Build Stuff 2017
2017-11-15..2017-11-19
Vilnius, Lithuania
[Build Stuff 2016, Build Stuff 2017, Build Stuff 2019, Build Stuff 2020, Build Stuff 2021, Build Stuff 2022, Build Stuff 2023, Build Stuff 2024, Build Stuff 2025]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Crossing the river by feeling the stones | Simon Wardley | 49m |
Introduces a practical mapping method that anchors user needs, plots component evolution from genesis to commodity, and reveals 31 repeatable economic… | ||
| Moral Foundations Theory help in overcoming resistance | Linda Rising | 55m |
Claim: facts rarely change minds because decisions come from fast, emotional brain systems; experiments (fMRI, behavioral economics) show confirmation bias… | ||
| Hacked Blockchain Projects What we’ve learned | Ivan Liljeqvist | 49m |
Covers concrete failures: Solidity smart contracts with mutable deployment mistakes that allow ownership takeover of a shared library and result in 300 million… | ||
| The Well-Balanced Programmer | J. B. Rainsberger | 01h 09m |
Argues that combining Getting Things Done with test‑first programming solves concrete problems: use the two-minute rule and ticklers to stop significant work… | ||
| Harnessing Chaos; the hidden ingredient behind building better systems through learning | Russ Miles | 01h 04m |
Production is hostile: hardware, latency, exhaustion and human error cause failure to be the norm, so the concrete claim is that chaos engineering builds… | ||
| Defying Bloomberg & Increasing Tech Diversity: Coal to Code | Amanda Laucher | 56m |
A staged program recruits rural coal communities with a two‑week intro, 16-week boot camp, followed by apprenticeships and paid contractor stints; graduates… | ||
| Big Bang Redesign Smashing Magazine’s 2017 Relaunch, a Case Study | Vitaly Friedman | 01h 06m |
Eighteen months of work replaces a multi-platform LAMP mess with a static prebuild with Hugo served from a CDN, plus JavaScript APIs and service workers to… | ||
| Data Modeling in a Non-Relational World | Oren Eini | 55m |
Relational schema rules break when using documents; model around aggregates and coherent independent isolated units instead of foreign keys. RavenDB supports… | ||
| The Web That Never Was | Dylan Beattie | 44m |
Dylan wrote his first web page in 1992 and never looked back. He's the systems architect at Spotlight, the UK's leading casting service for professional… | ||
| How I learned to stop being afraid and love the JVM | James Turnbull | 37m |
Java is no longer the inscrutable heavyweight it once was: Java 8+ lambdas and streams make code more concise, build tooling (Gradle, modern Maven, uberjars… | ||
| From dependency injection to dependency rejection | Mark Seemann | 55m |
Argues that partial application in F# is equivalent to constructor injection (it compiles to a class with three fields and a constructor) but that pattern is… | ||
| Do or don’t There’s no try Or is there The power of monads explained Sort of | Sander Hoogendoorn | 59m |
Explains monads by building concrete boxes: a Try monad implemented in Java (and ports to TypeScript and C#), a Maybe/Promise examples pattern to eliminate… | ||
| Extreme Performance Architecture | Oren Eini | 01h 03m |
Claims a 10x speedup by redesigning RavenDB’s internals: replaces per-request GC-heavy allocations with a pooled context pool and arena-style native… | ||
| I had microservices and I didn’t know | Dino Esposito | 55m |
A company grows from two people to ~30–60 over six to seven years and discovers its backend is actually a set of microservices: five or six web apps (a player… | ||
| The DDD Do-Over: Domain-Driven Design Lessons Learned | Jimmy Bogard | 01h 01m |
Revisits two near-identical legal projects: the first is a forced “majestic monolith” with 195 controllers, 652 actions and 121 hard-coded roles that collapses… | ||
| Patterns & Anti Patterns for Scaling & Enabling DevOps Adoption | Roy Osherove | 55m |
Argues that enterprise DevOps fixes actual bottlenecks by building a pipeline that produces a single binary stored in Nexus/artifactory, runs… | ||
| A security tester's toolkit | Niall Merrigan | 01h 01m |
Demonstrates hands‑on offensive steps: boots Kali Linux VM, maps networks with nmap, finds 597,458 IIS6 hosts via Shodan/Showdown, uses Wi‑Fi Pineapple to… | ||
| Process IoT information using Akka.NET | Aarjan Meirink | 48m |
Shows an architecture using Akka.NET actor model for IoT ingestion, using Akka.Cluster and Akka.Persistence to scale and survive node failures. Demonstrates an… | ||
| 12 Factor Apps in .NET | Ian Cooper | 01h 01m |
Polyglot Coding Architect in London, founder of #ldnug, speaker, tabletop gamer, geek. Tattooed, pierced, and bearded. The 'guv' on @BrighterCommand | ||
| I just hacked your app! | Marcos Placona | 38m |
Marcos is a developer evangelist at Twilio where he serves communities in London and all over Europe. He is passionate about technology and security and spends… | ||
| How to end your challenging workday with more energy than you started with | Ronald van Es | 57m |
Company-wide vitality program addresses three “batteries” — physical, emotional, mental — after a survey shows 70% response, 1 in 5 at increased stress risk… | ||
| An Abridged Guide to Event Sourcing | Tomer Gabel | 56m |
Argues that event sourcing plus CQRS replaces CRUD for better auditing and tunable consistency, demonstrates a production-ish system for Wix Adi implemented in… | ||
| SOA lessons learnt (OR Microservices done better) | Sean Farmar | 57m |
Argues that most microservices mistakes replay SOA failures and recommends concrete patterns: use messaging (example: NServiceBus) and queues for state… | ||
| The continuous culture | Kim van Wilgen | 59m |
Argument for moving beyond continuous delivery to a culture that makes rapid, safe experiments: claim that high performers run 2555x faster (Puppet Labs) and… | ||
| Modernizing Legacy .NET Apps with Docker | Elton Stoneman | 59m |
Demos show a legacy ASP.NET WebForms app packaged with Dockerfiles for Windows, a SQL Server container, and an image2docker extraction; synchronous DB writes… | ||
| Event Sourced Transformation in Financial Systems | Chris Condron | 52m |
A team migrates a large legacy three‑tier app into CQRS plus event sourcing by splitting the middle tier into small domain services that append to an event… | ||
| Achieving High Load in Advertising Technology | Peter Milne | 01h 02m |
Adform handles roughly 1.2 million bid requests per second with a tight 50–70 ms bid window, bidding on about 32% and winning under 1% of auctions. an… | ||
| Who’s Afraid of Graphs? | David Ostrovsky | 01h 00m |
Cuts through what graph databases actually do: stores vertices/edges, runs fast in-memory traversals, and fails to shard easily because partitioning is… | ||
| Building Apple Watch Apps with Xamarin | Ariel Ben Horesh | 56m |
C# app built with Xamarin and WatchKit, authored in Visual Studio for Mac with Xcode for storyboards, uses JSON.NET for messages and WCSession to sync watch ↔… | ||
| Slaying Sacred Cows: Deconstructing Dependency Injection | Tomer Gabel | 46m |
Argues that dependency injection frameworks like Spring or Guice add little value beyond plain constructor injection, showing Java examples and a toy service… | ||
| Turing's Toy - The story of a mathematical idea that changed the world | Øystein Kolsrud | 44m |
A clear, concrete retelling of how Turing formalizes computation with a three-part machine (finite states, infinite tape, read/write head) and then shows there… | ||
| Real life usecases of Blockchain and open source | Marta Piekarska | 49m |
Hyperledger grows from 30 to 180 members and ships four tools and five frameworks, with Fabric 1.0 as a production release. Financial firms run a proof of… | ||
| Solving technical debt of a microservices architecture | Vaidas, Donatas | 53m |
Microservices proliferate into dozens of tiny services (PDF-per-type, one-off tax endpoints) causing repeated DTO mapping and confusion; team size is ~12–15… | ||
| Serverless in production, an experience report | Yan Cui | 47m |
Company moves from EC2 to an event-driven, service-oriented stack centered on AWS Lambda, running 170 Lambda functions in production and paying roughly 5% of… | ||
| How to control your code | Alexander Laptev | 26m |
Shows a Visual Studio plugin that runs lightweight diagnostics, highlights suspicious code and prints a ranked list of impacted files with a percentage metric… | ||
| 15 Years of Spring: Evolving a Java Application Framework | Juergen Hoeller | 01h 07m |
Framework timeline: 15 years from 2002/03 to today, evolution centers on concrete changes not slogans: migration to JDK 5/6/8, the rise of Spring Boot… | ||
| How to Avoid Creating a GitHub Junkyard | Lauri Apple | 47m |
Zalando discovers that unfettered publishing creates a cluttered GitHub: about 400 repositories pile up in a year, many missing licenses, CONTRIBUTING.md… | ||
| Reactive web services | Kamil Szymański | 01h 01m |
Live Java examples use Spring and Project Reactor to show practical gains: moving blocking I/O to async servlets or wrapping with Mono and using… | ||
| Slicing 'Big Elephant' systems into micro-services | Vytautas Petrauskas | 27m |
A team splits a monolithic banking system by building three microservices: extractor (called pepper), REST API, and UI service, using Spring Boot, OpenShift… | ||
| Rewriting 15-Year-Old Code | Anna Filina | 01h 07m |
A practical playbook for fixing old web apps: module-by-module rewrites, not risky full rewrites, with an actual billing module rewritten in about a 40-hour… | ||
| Using F# on Azure Functions in Production | Nikolai Andersen | 53m |
Builds an automated changelog service in F# that calls Octopus Deploy, TeamCity and JIRA APIs, parses merge commits and DB migration tags, and emails a… | ||
| Open Source Contribution - How does it even work? | Amye Scavarda Perrin | 29m |
Explains the corporate problem called fork-and-forget: companies vendor and patch three upstream projects, drift off mainline, then face painful upgrades… | ||
| The Three Last Conversations | Mindaugas Mozūras | 33m |
Head of engineering at Vinted describes running a 32‑person team that does hundreds of deployments per day (about a million total over several years), then… | ||
| Reading code under the influence of one’s emotions | Romeu Moura | 56m |
Claims that reading code is an under-taught skill and that emotions steer interpretations, so adopt a staged empathy checklist from malice → stupidity →… | ||
| Smaller not taller: defeating the mobile app architecture giant | Heather Downing | 01h 02m |
Argues that most projects don’t need a native app and claims the 60% rule: a responsive site suffices. Compares stacks with specifics: iOS via Swift/Xcode… | ||
| Real-time-first metrics | Aurelijus Banelis | 52m |
Argues that pushing netdata-style per-second metrics to the machine nearest the process speeds debugging and decision-making, with examples: custom stats… | ||
| The quest of automating crash handling at Unity | Igor Kochetov | 26m |
Unity has >1M registered users and gets ~6,000 bug reports/month so a custom crash pipeline is built because existing systems like Sakura and Breakpad prove… | ||
| Controlling Quality in Software Development | Jonathan Graham | 56m |
Argues quality is the balance of benefits versus risks and offers three concrete pillars: build the right thing, build it at the right time, build it the right… | ||
| Functional geometry: picture combinators and recursive fish | Einar W. Høst | 49m |
Implements Henderson’s 2002 “functional geometry” approach in F# with Fable, treating pictures-as-functions and composing them with four basic transforms… | ||
| Math and other good things useful for building a new engineering office | Vytas Taujanskas | 30m |
A practical case of launching a new engineering branch: builds a Vilnius office, hired 4 teams in 9 months, and establishes an engineering management process… | ||
| The Process of Shipping Hardware Products: Hardware Tales for Software Engineers | Omer Kilic | 55m |
Built a student attendance monitor that reads existing RFID ID cards, moves from a weekend breadboard to PCB and case, and ships a few hundred units via a… | ||
| Web Development To Big Data. A Journey | Sam Elamin | 42m |
Migration from brittle Windows Python ETL to a distributed pipeline that actually works: move batch files into an S3 data lake, convert to Parquet with Spark… | ||
| How to feel good about the code you contribute | Mažvydas Skuodas | 35m |
Argues code happiness comes from three levers: novelty/problem solving, social connection, and feedback. Names the brain chemicals as dopamine, serotonin… | ||
| Why RTL Support Is So Hard: Detours in Abstraction | Aaron Greenwald | 55m |
Claim: right-to-left support breaks not from vague culture notes but from concrete mismatches — punctuation and numbers rendering, slider semantics, pagination… | ||
| Baking Boards: Tweak the Recipe for Agile Development | Valerie Andrianova | 49m |
JetBrains shows concrete board recipes: product team moves to continuous delivery with two-week sprints, adds designers and testers as visible tasks, limits… | ||
| Teaching Kids Robotics | Dmytro Mindra | 57m |
Claims that kids learn best when complexity is cut and fun is rewarded, showing an Arduino + Scratch bridge that gets a blinking LED working in about two… | ||
| Man vs Machine: manual and automated security testing | Aurelijus Stanislovaitis | 49m |
Compares SAST and DAST automation versus manual testing using a 2.3M-vulnerability dataset: automation finds most issues and covers about 90% automation… | ||
| Never-Neverland of pursuing Quality | Justina Juknevičiūtė | 53m |
Argues that quality is a shared responsibility, not just QA, and gives concrete rules: use a Definition of Ready: acceptance criteria, mockups, team review and… | ||
| Continuous Security in the Cloud | Stein Inge Morisbak | 01h 03m |
A one and a half year migration moves customer-facing railway apps onto AWS, using Terraform modules to define VPCs, security groups, DB subnet groups and a… | ||
| Resilient Design 101: Queue Theory | Avishai Ish Shalom | 40m |
Wix runs ~500 microservices for ~100 million users and queue theory explains why latency explodes as utilization nears 100%: small variance makes queues grow… | ||
| Procedural Programming: It Never Went Away | Kevlin Henney | 01h 02m |
Argues procedural programming never went away and many modern features actually originate in 1960s languages: Algol 68 orthogonality (closures, void, compound… | ||
| Sprint Zero: DevOps & Working Software too | Martin Hinshelwood | 01h 02m |
Outlines a concrete Sprint Zero checklist that sets up backlog, tests, and infra so the first sprint can produce shippable software, shows step‑by‑step… | ||
| How Smart are Smart Things? | Avi Itzkovitch | 34m |
Bought a Sense smart alarm clock after a year delay and it fails: Wi‑Fi drops, it misattributes a partner’s sleep, the three‑LED never green, and it gets used… | ||
| Linux & Windows Containers on a Hybrid Docker Swarm | Elton Stoneman | 56m |
Demonstrates a running Docker Swarm hybrid cluster that schedules Windows and Linux images to the correct nodes, uses swarm secrets for encrypted connection… | ||
| Developing for Mixed Reality with HoloLens | Rafał Legiędź | 50m |
Overview of HoloLens development: Unity + Visual Studio with the Mixed Reality Toolkit provides one‑click project setup, a gaze‑gesture‑voice input model and… | ||
| What you need to know about the comeback of RPC | Ali Kheyrollahi | 43m |
Argument: RPC resurfaces because transport and tooling solve old costs, not because distributed computing suddenly changes. Demonstrated a .NET Core gRPC… | ||
| nothing matches | ||