Build Stuff 2021
2021-11-17..2021-11-19
-- online --
[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 |
|---|---|---|
| Build a database from the ground up | Oren Eini | 49m |
Builds an industrial storage engine from pages up: 8 KB pages, bitmapped free-space per 4 GB file, preallocate 128 MB extents, and prefer many fixed files so… | ||
| Kubernetes Native Java | Josh Long | 52m |
A runnable demo builds a reactive Spring Boot microservice stack: a Java 17 customer service with reactive Spring Data (Mono/Flux) and an in-memory SQL schema… | ||
| Exploring Stateful Microservices in the Cloud Native World | Mary Grygleski | 51m |
Argues that most real systems (she estimates 95–99%) require stateful behavior and shows concrete patterns and tools: an event-driven shopping cart prototype… | ||
| Be Fullstack, because everyone should | Anton Kazakov | 45m |
Claim: everyone should become at least a bit full stack because a T-shaped engineer avoids blocking dependencies and delivers faster. Examples: a backend… | ||
| To Re-write Or Not To Re-write | Sean Farmar | 51m |
Rewrites usually fail unless the risk is low, data is small, and migration is manageable. Example outcomes: an internal MS Vacation rewrite takes ~12 months… | ||
| Stop punching yourself in the face! | Hannes Lowette | 40m |
Software teams pick shiny tools and then pay for them: storing raw files in RavenDB cost vs S3; adopting an abandoned library like Agatha (no maintainer) vs… | ||
| Public cloud in regulated industry, not just swipe of a cred | Donatas Bagdonas, Mantas Kukenys | 49m |
Bank-grade cloud platform called Cloud Factory provisions compliant landing zones across hundreds of accounts and enforces continuous security at scale using… | ||
| Web for all The power of progressive web apps | Patricio Vargas | 31m |
Shows how a real PWA uses service workers and the background sync API plus a manifest to cut server calls by 32%, reach 120 countries and drop load to ~3… | ||
| Multi Cloud Magic: Leveraging Multi Cloud Clusters in Real World Scenarios | Adrienne Braganza Tacke | 40m |
Shows concrete use of MongoDB Atlas multi-cloud cluster to keep data in-country (Canada, Australia) and to attach GCP for AutoML analytics while production… | ||
| Scala meets Kubernetes | Roksolana Diachuk | 45m |
Shows concrete ways to create and manage Pods, ReplicaSets, Deployments and CRDs from Scala using three approaches: the plain Java Kubernetes client… | ||
| Building a Data Validation Rules Engine | Rimantas Žukaitis | 49m |
Data validation is one of those problems, where the devil is in the details: it might seem simple at first, but quickly grows in complexity in the large… | ||
| Building accessible experiences with AI | Henk Boelman | 46m |
Demonstrates concrete AI components that make interfaces accessible: Azure Custom Vision for training classifiers (recommendation: about 50 images per class… | ||
| Expanding Your Human Workforce with Digital Robots | Justina Kasiuleviciute | 38m |
Manages a digital workforce of 126 robots built mainly on UiPath with experiments in task mining, computer vision and Power Automate; shows concrete wins: 24/7… | ||
| Testing PRs in a distributed PaaS environment | Glenn F. Henriksen | 45m |
A single monorepo replaces many repos so cross-repo PRs become one change; CI builds and unit tests run first, then GitHub Actions deploy per-PR environments… | ||
| Domain-driven Game Design | Marco Heimeshoff | 50m |
Build process uses Event Storming to find a single core mechanic: enemies become usable hats that grant abilities, and that mechanic drives all design choices… | ||
| Good Fences Make Good Neighbours | Trond Hjorteland | 46m |
Claim: modular boundaries must be chosen with a holistic sociotechnical view, not just code. Cites Accelerate that architecture beats automation for… | ||
| In space no one can hear microservices scream – A case study | Nir Dobovizki | 48m |
In this session I’m going to tell you the tragic story of the microservices based, modular, fully automatic, next generation, totally buzzword compliant, multi… | ||
| Kubernetes cost optimisation - How to actually do it | Annie Talvasto | 43m |
Eight practical steps for Kubernetes cost cuts plus concrete tools and demos: KEDA auto-scales a .NET worker from 0 to 10 pods to handle 100 queued orders and… | ||
| What the Soviet Space Program Taught Me About Digital Product Development | Dean Schuster | 46m |
Claim: prioritizing being first drives dangerous shortcuts. Soviet teams ship untested hacks like an inflatable airlock and experimental suits; Voskhod II… | ||
| Machine learning in the browser using TensorFlow.js | Håkan Silfvernagel | 46m |
In order to start out with machine learning you typically would need to learn Python, Tensorflow, Jupyter Notebook etc. But what if you could run your machine… | ||
| Big microservices, small team a painful story | Toby Henderson | 51m |
Company migrates a monolith into dozens of business-capability services over seven years, then loses 80% of developers after a buyout and must run everything… | ||
| Implementing an Event Sourcing strategy on Azure | Olena Borzenko, Eldert Grootenboer | 51m |
Shows how to ingest and process high‑throughput events using Azure Event Hubs and persist them into an event store built on Cosmos DB, with working demos of… | ||
| The Future of Software Engineering | Grady Booch | 01h 09m |
History-driven roadmap that ties concrete tools to concrete tradeoffs: claims that modern systems mix symbolic and learned components, demonstrated by work on… | ||
| Pilot Critical Decision Making skills | Clifford Agius | 50m |
Airline cockpit decision steps mapped to software incidents: a clear TDODAR sequence (Time, Diagnosis, Options, Decision, Assign, Review), concrete tools like… | ||
| THE too MANY FACES OF ARCHITECTURE | Mihaela-Roxana Ghidersa | 46m |
Argues that software architecture is not an elite art but a practical, team-shared responsibility and that architecture is a role not a title, requiring both… | ||
| Who is a Lead Engineer today | Denis Chichmaryov | 38m |
Argues that every engineer is a leader and gives concrete guidance: move beyond single-language chops (Java/JavaScript/Spring Boot, Kubernetes, React/Vue) into… | ||
| Striving for engineering excellence: Data-informed organization | Aleksej Klebanskij, Max Koutun | 48m |
Flow Health treats engineering as a service to product and measures it: cycle time per team has a one‑day north star and falls from about five days to an… | ||
| The Care and Feeding of Software Engineers | Heather Downing | 56m |
Companies promote excellent coders into managers with no training and lose people as a result; concrete fixes include asking teams what they want, making the… | ||
| Stop wasting your time with Retrospectives | Simon Kunddal, Rimante Petkeviciene | 44m |
Claims that many retrospectives treat symptoms not causes and offers three anti‑patterns: wheel of fortune (vote on obvious symptoms), wrong format choice (too… | ||
| Component Driven Repo for a Component Driven World | Debbie O'Brien | 55m |
Argues that front ends must be split into independently versioned component scopes (examples: base-ui scope, e-commerce scope, separate repos for four stores)… | ||
| Frustrating Design Patterns in 2021, And How To Fix Them | Vitaly Friedman | 57m |
Common frustrating patterns and concrete fixes: carousels consume attention with 85% see only slide 1 so replace dots with labeled thumbnails, pause… | ||
| Frontend Testing: Mapping Out the Territory | Gil Tayar | 49m |
A practical map of front-end testing that claims confidence comes from using the right tool at each level: Cypress end-to-end for user flows and occasional… | ||
| Building a Game Boy emulator in .NET Core! | David Whitney | 48m |
Builds a working Game Boy emulator in .NET Core by transliterating the Java coffee gb codebase into C# (.NET Core 3.1), boots the Super Mario Land ROM to its… | ||
| 3D printed Bionic Hand a little IOT and a Xamarin Mobile App | Clifford Agius | 49m |
Repurposes OpenBionics designs and prints articulated components on a Prusa MK3 while molding soft fingertips; replaces sticky EMG pads with embedded force… | ||
| Six Impossible Things | Kevlin Henney | 01h 07m |
Six concrete claims and counterexamples: floating point NaN and infinity cause real failures (a MATLAB-controlled racecar steers into a wall), a classic binary… | ||
| Plain Text | Dylan Beattie | 49m |
Argues that “plain text” is a myth and shows concrete failures: ASCII’s 7-bit limits, IBM code page 437 hacks, and SQL Server collation surprises that reorder… | ||
| IoT with nothing but your laptop | Peter Gallagher | 47m |
Claims that full IoT prototyping needs only a laptop and browser and then demonstrates it: uses MakeCode simulator for BBC Micro:bit, Tinkercad circuits +… | ||
| Ways out of a monolith | Anja Kunkel | 39m |
Argues that a monolith becomes harmful when it’s simply too big for scale, ownership and fast builds, causing costly full-stack scaling, slower CI/CD and… | ||
| Fixing the Billion Dollar Mistake | Richard Gross | 49m |
Claim: null pointer exceptions remain one of the most frequent runtime errors (Ops finds ~97% of logged errors come from ~10 kinds and nulls top frequency)… | ||
| Mystery Machine Learning: Classifying Text with RNNs, Keras, and Scoob and the Gang | Guy Royse | 46m |
Builds a recurrent neural network with Keras/TensorFlow on a CSV of Scooby‑Doo lines tokenized and embedded, then serves the model on RedisAI and queries it… | ||
| It's A Long Way To The Top If You Wanna CTO | Randy Shoup, Yvette Pasqua | 50m |
Practical roadmap about career tradeoffs: move between individual contributor and management is OK, stay technical via code reviews and industry engagement… | ||
| Our SAFe journey to follow the sun | Amir Elkabir | 53m |
A 1,200-person program across five sites, seven ARTs and 70 teams ships production every two weeks and goes from chaotic to repeatable by enforcing concrete… | ||
| Streamlining your Machine Learning projects with Azure Machine Learning | Sam Vanhoutte | 48m |
Shows Azure Machine Learning running end-to-end MLOps: notebooks pushed to an Azure ML workspace, experiments tracked with exact script and parameter logging… | ||
| So you want to be an actor? Lessons from implementing the actor model | Vagif Abilov | 45m |
System runs in production on Akka.NET with F# and C# and proves the actor model scales and simplifies architecture: files become one actor each, removed file… | ||
| Getting a handle on software architecture | Tomer Gabel | 49m |
Argues that software architecture’s core claim is to avoid future constraints by designing layers with coherent boundaries; uses Unix pipes, Kafka as a… | ||
| Making it faster | Nikolay Mitikov | 39m |
Investigation shows a site that used to be fast now has random requests issuing 70+ SQL queries and a 1.5s homepage where 45% of time is spent in a recursive… | ||
| Sharing responsively: Streaming analytics from sensitive data | Frank Lyaruu | 43m |
Builds a near‑real‑time anonymized analytics view by piping DB write‑ahead logs into a stream so analytics never query production and heavy queries don't… | ||
| The Big Quantum Theory: An Azure Story | Andre Melancia | 46m |
Overview of practical Azure Quantum work: demonstrates running Q# and Python notebooks in Azure Quantum, using the IonQ provider (hardware) and local… | ||
| Deploying ML models and all the things that go wrong | Marianna Diachuk | 42m |
Deployment experience since 2017 shows concrete pitfalls: a brittle custom prediction service ends up hosting 20+ models on an unscalable architecture, causing… | ||
| Designing software in the cloud | Jan de Vries | 43m |
A legacy monolith migrates to Azure as many App Services and creates a fragile distributed monolith that fails after eight days; the migration cost spikes to… | ||
| What Emergency Medicine Can Teach You About Software Development | Jacek Kunicki | 51m |
Shows concrete analogies: thermography proves a typical emergency blanket fails to stop conductive heat loss; ETCO2 proves tube placement and beats guesswork… | ||
| Intro to Liberating Structures | Almantas Karpavičius | 41m |
Lists 33 meeting formats at liberatingstructures.com and recommends the Lisa app to filter by intention, then shows concrete patterns that were tried: one two… | ||
| Micro frontends: prepare for the ride | Paulius Kimbartas | 52m |
Argues micro frontends solve organizational scaling but create concrete tech and process trade-offs: dependency sprawl, coordination overhead, infrastructure… | ||
| Managing Event Driven Architectures | Ian Cooper | 46m |
Claims that documenting event endpoints fixes scale problems and shows how to do it: use AsyncAPI (and CloudEvents) to describe channels, bindings and message… | ||
| Power Platform DIY | Ricardo Calejo | 46m |
PowerPlatform tools (PowerApps, Power Automate, PowerBI, Power Agents) create a working hospital COVID triage system from a SharePoint list to a tablet UI, an… | ||
| Information Theory & Predictive Analytics | Douglas Hamilton | 46m |
Introduces practical use of entropy = sum p log p to measure uncertainty (coin = 1 bit, fair die ≈2.6 bits, rigged die ≈0.7 bits) and uses penalize mutual… | ||
| About trees, agility and me | Linda Rising | 46m |
Claims that forests operate as a cooperative system supported by an underground mycorrhizal network (the "wood wide web") that trades carbon for minerals, with… | ||
| Uncover and Slice the Elephant | Barbara Dravec | 41m |
Claims that motivation is fixed give way to a practical method: measure it repeatedly with a validated questionnaire targeting purpose, mastery and autonomy… | ||
| Building a serverless multi-tenant SaaS application | Gunnar Grosch | 44m |
Shows a working serverless SaaS prototype that uses Amazon Cognito + AWS Amplify for auth, a tenant onboarding flow that writes tenants to DynamoDB and creates… | ||
| Retrofit your Java App with a Reactive Flow Pipeline | Fabio Tiriticco, Mary Grygleski | 38m |
Shows how to wrap two legacy processors — one Scala using Akka Streams, one Java exposing an RSocket server — with Kafka topics to form a reactive flow… | ||
| Using Open Source Tech to Swap Out Components of Your Data Pipeline | Rustam Mehmandarov | 46m |
A Raspberry Pi cron job samples a public bike-availability API every 15 minutes and the JSON gets parsed with Apache Beam Java code so the same pipeline runs… | ||
| Hedy: A Gradual programming language | Felienne Hermans | 45m |
A gradual teaching language that unlocks syntax in stages, with 16 levels that start as plain keywords and later add quotes, brackets and indentation. It runs… | ||
| Hiding The Lead | Sam Newman | 37m |
Argues that independent deployability depends on strict information hiding and shows concrete failure modes: shared databases create common coupling and… | ||
| Putting the XP in Scrum | Roy Osherove | 39m |
Argues that Scrum or SAFe without engineering practices stalls adoption and prevents true continuous delivery, so teams must add concrete techniques: CI… | ||
| Building Highly Scalable Facial Recognition Pipelines | Sefik Ilkin Serengil | 39m |
A lightweight Python framework called deepface implements a full five‑stage pipeline (detection, alignment, normalization, representation, verification) and… | ||
| The Power of Performance Feedback | Amber Vanderburg | 47m |
Argues that specific feedback beats vague praise and offers concrete tools: a what/why model (use once for praise, twice for coaching/correction), simple… | ||
| Logic Apps: Anywhere, Everywhere | Sandro Pereira | 45m |
Shows that Logic Apps Standard runs anywhere (Docker, Kubernetes) and lets teams keep workflows on-prem to cut cloud round trips; contrasts that with… | ||
| Developer Fundamentals of Serverless.NET Development with Azure Durable Functions | Jonah Andersson | 46m |
Covers how to build stateful .NET workflows with Azure Durable Functions: six concrete patterns (including function chaining and fan-out/fan-in), orchestrator… | ||
| Don't Develop Just for Yourself - A Developer's Checklist to Accessibility | Eeva-Jonna Panula | 41m |
Checklist of concrete checks: run automated tools like axe-core and browser extensions but expect them to catch only 15–50% of accessibility failures, so… | ||
| Why software developers should build a resilience culture based on chaos engineering | Yury Yineth Niño Roa | 38m |
Argues that developers must adopt chaos engineering as a daily discipline and gives concrete how‑tos: form a hypothesize steady state, inject faults (Chaos… | ||
| Strategic Testing Decisions | Francesco Strazzullo | 42m |
Argues that automated tests are just tests are one form of feedback and recommends choosing tests by product phase using Kent Beck’s 3x model: explore, expand… | ||
| Choreography vs Orchestration in serverless microservices | Mete Atamel | 49m |
Compares event-driven choreography with a central orchestrator and shows a concrete rewrite: an event-heavy image app called Pika Daily is converted to… | ||
| Azure Video Indexer: Advanced metadata extraction from video and audio content | Luis Beltran | 46m |
Demonstrates Azure Video Indexer (Video Analyzer for Media) extracting timestamps, thumbnails and JSON insights via an access token and REST API, with face… | ||
| TDD and the Terminator - An introduction to Test Driven Development | Layla Porter | 48m |
Demo builds a tiny T800 reprogramming app using NUnit, Rider/Visual Studio and FluentAssertions, and shows the red‑green‑refactor cycle by writing failing… | ||
| Automated Cloud Security | Austen Novis | 39m |
Uses cloud custodian and small serverless functions (Goblet on GCP) to detect, aggregate and remediate cloud issues; policies deploy as Lambda-like functions… | ||
| Go global, or go home. Monitoring your platform from multiple locations | Andrei Danilov | 44m |
Monitoring from multiple regions is technically easy but strategy is the hard part: Postman, DataDog, New Relic, AWS, Uptrends and Cloudfare all work, but the… | ||
| Building your personal online brand using Static Blazor Apps, one step at a time | Stacy Cashmore | 43m |
Creates a Blazor WebAssembly app plus an Azure Function, calls the dev.to API to transform article JSON into a stable summary model, and wires client and API… | ||
| Why a Diverse Team is Crucial to Startup Success | Melissa Jurkoic | 55m |
Startups with at least one female founder register a 63% higher valuation and adding ethnic diversity edges that to 65% while ethnically diverse founding teams… | ||
| A Brief History of Big Data | David Ostrovsky | 46m |
Traces the engineering milestones that make modern cloud data stacks: the value tradeoff that single events lose value quickly while aggregates gain value over… | ||
| Shrink The Web: How To Get Happier By Removing Crap | Lemon | 48m |
Web pages keep ballooning: an example ThemeForest homepage weighs 3.56 MB with 35 images, 9 fonts, 5 scripts and takes >15s on 3G; average page now rivals Doom… | ||
| ML plumbing | Rimantas Benetis | 41m |
Claims that most ML effort sits outside model code: 85% stay in POC and data scientists spend most time on cleaning while algorithms take 4% of work. Describes… | ||
| Bringing a multicultural team together | Chervine Bhiwoo | 38m |
Built a banking app from scratch across multiple countries (Dec 2019–Mar 2021), the project moves from a confused, partly collocated group to a 20-person… | ||
| A Decentralized Reference Architecture for Cloud-native Applications | Asanka Abeysinghe | 39m |
Presents a cell-based reference architecture that groups components (microservices, databases, brokers, UIs) into independently deployable units with a cell… | ||
| 4 Pillars of Successful Agile Test Automation | Mesut Durukal | 39m |
Project lays out four concrete pillars and shows tools and results: True agility, KPIs and monitoring and Robustness in automation framework plus team… | ||
| The Joy of Multiple Models | Henning Schwentner | 47m |
Argues that the canonical “one big model” fails: the leasing example splits contract behavior into separate modules for sales and risk, each with its own data… | ||
| Everything you need to know about cloud migration | Radu Vunvulea | 46m |
Claims that poor planning, missing KPIs and missing governance cause migrations to balloon — one warehouse project scheduled for nine months hits 200% extra… | ||
| Intro to Blazing Web Accessibility (*) | Dennie Declercq | 46m |
A concrete build shows a Blazor site wired to Microsoft Cognitive Services to add paragraph-by-paragraph TTS that reads specific DOM elements instead of full… | ||
| Micro-services for a Billion people | Tejas Chopra | 34m |
A startup builds an Android marketplace for 12.8 million retail FMCG owners, iterating from SMS to app to microservices and saving supply chains money and… | ||
| Performance testing: from zero to hero with k6 & Azure | Jose Luis Latorre Millas | 34m |
Explains why switching from Azure DevOps legacy load testing to k6 matters, shows real scripts that run locally or in the cloud, and integrates with Azure… | ||
| Developing a Culture of Reliability and Resilience through Chaos | Russ Miles | 44m |
Claims that faster, smaller deployments reduce change-related failures and lower mean time to recovery; build four capacities — anticipation, synchronization… | ||
| Building Intelligent Enterprise-Grade Help Desk Bots using Conversational AI | Prashant G Bhoyar | 47m |
Shows how to build an enterprise help‑desk bot using Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure Bot Service, Cognitive Services and QnA Maker, crawling a public site to… | ||
| Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK (the Java version) | Diana Cheng | 44m |
Shows Java CDK code that builds a small stack (a Node.js Lambda fronted by API Gateway) and Lambda + API Gateway hello world demo with the project scaffolded… | ||
| Thriving in the cloud: Going beyond the 12 factors | Grace Jansen | 42m |
Claims that the original 12 factors evolve into 15 factors with three additions — API-first, telemetry, authentication & authorization — and that applying them… | ||
| EF Core 6: Fulfilling the Bucket List | Julie Lerman | 48m |
EF Core 6 shows concrete gains: TechEmpower full-stack tests report ~70% faster with .NET 6 overall and the EF Core piece is ~31% faster queries (benchmarked… | ||
| Designing meaningful Human-AI Interactions | Liji Thomas | 45m |
Microsoft presents the Microsoft HACKs toolkit with 18 guidelines grouped into four stages for designing human‑AI interaction; examples show Microsoft Word… | ||
| Domain-Driven Refactoring | Jimmy Bogard | 49m |
Refactors a legacy loyalty system into a real domain model by extracting a web-backed OfferValueCalculator domain service, converting a long handler into… | ||
| How a Serverless Backend Makes a Frontend Developer's Life Easier | Mark Piller | 36m |
Shows a live demo of creating a Person and Address table, linking them one-to-one, and getting JSON back via auto-generated REST CRUD endpoints; builds a… | ||
| Using the power of Azure and AI to help fight the COVID pandemic | Dmitry Soshnikov | 37m |
A reproducible pipeline processes the CORD‑19 corpus (~800,000 papers, ~30,000/month), extracts medical entities mapped to UMLS, and stores JSON records in… | ||
| Auditing your data and answering the life long question, is it the end of the day yet? | Simona Meriam | 39m |
Nielsen builds an auditing subsystem called Life Line that instruments the producer to emit five‑minute metadata windows and injects an AVRO Audit header into… | ||
| Build Your Cloud Infrastructure as Code With .Net Core | Hossam Barakat | 43m |
Shows how to use Pulumi with .NET Core to declare Azure infrastructure, scaffold a project with Pulumi CLI, create a resource group and storage account, enable… | ||
| I Feel the Need for Web Page Speed | Bill Dinger | 55m |
Explains how to find method‑level bottlenecks using the Performance API and browser tooling, showing live traces from Gmail and a carrier product where long… | ||
| The Evolution of JavaScript | Jemima Abu | 39m |
In the beginning, there was the web and the web was a simple place. Then came along JavaScript and all that changed. In this talk, we’ll take a look at the… | ||
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