Looking Back at GOTO 2016

By Peter Crona and Michael Ruhwedel

First of all, it was an amazing conference as always. None of us presented this year, but look for us in the future. Many of us at Small Improvements tend to go to more specific conferences, such as React Europe, DockerCon or JSUnconf. GOTO is more of a generic software engineering conference, focusing on issues such as architecture, security and new trends in the field. It doesn’t go as deep into the topics as the specialized conferences, but it serves well to give an overview and an introduction to interesting topics. Some of the most interesting and most popular topics were, as expected, microservices, data science, security and ethics. Let’s start with microservices.

Microservices are the Future

Something interesting about the future is that it is also always in the present, just initially hiding a bit in the corners. A clear message from Mary Poppendieck was that microservices are the future. Regardless of whether we want it or not, we need to learn it and will eventually use it.

Susanne Kaiser from Just Software talked about their ongoing journey from a monolith to microservices. She warned us from doing too much at once, but concluded that going from a monolith to microservices was worth it in the end. She also told us about the importance to not underestimate the effort required to do so. Later on Ilya Dmitrichenko walked us through Socks Shop, a demo application to show how an application built with microservices can look. He also showed us how a microservice-based application is deployed.

I urge you to read up on microservices if you haven’t. It is truly fascinating how convenient the configuration is nowadays, and if you’ve been around for awhile, you will find it interesting to compare with how we did it in the good old days. Have a look at this configuration for example, lovely, isn’t it? Let’s move on to another topic, which I have a very strong interest for, namely data science.

Seeing into the Future

It is truly fascinating how quickly data science has become popular and advanced. One of the first talks I went to was “Applied data science and engineering for local weather forecasts” by Nikhil Podduturi from Meteogroup. He took us through how they started using machine learning, running everything on their own laptops and then moving into the cloud. He showed us a bit of their architecture that process more than a terabyte daily. I enjoyed his talk very much and had a chat afterwards, in which he pointed out that, when getting started with data science, it is sensible to start with the basics, learning/repeating the mathematics and then move on to hot techniques such as deep learning. This will make it easier to develop an intuition for which technique to use when and how to find the best parameters. He recommended using Python since it has a very mature ecosystem for machine learning.

Robert Kubis from Google tutored us in Tensorflow, by working the Hello World of machine learning, namely classification of handwritten digits. He pushed the success rate of a neural network, up to an impressive 98%, while touching the basics of the Python API. This was a very interesting and hand-on talk, showing you how to use Tensorflow and giving you an introduction to deep learning.

How to find insights without using machine learning, was the topic of Michael Hunger from Neo Technology talk. He demonstrated how data can be modelled and queried using a graph. His talk focused on how Neo4J was used by journalists to analyze the panama papers.

Even your code repository is a datasource in itself that can be mined. This concept was presented by Dr. Elmar Juergens. By coloring new additions of code and test-coverages of functional tests, he clearly demonstrated that a dev- and a test-department at one of his clients had a serious communication problem: There was little overlap in what was tested and what was newly implemented.

The last two talks about data science were focusing a bit more on possibilities, philosophy and ethics. “Deep Stupidity: What Neural Networks Can and Cannot do …” by Prof J. Mark Bishop discussed about whether we can build general intelligence or not. “Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm” by Carina C. Zona focused on the importance of thinking through the ethical aspects when developing algorithms and using them. We are giving a lot of power to algorithms, and algorithms tend to reinforce prejudices and do not necessarily care about what is right, but are still used to make decisions that affect people’s lives. Let’s now have a look at the security talks.

A Secure Internet

When you learn a new concept, such as microservices, it is important to read up on security. It is easy to make mistakes that introduce vulnerabilities when you are new to technologies. Phil Winder talked about how to make your microservices secure. He was very practical and showed us common mistakes people do, such as running as root in containers and not setting up a sensible network policy. Dr. Jutta Steiner introduced us to Blockchain technology. She pointed out how we can use techniques from safety critical systems development, such as N-version programming, to securely implement it and minimizing the risk of bugs. The talk was unfortunately not going into implementation details of blockchain technology itself, but she made it clear that the technology can be used for much more than just a currency such as Bitcoin. Finally, let’s have a look at the ethics focused talks.

Ethics in Technology

The great thing about goto is, that it’s not got the latest technology topics covered, but also how to better get along with your fellow human beings.

Jamie Dobson encouraged us to think beyond capitalism in his inspiring “Postcapitalism” talk. It’s possible that the  power of 3D printing small and large can bring back the capital and onshore work in developed countries again.

Beginning with a short meditation Jeffery Hackert build a compelling argument for giving our full presence. With a full awareness of ourselves and our workplace come better informed observations, decisions and implementations. After all if you’re ever involved in a trolley problem, it would be really unfortunate if you’d be focused on your cellphone and not the lever.

If you’ve been exhausted by office politics Kate Gray and Chris Young can help you. Their great talk “How to Win Hearts and Minds” is about how the finesse of real world politics were used to push a blocked IT project to success.

Talks ranging from microservices to ethics shows you the great variety offered at GOTO, the conference really has a lot to offer.

Something for Everyone

Let’s end with some words about the conference itself. GOTO has five different tracks and the mix is very good, covering important and trending topics such as architecture (in particular microservices), security, data science and much more. In addition to this you find plenty of interesting people there to share ideas and pain points with. My only disappointment was that there was not a single talk about functional programming. But hey, you can’t fit everything into one conference.