2018 New England Software Symposium - Sept 28-30th in Framingham, MA

The popularity of Amazon's Alexa and Google Home has been inspiring both developers and businesses to think about Voice computing. From a banking assistant on your phone to grocery shopping on your TV - it is truly exciting to see how Voice Interfaces could be used. The challenge, however, is that most Voice Apps are fairly limited in what they can do.

In this talk, Vineet shares experiences from prototyping and building over a dozen Voice Apps. He shows how practical decisions can make implementing great apps easy, reviews existing tools that have been built and talks about Violet (http://helloviolet.ai/) an Open-Source Voice App Framework designed to help developers create Voice Apps. Violet uses an approach inspired by Angular and React to simplify the complexity needed when manually building using other lower-level frameworks, while providing for more flexibility than the drag-and-drop non-technical tools on the market.

Learning a new programming language doesn’t have to be hard. Sure, there’s a lot of new stuff to wrap your head around: syntax, keywords and symbols, conventions, how to define variables and methods, arrays, and the list go on and on! But what if there were a technique and toolkit you could use to master a new language fast?

In this session, Richard Kasperowski introduces mob programming and code koans. Mobbing is about getting all the best minds working on the same computer at the same time. Code koans are a series of micro-puzzles that teach you the new language in little chunks, using test-driven development. We’ll mob together on a set of code koans to learn a new language. Even better, we’ll decide on the language together! Current choices include C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby.

Who should attend? Anyone who wants to learn about mob programming and how to learn a new language.

We would like to thank our event host Chewy.com for all the support for making this event possible in Downtown Boston. 

If you have any questions, feel free contact Mahesh Acharya (Nejug Event Coordinator) at 617 767 Three One Seven One.

We would like to thank the following volunteers:

Photography: George Yazbeck

Videography:  Francis Solis Olivares

Resilient architecture is crucial for all cloud implementations. In this talk, we explore different design patterns to make a distributed application more resilient. 

As part of this journey, for any process, we need to ask what if something goes wrong? Then, plan a course of action to the process auto heal without any human intervention and how to lower risks by performing canary deployments. Design starts with at first understanding of requirements and performing empathy map and value chain analysis. 

Thinking application as stateless for all the API calls makes the system available most of the time requires creating a cache for common distributed data. Next, we examine how to deal with cascading failures, and timeouts scenarios.  Applications, as part of auto-healing, need to Detect, Prevent, Recover, Mitigate, Complement so that the service is resilient. 

Key takeaways for the audience are as follows:

• Resiliency is essential for any feature in cloud
• Understanding the value chain is critical to identify failure points
• Challenges come in identifying if there is a failure and design the system for auto healing
• Focus should be first to prevent a failure to occur. 
• Identifying key challenges in your company and tools and techniques to auto-heal and provide a sustainable solution

Have you ever wanted to deploy hundreds if not thousands of virtual servers with the single click of a button. Who hasn't? With a little JSON and the utility Terraform by HashiCorp, this power can be yours. 

By deploying your infrastructure as a service, you can not only keep track of what resources are where, but also easily adjust or deploy additional resources without the need for navigating cumbersome user interfaces.