My picks of NDC 2014 - part II

Another presentations worth looking from the past NDC conference (previous part is here):

1. Venkat Subramaniam - Towards an Evolutionary Architecture - Very nice talk which summarizes all necessary things which are important in the concept of Good Architecture. An architect in Agile have been considered as obsolete by many people, but actually it is the opposite. Good architecture defers decisions, enables evolution and moreover handles or even removes completely the complexity. Besides that - a very nice Agile approach is to prioritize features and assignments by the business value and the architectural impact - by doing that you can really avoid many pitfalls when you are moving forward and crush the knowledge during the process of building the application.
2. Cory House - Becoming an Outlier: Career Reboot for the Developer Mind - Definitely recommended video to watch. For many people it will be a mind and eye opening experience. Handful of valuable thoughts and advices how to manage your career, change your habits and adapt in the continuously changing environment.
3. Roy Osherove - Beautiful Builds - Very refreshing talk. It starts by very obvious, but very often forgotten statement that automated builds are not the continuous integration. It introduces important concept of shipping skeleton. Mixing operational knowledge with building and deployment knowledge is also an anti-pattern. Talk contains a very useful set of patterns and best practices about CI and even Continuous Deployment - definitely recommended.
4. Doc Norton - The Technical Debt Trap - Very wise and mindful explanation of Technical Debt metaphor (and moreover - the good and only true one). If you are operating this metaphor and you often use it, please watch this presentation and be sure that all points which are related with the true definition are fulfilled. Because if not, you are talking about cruft not debt.
5. Joe Armstrong - The mess we’re in - In most cases talks presented by Joe Armstrong can look like a little spontaneous, sometimes even unprepared. However it is a false belief - amount of experience, insight, pragmatic and at the same time scientific approach to the computing can be really underestimated. Knowledge and very insightful anecdotes are flowing out this talk. If you want to know more or you are merely interested about the history of computing and how it actually will affect the future of computer science, it is a must-watch presentation.
6. Aral Balkan - Free is a lie - Definitely recommended talk, especially if you do not have an idea what is a Google / Facebook business model. For those people it can be even a controversial talk (for me it is because of presenting Mozilla as not a ‘Free’ option in the IT world - claiming that most of the income comes from the Google and only that disqualifies this company from being free as a liberty is just unfair). In other words - if you do not know this already, by using free services - you are not a consumer, you are a product - a data source - nothing less, nothing more.
7. Venkat Subramaniam - Core Software Design Principles - Worth looking if you forgot or you would like to refresh your knowledge about SOLID principles, or you do not know what YAGNI, DRY and TDA means. Otherwise, you will watch a rather repetitive (but not boring) presentation.
8. Garrett Smith - Functional code considered Beautiful - Definitely worth looking, especially that it is a kind of a rather soft talk with very pragmatic insights, without preaching and not necessary marketing. If you are not convinced enough - try to think about very readable, declarative code which is oriented around concurrency and is side-effect free - how it should look like? And one more - presented sample with GCD is beautiful and enlightening.
9. Mathias Brandewinder - F# and Machine Learning: a winning combination - Inspiring and fresh talk, both regarding the topic and presented programming language. Definitely worth looking if you are interested in the polyglot programming movement, and if you are looking for interesting language to learn in this or next year.
10. Bruce Tate - Pipe Dreams - Another talk from the polyglot programming family. In this case it presents only two key pieces of Elixir, a new language which is a mix of Ruby syntax, Erlang VM and OTP library, but does it well and deeply - actually it is open-minded in terms of specific approach to the data processing paradigm and sequentiality.