Track: Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Location: Broadway Ballroom North Center, 6th fl.

Day of week: Tuesday

Case studies from the most relevant names in software

Track Host:
Jean Barmash
Director of Engineering @ Compass & Organizer @ CTO School Meetup

Jean Barmash is Director of Engineering at Compass, where he is helping build the first modern real estate brokerage. Jean oversees the teams that build products to make our agents more effective at delivering the best experience to their clients. Prior to Compass, he was VP of Engineering, Apps Platform & Marketplaces at Tradeshift. Jean has over 17 years of experience in software industry, and has been part of 5 startups, three as CTO / VPE and one of which he co-founded. Prior to his entrepreneurial adventures, Jean held a number of progressively senior roles in product development, integration consulting, and team leadership, working with Fortune 100 companies like Ford, Microsoft, BofA, Citi, IHG, and Adobe.

Jean is passionate about raising the level of technical leadership in the industry, and for the last six years has been organizing CTO School New York meetup, an organization he co-founded and grew to over 2,000 members. Jean lives in NY with his awesome and supportive wife and two hilariously-funny kids.

Trackhost Interview

Question: 
QCon: What’s the motivation for your track?
Answer: 

Jean: Architectures You've Always Wondered About is about finding stories of interesting architectures operating at scale. We look for things that are still on the newer side and thus pushes the state of the art. For example, several talks this year are about bringing multiple disciplines together - machine learning, search, IOT, devops through newer deployment tools. As a result, this track is a bit less about in-depth coverage of a specific topic, but about taking stock of where we are as an industry.

Question: 
QCon: What’s the level & core persona?
Answer: 

Jean: The core persona is senior developers and architects, although realistically, this is the track that all attendees should find something interesting. Anybody who wonders about architectures ;-).

Question: 
QCon: What 3 actionable things do you want persona to walk away with?
Answer: 

Jean: Because the talks are so diverse, this is a difficult question to answer. I think seeing some of these architectures being used by mature companies for challenging problems will help attendees take another look at them and consider incorporating them into their work, even if they have been hesitant to do so in the past.

Question: 
QCon: What was surprising about this year's track?
Answer: 

Jean: I hosted this track two years ago. What struck me this year is how much the industry embraced machine learning in a very short amount of time - it is becoming a key part of many systems. Also, as I said above, today's architectures are very much about taking advantage of different components - cloud frameworks, data analysis techniques, different API-based providers and open source components, infrastructure innovations and IOT devices. The world is also becoming increasingly integrated, with more ways to reach your customers (such as chatbots), and that of course is reflected in the architectures. Truly exciting time to be a leader in the industry, which I know QCon attendees are.

10:35am - 11:25am

by Brian Chambers
Enterprise Architect @Chick-fil-A, Inc.

Internet of Things (IoT) is radically changing the way Chick-fil-A does business. At Chick-fil-A, we see IoT as a strategic capability to enable in-restaurant interactions, from the front-of-house customer experience to back-of-house kitchen automation. IoT discussions often stop at data collection, but the real value comes when IoT can enable new interactions and drive automation.

In this session, you will learn how Chick-fil-A architected our IoT platform and created a digital...

11:50am - 12:40pm

by Jim Posen
Tech Lead @Coinbase

With over 6 million users across 33 countries, Coinbase is an industry leader building the bridge between traditional finance and the blockchain space. Our goal at Coinbase is to provide simple and secure exchange services to users worldwide for blockchain-based digital assets. The networks that power these digital currencies are complex and significantly different from traditional banking integrations. In this presentation, I provide an overview of blockchain protocols and discuss how our...

1:40pm - 2:30pm

by Phillipa Avery
Senior Software Engineer @Netflix

by Robert Reta
Senior Software Engineer @Netflix

In November of 2016 Netflix successfully launched its new Download feature, allowing users to download and play content offline on their mobile devices. This feature required us to change our previously stateless distributed licensing service to be real time and stateful. In a matter of months we needed to create a brand new stateful service that could evolve with rapid feature requirement iterations, while also being able to scale to millions of members using the feature across the globe....

2:55pm - 3:45pm

by Pedro Rubio
Engineering Manager @Zocdoc

by Brian D'Alessandro
Director of Data Science @Zocdoc

Most physician search systems require patients to know exactly what they’re looking for, either in terms of the appropriate specialty for a given condition or the medical terminology to describe the condition. At Zocdoc, we have built a patient friendly search system to power our core doctor discovery and booking platform using various products from the AWS stack and custom Machine Learning pipelines. This talk will focus on the anatomy of our Patient Powered Search and will cover both the...

4:10pm - 5:00pm

by Robert Enyedi
MTS Software Engineer @eBay

ebay ShopBot is a personal shopping assistant available as a Facebook Messenger bot. It surfaces the best shopping options with the least effort in a conversational style. ShopBot leverages an array of AI components and the richness of ebay user data. In this session you will learn of the internals of the ebay ShopBot and how the processing of text, image and speech flows through the purpose-built system leveraging the product knowledge graph, commerce-aware input recognizers and the Dialog...

5:25pm - 6:15pm

Open Space

Tracks

Monday, 26 June

Tuesday, 27 June

Wednesday, 28 June