QCon London 2011 schedule

Monday 7th March 2011

• "The Kiev Experiment": Evolving Agile Partnerships

  by Peter thomas

  A whirlwind journey through the evolution of development processes within a large department of an investment bank working alongside external vendors in Eastern Europe and India. The journey takes place over 5 years of improving techniques and process to deliver a major software programme and describes the journey from a small core band of software engineers to a program of 15 teams spread globally all working on the same codebase.

  We will explain the evolution of the relationships with our vendors, from formal contractual relationships to partnerships based on shared goals alongside the evolution of the teams and processes used for the delivery of the software. We will reflect on the core principles which have enabled this evolution and will explain the patterns which were successful and also the pitfalls to avoid.

  On Monday 7th March

Wednesday 9th March 2011

• The Invisible Computer Lab

  by Fraser Speirs

  The impact of mobile technologies in the computer industry is not limited to the retail channel. Businesses are increasingly "going mobile" yet schools remain unsure how to approach this new arena of computing both in terms of hardware provision but, more importantly, how we teach children in a world where information is constantly and instantly available.

  This talk will argue for a new direction in school ICT. Instead of stepping back from technological leadership, I argue that schools should move forward in deploying technology and move backward from teaching "IT skills", as typically understood.

  This talk invites the audience to reflect on the role of Computer Science in schools. The conflation of ICT and Computer Science in one subject has tended to edge out the Computer Science content in favour of teaching ICT to deliver skilled pupils to other teachers. Finally, this talk will present an experimental model of delivering ICT in a school with 1:1 technology.

  • Computer Science
  • Education
  • education reform
  • Mobile devices

  At 10:35am to 11:35am, Wednesday 9th March

Thursday 10th March 2011

• Netflix’s Cloud Data Architecture

  by Sid Anand

  For the past 3 years, Netflix has been building a popular subscription-based service to stream movies and TV shows to game consoles, mobile devices, BluRay players, digital TVs, etc… With tens of millions of paying customers, Netflix has firmly established itself as a household brand in the US. Few people are aware that, while aggressively expanding our market and products, we have also moved our web and data infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. We currently use a large array of AWS's offerings and deliver >90% of our web traffic from the cloud. While we have moved a significant portion of our web infrastructure to the cloud, the migration of our data has followed a slightly slower pace. Where we once solely relied on relational databases such as Oracle and MySQL, today we use a combination of technologies, including but not limited to SimpleDB, S3, Cassandra, and HBase. In addition to the use of these NoSQL solutions, we are looking at RDS and still have much data stored in Oracle in our data center. To access this Oracle data, we have built our own custom bi-directional data replication framework. This talk will detail the current evolution of Netflix's cloud-based data infrastructure.

  At 3:35pm to 4:35pm, Thursday 10th March

  Coverage video

Friday 11th March 2011

• NoSQL@Netflix

  by Sid Anand

  Over the past 2 years, Netflix has moved the vast majority of its infrastructure, applications, and data to Amazon's Web Services. At the end of 2010, we were serving 90% of our site and streaming traffic out of the cloud. This talk details Netflix's transition away from relational databases and towards high-availability (NoSQL) storage systems. In our first phase, we moved from Oracle to SimpleDB (and S3). However, based on a reassessment of our needs, we have started investing in Cassandra. This talk will details the reasons for our transitions and the strengths/weaknesses of the different technologies.

  • Amazon SimpleDB
  • Cassandra
  • Netflix
  • NoSQL

  At 10:35am to 11:35am, Friday 11th March

  Coverage video

• HTML5 and the dawn of rich mobile web applications

  by James Pearce

  HTML5 and its related technologies are enabling new ways to build beautiful sites and applications for contemporary mobile devices. Native mobile developers can now use web technologies to surmount cross-platform headaches, and desktop web developers can reach mobile users in familiar, app-like ways. This session explores the state of the art in HTML5-based mobile web frameworks, and demonstrates the practical possibilities that this powerful and standards-based approach can bring.

  At 4:50pm to 5:50pm, Friday 11th March

Unscheduled

• Single Page Apps and the Future of History

  The HTML5 stack - HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - has become a platform for applications, not just static documents. Full page refreshes are becoming a rarity in this new world, as the document-oriented website gives way to Single-Page Apps. What does this mean for developers and their users - revolutionary panacea or just-plain headache? This talk will look at the state of HTML5 art in dealing with single page apps, and identify best practices for dealing with the concerns of user experience, accessibility, and SEO.