SnowCamp 2019

This workshop discusses and explains the most popular patterns you can use with an Istio service mesh running on Kubernetes. It explains and demonstrates the use of traffic management with intelligent routing and load balancing, policy enforcement on the interaction between services in the service mesh, handling failures, and increasing the reliability of your services and your services’ telemetry and reporting.

Pre-requisites: All materials required to be installed before the workshop is described on https://github.com/peterj/snowcamp

Are you a web developer who always wanted to write an app for both iOS and Android, but want to write it only once? Do you want a true, performant, native app, but don’t want to learn yet another language, yet another framework and get used to yet another IDE? With NativeScript, this is easier than you might think! NativeScript is an open source framework that lets you build truly native apps from one code base using Angular, Vue.js, TypeScript or JavaScript. You will get 100% access to all native APIs directly from your JavaScript or TypeScript code. In the workshop we will build a robust app with NativeScript. For the backend we use Firebase to speed up development.


To get started you'll need the following pre-requisites:
Windows, Mac, or Linux computer
JavaScript and TypeScript experience. No prior NativeScript experience is necessary. 
All attendees must have node.js installed 
and the NativeScript CLI installed ( [sudo] npm install -g nativescript )
Additionally, please also download and install Visual Studio Code.

The average mobile website page weight is ~50% images. Toss in the complication of thousands of differently sized screens, and it might appear that efficient delivery of images to every device is an impossible task. But all is not lost! In this talk, we’ll examine strategies to send the perfect image to every device, ensuring a fast, beautiful rendering of your content. We’ll look at progressive images, placeholder images, lazy loading and other techniques and real world examples that will improve the usability of your site or app. Attendees will come away with an understand of the current ‘state of the art’ for optimizing visual content on the web.

Microservices brought us significant benefits, which allow us to structure teams based on business capabilities, improve scalability and enable the flexibility of being polyglot. Unfortunately, these powerful architectures are often complemented by a feature-rich browser application which ends up way too often in the creation of as a single, big and sprawling frontend-monolith. The approach of micro frontends is an effective strategy to tackle this problem and first appeared at the end of 2016 on the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. By going into detail about the idea of extending the concepts of microservices to the frontend world, the importance of end-to-end verticals, the difference of an orchestration- or choreography-based implementation, and the trade-offs in reusability become reasonable. Upon a closer look at the advantages and challenges we've experienced in customer projects, it turns out that micro frontends are not a silver bullet either. Rather, they are suited for a specific set of problems. In a nutshell, micro frontends can be a powerful tool to avoid frontend monoliths and this talk will give you the needed knowledge to decide if it’s the right one for the job.

Quantum computing has existed as a theoretical concept for some time. I recently saw some talks on quantum computing and I've been inspired to start researching the field myself. There are now a handful of (known) quantum computers in existence, some of which, such as the "IBM Q Experience" allow you to execute real quantum programs. I'll give an overview of the state of the art, what the potential of quantum computing is, what its limitations might be and a small dose of speculation on what applications could be suited to to quantum computers and when they might start to be really useful.

This is an evolution of the talk I've given a couple of times now. The first time at Devoxx Poland in June 2018. Throughout 2018 I went to loads of meetings, loads of lectures and in October I hosted a Quantum Hack Day at ThoughtWorks in which we had priority use of IBM's Q Computer. This talk is a description of how I got involved in quantum computers and where the journey took me.

I've also designed a demonstration of Quantum Computing, using Microsoft's Q# (not a real quantum computer, it is a simulator designed to run on a traditional digital computer) called "Clementine's Cat". I was inspired to make Clementine's Cat when I described Shrodinger's Cat to my daughter and she was horified that anybody would do such a thing to their cat. So Clementine's Cat is a humane modern spin on the traditional quantum thought experiment in which no cats are harmed, either theoretically or in reality.

Want to write a web application? Better get familiar with JavaScript! JavaScript has long been the king of front-end. While there have been various attempts to dethrone it, they have typically involved treating JavaScript as an assembly-language analog that you transpile your code to. This has lead to complex build pipelines that result in JavaScript which the browser has to parse and you still have to debug. But what if there were an actual byte-code language you could compile your non-JavaScript code to instead? That is what WebAssembly is.

I'm going to explain how WebAssembly works and how to use it in this talk. I'll cover what it is, how it fits into your application, and how to build and use your own WebAssembly modules. And, I'll demo how to build and use those modules with both Rust and the WebAssembly Text Format. That's right, I'll be live coding in an assembly language. I'll also go over some online resources for other languages and tools that make use of WebAssembly.

When we're done, you'll have the footing you need to start building applications featuring WebAssembly. So grab a non-JavaScript language, a modern browser, and let's and get started!