Top 10 Reasons Java Programs Envy Scala (Presentation)

From the archive: Originally posted in October 2011, I was reminded today of this post from my old blog, Graham Hacking Scala. I thought I should bring it over and give it a bit of a refresh…

In October 2011, I presented a talk at the 2nd meeting of the (then) new ScalaSyd Meetup. I talked through the “Top 10 Reasons Java Programs Envy Scala” in an attempt to give Java developers a taste of some little things that could make them much more productive if they switch to Scala.

Interestingly, in almost 4 years, very little has changed. Yes, Java 8 now has lambdas, but the standard collections library still makes very little use of them, forcing you to convert any collection to a stream before lambdas can be used, and pretty much nothing else mentioned in the talk has made its way into Java SE. People are still writing up lists of how to use Java better, but the fact is that a lot of Java best practices are either built into or easier to achieve in Scala.

Anyway, if you want get the real scoop on Java vs Scala and hear what all the Scala kids are raving about:

  1. hit play on the SoundCloud recording below, and then
  2. follow your way through the Prezi below that.

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Microservices Security: All The Questions You Should Be Asking

I spoke earlier in the year at the Sydney Microservices Meetup about the long path we’ve taken at Tyro Payments over the last decade, gradually tending towards a more fine-grained SOA approach – microservices as it’s come to be known recently.

Hacker-looking character sitting at a Mac in a dark room, checking out your microservices securityI covered a lot of ground in that talk, but something I didn’t get around to talking about was security. However, I believe that’s a really important topic to think about in microservice environments. It’s even more important than with a monolith, because in a service-oriented architecture you’re making a lot more of your system’s functionality directly exposed to the network, and that puts it in closer reach of would-be attackers, or “increases the attack surface” as a security pro would say.

So last week I presented another talk entitled “Microservices Security: All the Questions You Should Be Asking”.

Microservices Security: Let’s Share What We Know!

I want to tell people all about what we’ve been doing about security at Tyro lately. Security is incredibly important to the IT community and I think it’s imperative that we help each other improve. I want to share with the world some of the problems we’ve dealt with and some of the great solutions our team has built. Continue reading

Microservices at Tyro: An Evolutionary Tale (Presentation)

In February, I presented a talk at the Sydney Microservices Meetup titled “Microservices at Tyro: An Evolutionary Tale”.

Microservices at Tyro

I wanted to talk mostly about things we’ve been doing with microservices at Tyro Payments over the last year, but also about the almost 10 years of practice with distributed computing that has led us towards what we’re doing today.

I’ve merged my slides and the audio from the talk into a video, which you can watch below. If you’re more the reading type, there’s a transcript from the talk beneath the video. My talk goes for 40 minutes and then there’s 20 minutes of Q&A.

The talk covers:

  • Who is Tyro Payments?
  • Why are we doing Microservices?
  • Tyro’s Architecture History
  • Current development in Microservices
  • Tyro Microservices Practices
  • Asynchronous Communication Strategies
  • Helping Out Ops
  • Microservices Technologies and Patterns
  • Challenges we’ve been having at Tyro
  • Microservices pre-requisites

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