YOW! 2021
who it's for
functional programmers, backend developers, platform engineers, engineering managers, devops engineers, site reliability engineers, embedded engineers
topics
Unison content-addressed codebase; Multicore OCaml effect handlers; Elixir supervision trees and supervision tooling; Phoenix connection scaling; F# 5 computation expressions and Span<T>; gitops deployments with Terraform and CI; platform design, onboarding and telemetry; continuous verification and chaos engineering; policy as code for team interfaces; ML platform organisation at Netflix
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Idioms for Building Fault-tolerant Applications with Elixir | José Valim | 44m |
Elixir runs lightweight isolated processes that communicate by message passing and are supervised so crashing components are restarted automatically… | ||
| Unison: A Friendly Programming Language from the Future Part 1 | Rúnar Bjarnason | 19m |
Unison stores every definition as a cryptographic hash so code becomes a content-addressed immutable data structure where names are just annotations… | ||
| How to Read Complex Code | Felienne Hermans | 52m |
Research shows developers spend about 58–60% of time reading code and that three memory systems drive confusion: short‑term (5±2 items), working memory, and… | ||
| Effective Programming in OCaml | KC Sivaramakrishnan | 32m |
Retrofitting Multicore OCaml adds effect handlers as first-class user-defined effects with one-shot delimited continuations and continue/discontinue… | ||
| Software Architecture, Team Topologies & Complexity Science | James Lewis | 01h 01m |
Argues organizations must optimize the flow of value and shows concrete practices that do this: Amazon-style forcing functions (teams must use externalized… | ||
| Unison: A Friendly Programming Language from the Future Part 2 | Rúnar Bjarnason | 27m |
A functional language where every definition has a content-addressed hashes identity, so names point to immutable objects and the codebase is an append-only… | ||
| Replatform in a Year or Die: The Tale of a Turnaround | Ken Scambler | 59m |
A legacy desktop accounting product gets rebuilt on top of the existing AccountRight core (a single ~4M-line DLL) with a BFF layer and a Gateway, using… | ||
| The Magic of Platforms | Gregor Hohpe | 51m |
Argues that platform success depends on the mechanics not the metaphor: platform must deliver low friction onboarding, clear telemetry and a shared… | ||
| Software Design: Beyond Boxes & Lines | Jessica Kerr | 53m |
Claims that software design is participatory sense making and that the single leverage point is a shared language drive concrete practices: map capabilities… | ||
| What’s New in F# 5.0 & Beyond | Don Syme | 50m |
F# 5.0 focuses on concrete tooling and language changes: computation expressions for applicatives and monoidal workflows enable resumable high‑performance… | ||
| Fast & Simple Deployments for Code & Infra | Jessica Kerr, Ian Smith | 56m |
Shows how Honeycomb uses CircleCI, Terraform (plus Chef and home‑grown scripts) to push green builds and deploy roughly a dozen times a day with ~3‑hour lead… | ||
| Move Fast But Don't Break Things | Andy Kelk | 59m |
Grew product and tech from ~12 engineers to over 50 while company reaches ~130 people and lands one top‑10 Australian customer plus five ASX 200 clients… | ||
| What Counts as a Programming Language? | Chelsea Troy | 49m |
Argues that what counts as a programming language depends on assumed context and shows concrete work: implements compilers and interpreters, refactors a lexer… | ||
| Trust Teams but Verify: Compliance as Code Done Right | Effy Elden | 48m |
Shows that converting policy to automated checks cuts delays and surfaces problems earlier: a policy "all data encrypted at rest" becomes an S3 buckets must… | ||
| Hashing Modulo Alpha Equivalence | Simon Peyton Jones | 48m |
Presents an algorithm that hashes lambda terms modulo alpha‑equivalence by summarizing each node into a structure + free‑variable map and then hashing those… | ||
| Beyond Chaos Engineering: Continuous Verification | Cat Swetel | 55m |
Continuous verification uses tooling to perturb to the safety boundary in production, detect where the operable margin sits, then back off and track how that… | ||
| Evolving the ML Platform Organisation at Netflix: A Case Study | Julie Amundson | 29m |
Chronicles how Netflix builds and reorganises ML support: a dedicated Personalization Infra team forms in 2014 to fix feature parity and scaling for hundreds… | ||
| Cultivating an Engineering Dialect | George Wilson | 24m |
PaidRight builds a rules engine where a Rule type has 45 constructors and many recursive cases, so the team chooses solutions that actually reduce work: using… | ||
| Who Tests Their Cloud Code Anyway? | Lars Klint | 54m |
Shows how Azure actually makes cloud testing practical: use deployment slots with traffic split to do real A/B tests by sending e.g. 30% traffic to staging… | ||
| Lessons Learned from Scaling Up Octopus | Mike Noonan | 44m |
Company head count grows from 39 to 95 headcount between January and August 2021 and the team ships measurable changes: a funded People & Culture team… | ||
| Give your ESP32s the Gift of Serviceability | Kasper Lund | 54m |
ESP32 becomes remotely serviceable by running a small virtual machine and language that sandbox applications, let the cloud orchestrator install or replace… | ||
| Lessons from Leading through Uncertain Times | Lisa Zhu, Ted Tencza | 56m |
Company loses significant revenue in May–June 2020 and runs redundancies, triggers daily check-ins and preserved scrum rituals while shipping hardware home… | ||
| Data Rainbows - select * from cloud; | Nathan Wallace | 30m |
Claims that Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers plus the open source steampipe let SQL query live cloud APIs with low latency and parallelism. Demo metrics: Zoom… | ||
| nothing matches | ||