Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of APIness: The Secret to Happy Code

We spend our lives working with systems created by other people. From the UI on our phones to the cloud infrastructure that runs so much of the modern internet, these interactions are fundamental to our experience of technology – as engineers, as developers, as users – and user experiences are viral. Great user experiences lead to happy, productive people; bad experiences lead to frustration, inefficiency and misery.

Whether we realise it or not, when we create software, we are creating user experiences. People are going to interact with our code. Maybe those people are end users; maybe they’re the other developers on your team. Maybe they’re the mobile app team who are working with your API, or the engineers who are on call the night something goes wrong. These may be radically different use cases, but there’s one powerful principle that works across all these scenarios and more – and it’s called discoverability.

In this talk, we’ll draw on ideas and insight from user experience, API design, psychology and education to show how you can incorporate discoverability into every layer of your application. We’ll look at some real-world systems, and we’ll discuss how how discoverability works with different interaction paradigms. Because, whether you’re building databases, class libraries, hypermedia APIs or mobile apps, sooner or later somebody else is going to work with your code – and when they do, wouldn’t it be great if they went away afterwards with a smile on their face?

Dylan Beattie is a consultant, software developer and international keynote speaker. He’s been building web applications since the 1990s, and works primarily on Microsoft .NET, HTTP APIs, UX design, and distributed systems. Dylan lives and works in London and when he’s not writing code he plays guitar and writes songs.

Six Little Lines of Fail

It seemed like an easy feature to implement, a checkout page to place an order. The code looks simple, 6 little lines of distributed systems code.

But those lines hid a dark secret that we only found after launching. Customers complained they didn’t get their email. The back end system wasn’t getting updated from our messages. And by far the worst of all, customers complained they saw an error page but still got charged!

In this session, we’ll look at taking our 6 lines of distributed systems fail, examining the inevitable failures that arise, and possible mitigating scenarios. We’ll refactor towards a truly resilient checkout process that embraces, instead of ignoring, the fallacies of distributed computing.

Jimmy is a member of the ASPInsiders group, the C# Insiders group, and has received the “Microsoft Most Valuable Professional” (MVP) award every year since 2009. Jimmy is also the creator and maintainer of the popular OSS libraries AutoMapper and MediatR. Jimmy is an independent consultant, and the chief architect at Headspring, a custom software consultancy based in Austin, TX.

Solo Product Development

When you build a product all by yourself, you have to wear a lot of hats and take on tasks outside your comfort zone. Mark has been working on Visual ReCode for nearly eighteen months, from the R&D phase, through productization, to on sale and supported, and he has some experiences he’d like to share. This talk will cover the ups and downs of solo product development, looking at the things he got right and wrong along the way, and offering advice for any developer who has a side project or bootstrapped startup idea in mind.

Mark Rendle has over 30 years of experience in professional software development, from UNIX terminals to Windows PCs to web apps. He currently specialises in .NET Core and .NET 5, helping teams and organisations around the world to migrate their .NET Framework applications to the new platform with consultancy, workshops and Visual ReCode, a Visual Studio plugin that automatically modernises projects and code. Mark is a regular speaker at international conferences and local meetups. You can find him on Twitter @markrendle and blogging at rendle.dev.

GraphQL VS. BFF: A Critical Perspective

Imagine an application that has a web and a mobile, IOS and Android, or that your API is consumed by similar frontends from totally different teams. The functionalities they provide are distinct, hence the need for distinct sets of data and functions. You might think that the solution for this is having an “as generic as possible” backend for all UI’s. From my experience, this kind of backend leads to big issues in matters of performance, entangled user experience as well as extra and unnecessary communication for the development teams in order to align and meet their needs. Fortunately, there is a promising set of approaches taking the stage as they are created with the intention to optimize how front-end applications collaborate with back-ends: BFF (Backend-For-Frontend) pattern and GraphQL. Given these two approaches, which one is the right to consider? Join me in a talk where we will discuss the two approaches, underline both their good and bad sides, and determine which you should consider as the backend technology for your frontend application.

Coding and teaching represent my passion, learning is my hobby, having an impact in technology is my goal. I am a software developer and technology passionate, I enjoy building and delivering quality, all the while trying to have fun as much as possible.

Improving the Design of Existing Software

Over time, software rots. If we’re not diligent, our beautiful code can degrade into a worthless mess. Keeping our code in working condition is no different than changing the oil in our car – it’s preventive maintenance. In this session, Steve will look at some common places to look for signs of degradation in existing applications, and steps to take to improve the code. Examples will use C#/.NET but are generally applicable regardless of platform.

Steve Smith (@ardalis) is an entrepreneur and software developer with a passion for building quality software as effectively as possible. Steve has published several courses on Pluralsight, covering DDD, SOLID, design patterns, and software architecture. He’s a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and Insider, a frequent speaker at developer conferences, an author, and a trainer.