QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Michael T. Nygard, Author of "Release It!"

Michael T. Nygard

Biography: Michael T. Nygard

Michael Nygard has written and co-authored several books, including "Release It!", "Beautiful Architecture", "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" and "Java Developer’s Reference".

Michael says he strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers.

An expert in highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems, Michael has been professional programmer and architect for over 15 years. In that time, Michael has delivered systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries.

Twitter: @mtnygard
Websites: www.michaelnygard.com, http://thinkrelevance.com
Publications: Release It!, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, Beautiful Architecture

Presentation: Exploiting Loopholes in CAP

Track: Stayin' Alive - Tales of Resilience, Fault Tolerance & Recovery / Time: Wednesday 15:40 - 16:30 / Location: Whittle Room

By now, we've all learned the summary version of CAP: choose at most two from "Consistency", "Availability", and "Partition-tolerance." It's usually framed as a binary choice between C and A, with P as the unavoidable reality. Exploring CAP at a deeper level, though, we'll find several loopholes that you can use to engineer practical, real-world systems with desirable features. After this talk, you'll know how to use your domain knowledge to make thoughtful choices in your distributed systems.

Presentation: Maneuverable Architecture

Track: Building Integrated Applications with Web Technologies / Time: Thursday 10:20 - 11:10 / Location: Fleming

What can a rogue fighter pilot from the 1960's teach us about software architecture? Quite a lot, as it turns out. In 1964, John Boyd introduced "energy-maneuverability" theory. It showed that the fastest airplane didn't always win the dogfight. Rather, the one that could accelerate or decelerate fastest would win.

Software architecture today is about gaining and shedding mass rapidly. One must scale up and scale down, and be able to adapt quickly to changing situations. Sadly, enterprise integration destroys maneuverability more often than it helps.

As architects, we can change the way we integrate systems to produce maneuverability, via some different techniques and patterns. Some of these techniques may appear to contradict past notions of sound architecture. Our industry evolves rapidly, however, and last year's sound practice might just be drag this year.

Training: Systems Thinking and Methods

Track: Training / Time: To be announced / Location: To be announced

In this full-day workshop, you will learn how to analyze and influence any system. (There's no such thing as "control"!) We will take a sociotechnical view of systems that draws on lean thinking, cybernetics, complex adaptive systems, and human factors. Using these perspectives, we will look at how systems work, how you can optimize them, and the many ways they can fail.

During this workshop, you will be asked to stretch your thinking into one or more new paradigms to understand how the same dynamics can sometimes create inertia and other times create radically nonlinear change.