Held in the Redcliffe Sixth Form Centre again, my day started early as I was driving down and back in the day. Fortunately the M4 was clear and in spite of the roadworks around Bristol Temple Meads, I rolled into the car park just after 0830.
Once again, Landmark was sponsoring the Cream Teas, so I was able to bag a sponsors parking space behind the building (thanks Ross) and get the goodies in via the back door.Setting up the Landmark stand-up and handing the box full of goodies for the delegate bags took but moments, and then it was up to the Speaker Room to do a quick run-through and check connectivity via my phone.
I was scheduled for Track 5 just before lunch, so I would have had plenty of time to prepare had I needed it - as it was I could chat and catch up with old friends.
Speaker Briefing was followed by the usual intro and housekeeping talk in the main room. It was really good to see a strong turnout again too, right from the start
With these over, it was off to the sessions - and first up was one that was really just for me with no real bearing on my day-to-day job (tho' I've got a few ideas now).
Session 1 - Unity 101 with Andy Clarke
I was interested with this as I'd played a little with Unity 3d already, but hadn't really got past attaching standard behaviours to pre-fabs. Andy started simply with an intro to the product (used for everything from simple 3d games up to Neill Blomkamp's "Adam" series of shorts. He then gave a quick once over of UI (and the left-hand-coordinate-system), and soon had balls rolling and boxes bouncing off each other as they spun.
Next up was "Tank Dominoes", using pre-fabs from the Unity Store to indulge in a bit of monolith-toppling. With a tank. 😁
It was only a shame that Andy's laptop refused to play the sound effect of the explosion.
Then Andy demonstrated the Inverse Kinematic Skeleton system available with a humanoid model.
By the end he had a two-player networked sample running where the characters could pass a batton between each other. The amount of code required - or rather the lack of it - is a real testament to what a powerful authoring environment Unity is.
Thoroughly enjoyable, Andy's talk will give me a good head-start against my 11 year old who wants to try Unity himself for game development (Scratch is so Junior School, apparently).
Session 2 - "Give it a REST - Tips for designing and consuming public APIs" with Liam Westley
You've got to give it to Liam - a day or so before DDDSW he'd been knocked off his bike (and had possibly broken a bone in his wrist), but that didn't stop him giving a polished presentation on the good, the bad and the ugly sides of public facing APIs. |
| Liam explaining (with video) his cycling accident |
He described how Google ReCaptcha was exceptionally clever when deprecating service versions by using canary deployments to show a message designed to get users to prod web site owners to upgrade.
Liam finally explained how a public API is effectively a contract between owner and user, and needs to be handled as such if you don't want to hack your users off.
Lots of good stuff to take back to work here, although I'm not sure I captured it all in my "sketchy" notes.
Next up was my own talk.
Session 3 - Azure in Action: CosmosDB, Functions and ServiceBus in perfect harmony
I'd had a humbling experience submitting this year - not one, but two talks accepted for DDDSW, with absolutely identical numbers of votes! I could only do one, so I'd decided to do my Azure talk rather than the soft-skills one.
Paraphrasing my own blurb, there's so many parts to Azure, it's sometimes hard to decide what to use and when. Do I use TableStore or CosmosDB? Would BlobStore be better? Should I host a full-fat .Net service in a VM, or stand up an ASP.Net Core WebApi? What about functions? The choices are myriad.
I described how at Landmark we made these kind of decisions as we implemented some new features in our product. I talked about the questions you need to ask to make those decisions, where we went wrong, and how we succeeded in the end.
Finally I described in detail how we used CosmosDB, Azure Functions and Service Bus together to provide a Compliance Audit trail feature that would scale properly, work reliably, be trivial to use, and that wouldn't break the bank, using a complete end-to-end sample code-base, lifted-and-shifted from the code we wrote at Landmark.
Paraphrasing my own blurb, there's so many parts to Azure, it's sometimes hard to decide what to use and when. Do I use TableStore or CosmosDB? Would BlobStore be better? Should I host a full-fat .Net service in a VM, or stand up an ASP.Net Core WebApi? What about functions? The choices are myriad.
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| Speaker's Eye View |
I described how at Landmark we made these kind of decisions as we implemented some new features in our product. I talked about the questions you need to ask to make those decisions, where we went wrong, and how we succeeded in the end.
Finally I described in detail how we used CosmosDB, Azure Functions and Service Bus together to provide a Compliance Audit trail feature that would scale properly, work reliably, be trivial to use, and that wouldn't break the bank, using a complete end-to-end sample code-base, lifted-and-shifted from the code we wrote at Landmark.
For a first outing, I'm really pleased with how this went - the slides gave the background and context I wanted, and the code demos pretty much all worked perfectly. Certainly the questions asked by the audience and the feedback I've received has been great. Thanks all.
It's been great to have such support from Landmark too - allowing me to effectively open-sourcing our Compliance Audit framework as the reference implementation to go along with this talk.
Once again, Ian Johnson captured the essence in one of his legendary sketchnotes - thanks, Ian!
For the curious, the slides and code are all available online:
After the obligatory pastie lunch (sponsored by Dyson this year), punctuated with interesting conversations as always, it was on to the next session:Session 4 - "What's That Smell" with Anthony Dang
Whilst focused a little on Umbraco (The CogWorks is an Umbraco Gold Partner), his advice is applicable to anyone scratching their head about web application performance.
One thing that jumped out at me was his suggestion that the simple act of turning off all caching can actually improve performance, and certainly show up the real underlying issues. It's all to easy as a developer to over-use (or over-engineer) caching in your application and bring in all sorts of un-testable issues.
I was good and only had a couple. Really.
Then it was time for
Session 5 - "Lessions learned - ingesting, processing and securing 200 million messages / day" with Jess Panni
Jess described how Endjin ingest Radius data via a UDP-listener service, and pipe this to Azure Data Lake via Functions. He described the "Swiss Cheese" model of providing more and more security along the pipeline, how Shared Access Signature Tokens provide better security than Shared Access Policies (at the expense of somewhat more complicated code flows), particularly when used with Key Vault.
Jess also demonstrated how a "2-key launch control" could be implemented for software - requiring two independent operators to start an update to a system.
Finally, he showed how Azure Data Lake Analytics are used to process the 200 million events into useful data points for reporting and monitoring using uSQL.
All in all, a really interesting - and very fast paced - talk to finish up the day before the final wrap up and swag.
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| Wrap up and swag |
Afterwards, it was off to Just Eat towers for more chat over beer and pizza - although I had to forgo both as I was driving home. 😞
All credit has to go to the DDDSW team - another excellent event this year - and to all the attendees and speakers who made it a great day.
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