The NEJUG Holiday Party is scheduled for our normal "second Thursday" in December, but it is not a normal presentation meeting. Instead, it's an "all fun time" event where we get to chat, eat, drink, and socialize. Come, join us for dinner, great conversation and raffle prizes. Buy your tickets now and get the early bird discount!

CLICK HERE 🡆  NEJUG Holiday Party Tickets (at EventBrite)

Menu items include:

• Rolls

• Salad
• Appetizers
• Chicken Parma
• Four Cheese Ravioli
• Rigatoni, Broccoli & Chicken
• Dessert
• Soft drinks, tea, and coffee are included.
• Cash bar also available.
• NO PIZZA - That's for regular meetings...

 

Space is limited to 50 guests so buy your tickets early! Tickets for yourself and your guests are available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nejug-holiday-2018-tickets-51209185051

There will be a Raffle drawing and you have a chance to win a Gift Card -- Thanks to our sponsor Attivio

 

Corporate Sponsors:

We are looking for additional corporate sponsors to help maximize the fun! Contact Avi Neer <avineer@gmail.com> if you have a sponsor idea or contact for monetary support, raffles items, or door prizzes.

 

Thanks to our primary Holiday Party sponsor:

	John Galt contributes to the success of organizations and individuals throughout the United States by expertly matching them with one another. Founded in 1997, they have worked with thousands of organizations and individuals over the years to enable them to achieve success. Their focus is on contract technology professionals in disciplines which are critical to an organization’s success.
Raffle Gift Card Sponsor:
	Attivio is an intelligent answers and insights platform that brings intuitive search experiences to businesses. In doing so, we help mid-to-large sized companies solve their most complex search needs/projects, such as customer support, risk avoidance, and digital transformation. To do this, we leverage our own natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to provide a personalized and accurate search experience that delivers actionable answers to every question, instead of a simple list of links.

 

While "DevOps" is a very overrated and misused marketing term, we have many DevOps stories from around the world proving that shared responsibility between Dev and Ops can work out really well.

A key component of DevOps is open communication and feedback loops. Monitoring data is one source of these feedback loops. Too often, however, this is only done in Operations for firefighting and root cause analysis. Kevin will discuss approaches of Shifting-Left Performance into the Continuous Delivery Pipeline to give earlier and faster performance, scalability and architectural feedback to developers, testers, architects and business.

The presentation will include some hands-on experience on how to bake monitoring into DevOps tool chains such as JIRA, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Git, HipChat, JMeter, … - there should be something for everyone who wants to learn some new tips & tricks on how to become more “DevOps’y”

Check out the Prezzi that Jonathan made for this presentation

https://prezi.com/view/awP8F1N9QDV3vRCEAYCY/

 

Kubernetes out of the box is a strong platform for running and coordinating large collections of services, containers, and applications. As is, Kubernetes is powerful for many solutions.

Remember Underdog?  He was a mild-mannered dog, but when stress and conflict were introduced to the plot he took a magic pill, he became a superhero. Istio is a superhero for Kubernetes.

Istio is an open, platform-independent service mesh that manages communications between services in a transparent way. With a distributed architecture many things can fail, slow down and become less secure. Istio provides solutions to those stresses in our plot toward this architecture style:

    • Traffic management

    • Observability

    • Policy enforcement

    • Service identity and security

 

We will explore these benefits with Istio through some working examples on Kubernetes. The key point is this meshing solution allows your Java code to be less coupled to the inherent weaknesses of a distributed platform.

Register today for the 2018 New England Software Symposium returning Sept 28-30th to Framingham, MA

The No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium Tour Series long considered the premier Java/JVM/Agility Event Series is returning to Boston this fall! Witness first hand the best a conference has to offer: exceptional speakers, content rich ninety (90) minute technical sessions, right sized event model (capped at 250 attendees) all experienced in a vendor free environment.  At a No Fluff Just Stuff event, the focus is entirely on the attendee experience and nothing else!

**Local Venue, World Class Experience**

Event Name: 2018 New England Software Symposium
Dates: Sept 28-30th
Location: Framingham, MA
Venue: Sheraton Framingham
URL: https://nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/boston/2018/09/home

 

Make sure and use your special JUG discount of $50 by using the promo code nfjsusergroup50 when registering.
If you are registering with a group, the highest discount will apply - group or JUG discount.

REGISTRATION FEES:

Early Bird Individual: $1025/person thru Sept 10th

Excellent Group Discounts! Available - bring your entire development team to the show:

5-9 Attendees: $900/person
10-14 Attendees: $875/person
15-24 Attendees: $850/person
25-over Attendees: $825/person

 

See you there!

 

Jay Zimmerman

2018 NFJS Tour Director

jzimmerman@bigskytechnology.com

 

Today’s enterprise applications are complex, distributed and mission critical. In this session we want to share how the concepts, tools and patterns introduced by Domain Driven Design helped us in enterprise application architecture and design. DDD is invaluable in strategic architectural decision making. DDD was instrumental for us to layout our microservices architecture. We learned to speak DDD and adopted that as our medium of communication to build our team. DDD made our communication with outside teams and integration within the enterprise easier. It made us conscious about implications of enterprise integration at strategic and implementation level.

 

This presentation will include concepts of strategic and tactical DDD. It is also organized in such a way to encourage discussion rather than follow a strict lecturing mode.

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. 

 

 

When should you refactor code and when should you not do it?  How do you make sure you have adequate test case coverage?  What are the strategies, techniques, and patterns for refactoring existing code?  And how do you get your boss to agree to let you spend the time to refactor code?  This presentation will cover these questions and more.  Topics covered include Acceptance/Approval Testing, Design Patterns, Code Smells, Refactorings, and Tools.

 

For a deeper dive into related topics of Mob Programming, TDD, and software craftsmanship, join Ethan at the Mob Programming Conference April 12-13 in Burlington, MA.  Several of the presentations are on refactoring.