, capabilities-secure programming language with an actor model implementation at its core - here "actor" is a keyword! Pony is fun because it fixes most issues of concurrent programming. In the world of Pony it's the compiler that tells you whether your program is safe to execute. It's also type-safe, has no runtime exceptions and you can even use lambdas! I'll show you some examples of Pony programs, how its type system works and how capabilities render your concurrency safe.

Adform is on a journey to re-factoring private cloud, we run thousands of virtual machines in multiple datacenters and we manage terabytes of  replicated storage.
I'll share our experience deploying and managing  private cloud,  what architecture we're using and  key technologies we're adopting.

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.

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.

This quick lecture will introduce some basic concepts about Assembly programming. Why is Assembly important nowadays? How did it start? Is it true that it is so difficult? By attending this session, you will have a quick overview of Assembly's history, the main microprocessors and their architectures, followed by a comprehensive tutorial about structuring basic Assembly code for 6800, 8086 and MIPS. We will also show you architectural differences (RISC vs CISC, LE vs BE, etc) and some interesting challenges. Bonus: Comparison between microprocessors from the old days with the recent ones.

Code is a not an asset. Technology is not the solution to your company problems. And engineering for engineering's sake is not the answer. As engineers, we tend to focus a lot of our time thinking about "how?". How to solve this problem? How to structure code? How to name this method? We forget to ask "why?" and ponder the usefulness and greater impact of what we're doing. We don't work in silos. What we do affects our users. But not only that. It also affects our teammates and other developers in our organisations. Let's talk about why, having aforementioned things in mind, we should aim to write less code. Use less and more mature technologies. And don't do engineering for engineering's sake.

Do strong personalities dominate your development team? Are code reviews painful? Are you blindly following  orders from a backlog, or are you learning from observation? Visual Thinking Strategies, or VTS, is a cross­disciplinary technique applicable to anyone working in a  collaborative setting where observation is key. VTS develops critical thinking skills by viewing and discussing  works of art in a group. It is backed by over 30 years of field research showing its effectiveness and  accessibility. By allowing individuals to talk about art ­ without needing a background in the field ­ VTS  advances skills you can use to create more relevant products and stronger teams: Observing, Brainstorming,  Speculating, Reasoning with Evidence, Cultivating a Point of View, and Revision & Elaboration. During this interactive exercise, we’ll discuss selected works of art as a group. There are no right answers or  group consensus being sought. We’re creating an environment and process for looking, thinking, reasoning  and revision skills that are mission­critical to anyone working in a software design or development role. After  our group discussion, I’ll introduce the basics of image selection and facilitating VTS sessions within your  organization. In addition to the above, I’ll cover how VTS can help you and your team with the following:  Comfort with Ambiguity, Openness to the Unfamiliar, Civil Debate, and Willingness to Participate in Group  Thinking.

Pyramids? Quadrants? Cupcakes?! There are a number models that describe approaches to test automation strategy and their possible outcomes.

In this talk, we’ll look at classical models of testing patterns and antipatterns - technical, cultural, productive and anti-productive. Adding layers of professional experience, real world example, and case study, I’ll add detail and nuance to these models.

With a new lens, focused on tests as value amplifiers, I'll share a new approach to evolving a testing strategy appropriate for your product. Attendees will learn effective measurement technique, putting code coverage fixation to rest.

Traditionally we consider web sites to be working in an online mode only. If the Internet connection drops, the entire web site stops functioning. Mobile applications, however, change this perception as connection is considered unstable and applications should take necessary measures for good user experience. Now we are able to create web sites that react on changes in the Internet connection and provide certain functionality offline. AppCache, IndexedDB and File API are few of the mechanisms to allow us to store the application and its data in the browser. However, now we have some questions to think about: Who is the master of the data - the client or the server? What data should we download in advance? How do we handle updates of the application? In this talk I will give overview of how web applications can go offline and which precautions we should take.