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SDD day 1 - Impressions and takeaways

maj 21
by steffen 21. maj 2019 20:44

As a part of my attendance at the SDD conference in London, I have decided to write small blog posts summing up some of the impressions from the talks I attend. The format will be more rough since the posts has been written during the day and finished in the evening at the hotel.

This post is a summary of my impressions and takeaways from the first day of the SDD conference.

Keynote - Flow: the worst software development approach in history

The two speakers, Sander Hoogendoorn (@aahoogendoorn) and Kim van Wilgen (@kimvanwilgen), had a very entertaining keynote, discussing all the "horrible" things that Agile methodologies are bring to the software development world. I might have been a little slow out of the blocks this morning, but I was a little confused by the talk and it took me quite a while to figure out that the bashing of agile, was meant as a joke and what they were really trying to do was to set the stage for a summary of what really is important in agile software development.

The keynote was entertaining but a little lightweight for my taste. The points made at the end, could easily be boiled down to a few slides taking 10 minutes. Bottom line was: focus on building great software - use what fits you from the agile methodology and scrap the rest.

Getting started with .NET Core

Jeremy Clark (@jeremybytes) is a favorite speaker of mine. Great humour and lots of knowledge packed into a talk that is kept as simple as possible, to ensure that everyone can follow. This time he talked about .NET Core 2.2 and all the good stuff it brings to the table. The main point here is the fact that .NET Core is cross-platform that actually works. This means that it is a perfect fit for Docker containers that can be deployed to many different operation systems.

Apart from being cross-platform, I also really like the light weight nature of .NET Core. You have to manually add all the assemblies that you need, and even though that might seem a little tedious, the biproduct is that your applications does not end up with a s***load of assemblies that is never really used, making the application much more heavy than actually needed. 

The last great thing that I want to mention, is that fact that .NET Core comes with dependency injection baked in. All too often I see applications that is not using any form of DI and hopefully the fact that .NET Core has this from the get-go, will make more developers discover (and understand) the beauty of DI.

Modernizing legacy .NET apps with Docker - revisited

Elton Stoneman (@eltonstoneman) gave an extremely fast paced talk about how to modernize a legacy webforms application using Docker. The abstract of the talk sounded like it would be on an introduction to Docker, but this talk was definitely for developers who already had experience with the technology. I tried as best as I could to hang on to what was going on, but I did not gasp all of the content. It would have been nice to cut away 1/3 of the examples and slow down to make sure that all the points made actually got across, instead of speed talking 100 km/t for 90 minutes.

That being said there is no doubt that the Docker container technology is a very interesting topic, that opens up a wealth of possiblities with regards to deployment and elimintation of technical debt. The great thing about Docker is that you can create a reverse proxy, which transfers the requests to a web application to different containers. This means that you can have a "main" container running you legacy code and another to run a subcomponent of the system that you have rewritten in a new technology (like .NET Core), without this being visible to the user. By doing this you can slowly and surely eliminate technical debt, by rewriting small components of the application one at a time - and even deploying them without taking down the entire application.

AI for C# developers: introducing ML.NET

Jeff Prosise (@jprosise) gave a great introduction to Microsofts first take on a machine learning framework: ML.NET. So far if you wanted to mess around with AI and Machine Learning (ML), you had to learn Python and/or R. With the introduction of ML.NET this is not quite true anymore. Eventhough ML.NET is only in version 1.0 and is still missing support for deep learning and more advanced AI topics, you will be able to go a long way creating ML models in C# and being able to use those models natively.

A great feature of the framework is the ablility to take pretrained models created in TensorFlow and use these as a stepping stone to a more specialized model. This means that you do not need the gigantic amount of computer power to train the models, since the heavy lifting has already been done for you. By importing one of these models and adding the specific training that you need, you have very efficient and complex model at a very low cost. Very cool stuff!

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Machine Learning | SDD

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