PlatformCF - Day One
My last few hours have been spent outside in the beautiful fall evening in Santa Clara. While enjoying a steam beer just miles away from its origins (both generally in concept and specifically to the contents of my bottle), I’ve shared ideas about the history of beans in Java, the advantages of git rebase before pushing changes, and what sorts of pets people would have(of which wildcats, dolphins, and wallabies were all accepted answers). I’m at PlatformCF, the first of many Cloud Foundry conferences.
The conference started midday and, although it’s Sunday, the turnout was fantastic. After a tasty lunch and time to connect with others, James Watters kicked things off with a concise and effective introduction. Leaving the question of "what could have brought 500 developers here on a Sunday?" open, the intro was a well-placed energetic ramp to the first talk by Jonathan Murray. Murray, EVP and CTO of Warner Music Group, presented a look at how Warner Music Group scrapped their legacy code and “rebuilt the plane in the air” (switching out an engine seems like a breeze compared to rebuilding the whole thing). The talk exposed some problems with adapting legacy code through time and technological changes and the fact that, at some point, it’s more affordable to start from scratch. His arguments were well reasoned and persuasive and his message was exciting. “Now lets jump off a bridge,” he could have said, and a line would have formed. And what he was suggesting is sort of like jumping off a bridge: Start from a blank sheet? ...with all that legacy functionality to support? ..and new features being demanded by the business at the same time? That being said, I’d ditch the bridge for a set of wings any day.
The conference continued in excitement with both half-hour keynotes and 10 minute lightning talks. Thanks to a bare-footed Mike Gehard, I’m unbearably curious about Go(and smiling about his playful jabs at Ruby, the JVM, Maven, and JavaScript). Ismael Ghalimi showed off STOIC, his Node.js app (take that Mike!) that creates apps from spreadsheets. Yeah, you heard that right, apps from spreadsheets. Matthew Kocher’s planned talk ended a bit early and he shared a compelling example of disaster recovery at Cloud Foundry involving the redeployment of everything to another Amazon availability zone after Amazon’s recent outage. Ben Hale bravely, and quite successfully, spent his lightning talk on the Java build-pack live coding, effectively demonstrating how quick and easy it is to customize the deployment. He repeatedly stressed “Just say no!” to config files, and I’m wondering if he’ll turn out like Larry “no modes” Tesler (anybody seen Hale’s license plate?). These are all just tiny slices of the day, the full experience being too much to recount! I’m looking forward to another day combining keynotes, lightning talks, and… an unconference? Unconference within a conference. Hmm. Sounds evil. Doesn’t matter, I’m sure it’ll be great!
A few references mentioned not to miss:
https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/ - recommended by Jonathan Murray for documenting and testing your REST API http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 - recommended by Andrew Crump http://www.cs.ucf.edu/courses/cop4020/sum2009/CSP-hoare.pdf - mentioned by barefoot Mike and a strong influence in the creation and development of the Go programming language.