The 2018 New England Software Symposium

With such a strong set of available talks, it was difficult to choose just one - so we've decided to pick two topics that Michael is most passionate about: The Micronauts Framework, along with The Influential Engineer. 

Micronaut is a modern, JVM-based, full-stack framework for building modular, easily testable microservice applications. In this session he'll give a solid overview of Micronaut - it's strengths, capabilities and best practices when building & testing services, functions and reactive apps. Even if you don't use Micronaut itself, you'll get a clear understanding about what's possible with a well engineered micro-service framework.

Being The Influential Engineer is a dream of seasoned professionals, thumb-sucking nubies, and many in between. After pure technical competency, the most important set of skills we have are social. During this part of the meeting, Michael will share with us clear and simple techniques that we can use to effect culture change in our organizations, lead the transition toward a new technology, or simply ask for - and recieve - better tools. How awesome is that!?

More information about these and his many other presentations is available at he No Fluff, Just Stuff web site, at his about the speaker page.

Every July, the NEJUG Production Team (formerly known as the NEJUG Advisory Group) gathers to discuss various business items. The meeting is open to all members, as usual, there will be food and drinks. Meeting format, however, will be different. There will be no external/guest speakers, rather, there will be roundtable discussions by NEJUG production team members.

So you have some code and it is in a bounded context with a REST API. You are on your way to Microservices. Next you wrap it in a container and now it is an image that others can run. Simple. Now what? No service is an island. Your service needs to log information, needs to scale and load balance between its clones. Your service needs environment and metadata way outside its context. What about where the service will run? Who starts it? What monitors its health? What about antifragility? Updates? Networking? Oh my.

Services live in clusters and clusters live in data centers. There are hybrid solutions that span data centers. Many concepts overlap with the features of cloud management. But don't get too flustered since, fundamentally, services are managed by clusters. There are several approaches to cluster management such as Docker Swarm, Mesos with Marathon and Kubernetes.

Minikube with Kubernetes is an approachable technique to set up a local cluster that is easy to understand and get started. Whether you have a simple service or a Web application with a set of services, you can develop much of it on Kubernetes with Minikube. We will run some practical examples. Once you understand the mechanics of the tools, we will explore how it works, sort through the terminology and share ideas about practical uses for this technology.

Afterward you will understand how to run your personal cluster with your Linux, OS X or Windows laptop to further enjoy unravelling the mysteries of running applications in a cluster.

As Java developers, we have long understood the value of early feedback, unit testing, and Continuous Delivery (CD). As practitioners in a DevOps environment, we tell others how important these practices are. How well do we implement these practices for software intended for DevOps applications? Do we “eat our own dogfood”? In this presentation, I will review an approach taken to apply Continuous Delivery practices with a Java application that creates Jenkins Pipelines.   After hearing the presentation, I hope you will walk away with some ideas on how to implement your Java CD practices in a broader context. 

Kotlin and Category Theory: Pragmatic Functional Programming 
by Craig Lubin

What is Functional Programming (FP) and why should you care? This presentation will provide a simple (but not simplistic) introduction of the science behind both Functional Programming and Category Theory by using simple mathematical concepts and the Kotlin programming language. I will show how to apply these techniques for error handling, IO, and more AND how these techniques can also work in Java (it's not just a "Kotlin thing").
No prior knowledge of Kotlin or advanced mathematics is required.