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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Book Recommendations from Sydney Technology Leaders

Last week I went to the Sydney Technology Leaders’ Meetup, which we hosted in the Tyro Fintech Hub. There was a trio of great talks, and a panel discussion with the speakers at the end.

When asked what they do to help train new leaders, one of the speakers mentioned “throwing a bunch of books at them”. So I took the opportunity to ask the speakers, if they could only recommend one or two books to a new leader, what would each of them recommend. Continue reading

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

Is a Microservices PaaS In Our Future?

Last month at the Sydney Microservices Meetup, the Meetup’s organiser, Yamen Sader, presented a great talk on “A Microservices Reference Architecture“.

My own talk on the night, which was a case study about the evolution of microservices at Tyro Payments, laid out many examples of practices and tools we’ve used, but left it for people to either follow or ignore what we’ve done as they feel led. Yamen’s talk, on the other hand, was deliberately prescriptive, describing by the end what he obviously considers to be a widely-applicable framework – a “microservice platform in a box”, if you will. (He also ranked the importance of his suggestions based on a hilarious scale of Seinfeld characters, so he could recommended some ideas more strongly than others.)

Is a Microservices PaaS In Our Future?

A trendy, blue-lit data centre, the kind of place where it would be cool to run a Microservices PaaSYamen’s talk, as well as being really interesting, left me wondering about the future of microservices development. In particular, it had me wondering whether, at some point in the near future, we’ll see a Microservices Platform as a Service, or MSA-PaaS. I’m now thinking… 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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Notes from Microservices Talk by Zhamak Dehghani

People have started using honeycombs and hex shapes to depict microservices architectures. Who knows why?A couple of weeks ago, I went along with a couple of other Tyro software engineers to hear Zhamak Dehghani speak about microservices at a “YOW Nights” event, hosted by Optivar and sponsored by ThoughtWorks. It was so good that we asked Zhamak if she’d come into the Tyro office and give a re-run for the whole Engineering team and she kindly obliged. What a legend! Thanks again Zhamak!

I’d already read a lot about microservices (MS), mostly thanks to the excellent pages of links put together by Adrian Rossouw and Matt Stine. Zhamak covered a lot of ground that I was already familiar with, but she also touched on many things that were new and interesting to me, so I thought I would write about a few here. Continue reading

Meetup Digest: Sydney FinTech Startups (April 2013)

I went along to the Sydney FinTech Startup Meetup for the first time tonight.

Keyboard keys spelling out 'money' sitting on top of a lot of coinsIt was an interesting meeting as the speakers were all from the Westpac Group, one of the biggest, oldest companies in Australia, which hardly seems appropriate to the Startup scene. However, the guys had a lot to say about how they see the current banking markets and what the bank’s take on innovation and interaction with small companies looks like. From my point of view (as an employee of a financial startup that’s recently hit profitability and is now entering a scaling stage) it was interesting to listen to the challenges that these big companies face and to think about how we might try to avoid the same traps as we grow. Continue reading

ScalaSyd Wrap-Up: November 2012

ScalaSyd: Episode 9

We had a great meeting at ScalaSyd last Wednesday night, probably one of the best I’ve been to. These are my notes from the evening, which are in no way comprehensive – they are just the points I found most interesting.

Jed (@jedws) warned us at the start that there were two “pointy” talks with some soft stuff in the middle, but I found the two pointy talkers did an excellent job of conveying their pointy subjects to neophytes. Not an easy task, so well done, guys.

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Meetup Digest: Migrate to DVCS Sydney (October 2012)

Two weeks ago, I and a couple of other developers from Tyro went to the first “Migrate to DVCS Sydney” Meetup at Atlassian’s new headquarters. Here’s my notes on the most salient points from the evening (with some editorial by me in italics) …

Talk 1 – Jonathon Creenaune from the JIRA team

  • Know why you’re migrating. I’m sure he meant, and may have even said: have a business reason to change, don’t just be a cargo cult.

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