Last week I attended the Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference (#PhillyETE). It was my first time attending the five year old conference organized by Chariot Solutions. From start to finish it was a good event for software developers looking to get up to speed on some technologies that are well on their way to critical mass in the industry. Three hotel meals a day and open bar happy hour events didn’t hurt either.
A lot of the topics on the agenda weren’t news to attendees. But the chatter surrounding them indicate growing acceptance of the tools and concepts as industry standards. The elusive “enterprise” is a beast that takes time to come around. But smaller, more agile shops are tackling enterprise problems more than ever. And with that shift comes a quickening pace of the variety of tools folks are using to tackle those problems. Static, monolithic solutions are being replaced, or at the very least enhanced, one by one by quickly evolving, narrow focus options.
The topics I noticed most discussed were the practice of software craftsmanship, NotOnlySQL alternative data stores, cloud based operations and services, functional programming to take advantage of parallel processing, and system configuration as code.
If you’re interested, my boring session notes are posted on github.
Craftsmanship
The first day’s keynote by Bob Martin was completely focused on the idea of sofware craftsmanship. He’s a great speaker and gave a very entertaining talk. But most of the sessions carried the same craftsmanship message under the covers.
The biggest take away for me was that time deadlines are no excuse for poorly designed and executed projects. The technical debt that piles up from poor execution dwarfs the time spent on practices like writing compact, modular, loosely coupled code and test driven development. If nothing else, I came away from the conference with a renewed focus on leaving projects that I work on a little better than when I started them.
NOSQL
A few NotOnlySQL systems were covered in detailed sessions: MongoDB, Cassandra, Project Voldemort. The takeaway though was that there are solid alternatives to traditional SQL RDBMS’s. Each system solves different issues and leaves a few things to be desired. None of them will completely replace SQL RDBMS in the market. Still, taking a close look at the options and understanding the differences is a valuable exercise for any developer.
Cloud
Cloud services are speeding up developers’ ability to deploy reliable, highly available, scalable applications affordably. They’re opening up enterprise level services on a pay-for-use budget. This is a game changer for the enterprise where remaining static and being monolithic were the proven pathways to stability.
On the flip side, cloud services are reminding developers of a slew of system level operation concerns that we’ve sometimes been lazily overlooking in our in-house environments. This is where the configuration as coding concept comes into play. Developers and operations folks have to work together to build application environments and deployment schemes that are highly automated. Putting some of that systems burden back onto developers should free up operations folks for more innovative work.
All in all, Philly ETE was well worth the price of admission. I take the large number of people in attendance as a great sign of strength for the business technology community in Philadelphia.