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Podcast #2 : QCon revisited
Themes from the recent QCon London conference
As promised the 2nd CTA podcast is a roundtable discussion between some of the CTA contributors - namely Simon Brown, Sam Dalton and Kevin Seal. In this podcast we discuss some of the themes emerging from the recent QCon conference held in London and our views on those themes.
The podcast can be downloaded here or you can subscribe. Full show notes follow below:
1. Introduction
- QCon Conference London detail can be found here.
2. Monitoring and Management (0:27)
- Roll your own vs. "off the shelf" monitoring
- Asynchronous monitoring
- JXInsight
- The need for an System Architect and an overall understanding of WHAT to monitor and a holistic view
- Including Monitoring NFRs upfront in SAD
- Monitoring the monitoring vs. best effort
- eBay and 1.5TB of monitoring and logfile information per day
3. Rehashing Refactoring (11:56)
- Refactoring now mainstream, now emphasizing at the micro-level
- Code-debt - how can you measure it?
- Refactoring is not something to be "saved up"
- Lots of rearchitecture projects sold as refactoring
- Sometimes starting again is a better solution than large scale refactoring
- Why do things end up in such a mess so often?
- Need to get back to writing code for humans to understand
- Worry about emphasis on low-level code optimizations rather than architecture
- Is refactoring its own worst enemy being referred to as a separate discipline to regular software development?
- We are our own worst enemies - we (especially the architects) need to stand up for the quality of our code - stop allowing ourselves to be convinced to make shortcuts
4. The Return of the Architect? (25:08)
- Thinking about performance, monitoring etc upfront
- Terracotta, Coherence, Gigaspaces
- Kevin's views on Terracotta
- How much performance could you squeeze from a system in 2 weeks with code changes alone?
- Real-time VMs and performance improvements
- The benefits of continuous performance testing
- Premature optimization
- Understanding a system's deficiencies can be as valuable as fixing them
