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Michael T. Nygard, Track Host, Author of "Release It"

 Michael T.  Nygard

Michael strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers across the country. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Michael has spent the better part of 20 years learning what it means to be a professional programmer who cares about art, quality, and craft. He's always ready to spend time with other developers who are fully engaged and devoted to their work--the "wide awake" developers. On the flip side, he cannot abide apathy or wasted potential.

Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has delivered running systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. More often than not, Michael has lived with the systems he built. This experience with the real world of operations changed his views about software architecture and development forever.

He worked through the birth and infancy of a Tier 1 retail site and has often served as "roving troubleshooter" for other online businesses. These experiences give him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.

Most recently, Michael wrote "Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software", a book that realizes many of his thoughts about building software that does more than just pass QA, it survives the real world. Michael previously wrote numerous articles and editorials, spoke at Comdex, and co-authored one of the early Java books.

Presentation: "Buy it, Build it, Download It, or Browse It? Achieving Effectiveness with Enterprise Applications"

Time: Tuesday 13:30 - 14:30

Location: Rytmisk Sal

Abstract: "Buy versus build" isn't the question any more. The question has always been a proxy for a more important underlying issue: how to effective apply company assets in pursuit of advantage. Containing cost is part of this equation, but it's not the only factor to consider. In this session, we will examine the important decisions you must make about applications and infrastructure to support your enterprise, and how to use all the assets at your disposal: capital, time, flexibility, and creativity. Together, we will explore pragmatic implementation decisions that can help your company achieve competitive advantage with far less risk of failure.

Keywords: Business, Open Source, CIO/CTO, Time to Market, Competitiveness

Target audience: Anyone who makes decisions about IT investments.

Presentation: "Engineering in Five Dimensions"

Time: Wednesday 11:30 - 12:30

Location: Filuren

Abstract: Most architecture representations focus on functional behavior. Non-functional characteristics are either left to the architects' intuition or treated as single-valued targets. This makes it difficult to communicate with stakeholders about tradeoffs. As a result, stakeholders often make decisions without fully understanding their consequences, or they demand the impossible.

In this session, Michael will discuss a way to capture non-functional attributes and their tradeoffs by creating a five-dimensional behavioral envelope. This envelope helps discuss tradeoffs with stakeholders to optimize the success of the system. Further, by explicitly incorporating uncertainty, it can help direct modeling, estimating, and prototyping efforts where they will be most valuable. This method accounts for different degrees of ignorance at different points in time, thereby supporting stakeholder decisions and facilitating risk management.

Keywords: Architecture, Cost-benefit, Enterprise, Probability, Non-Functional Attributes

Target Audience: Practicing application and technical architects.

Workshop: "Release It"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Sunday 09:00 - 16:00

Location: C103 Music Hall

Abstract:

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create applications that survive the rigors of life in production. Too often, project teams aim to pass QA instead of aiming for success in production. Testing is not enough to prove that your software is ready for continuous availability in the corrosive environment of the Internet.

During this tutorial, you will receive an understanding of the architecture and design patterns that can produce high availability in distributed, multithreaded systems such as those based on Java EE, .Net, or Ruby on Rails. You will also learn about the antipatterns that can sabotage your systems availability and capacity.

 

LEARN HOW TO:

   * Avoid common design antipatterns that sap capacity and availability.
   * Apply stability patterns to produce highly available systems.
   * Design software for production networks.
   * Create applications that administrators love.
   * Design your applications for easy deployment and change.

PROGRAMME
*Introducing Production-Ready Software*

   * Hostile, high-consequence environments
   * The testability gap
   * Recovery-oriented computing
   * Focus on features
   * The failure-oriented mindset

*Stability*

   * Defining stability: What matters to your users?
   * Failure modes: stability anti-patterns
   * Architecting for stability: patterns

*Capacity and scalability*

   * Relating performance, capacity, and scalability
   * Myths about resources
   * Failure modes: capacity anti-patterns
   * Capacity improvements: patterns
   * Architecting for scalability
   * Getting extreme

*Manageability*

   * Appreciating Operations
   * Evolving interfaces
   * Evolving schemas
   * Handling configuration properties and configuration files
   * Automating everything