QCon NY 2018 Community Night

QCon New York (June 27-29, 2018)is the software conference where leading shops like Netflix, Google, Gilt  and Facebook open their doors and give us a glimpse into their greatest engineering feats (and in some cases, their biggest failures). QCon is the place where senior software engineers, tech leads, and architects come together to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation.

Wednesday evening is the first night of the QCon NYC 2018 and is all about opening the doors to QCon and inviting the local community in. One local meetup organizer described holding meetups in NYC this way: "One of the biggest problems for meetups in New York is finding a place big enough to host us. Getting people to come isn't the issue, it's finding a place big enough for everyone." So by providing space right in the heart of Times Square and top notch AV used at QCon itself, we want to remove some of the friction and encourage the mixing of ideas and networking of QCon attendees and the local development scene. That's what QCon's Community Night is about.  

We’re inviting four local meetups to the conference to hold their monthly events at QCon NY on Wednesday, June 27th: Serverless NYC Meetup, Papers We Love NYC, JavaSIG Meetup, and the CTO School Meetup.

You can find more details and register to the events using the links below. Registration is free and required to join the meetups.

The 7th annual QCon New York features 15 tracks covering all aspects of software development and Architecture/Developer focus with 75 technical talks on topics like security, chaos engineering, ethics in computing, blockchains, containers and serverless from architects/engineers at Uber, Facebook and Google.

Check all of the 100+ speakers, ~100 sessions, and 15 workshops. If you want to join the full 3-day conference you can register using one of the following promo codes to get $100 off your QCon conference ticket: PapersWeLoveNY18, JavaSigNY18, CTOSchoolNY18, ServerlessMeetupNY18 on https://qconnewyork.com/registration.

 

Papers We Love @QCon w/ Carmen, Sally and Matt

7:00 pm - Location: New York Marriott Marquis Time Square - Registration on the 6th floor

Papers We Love is a nonprofit organization that is bringing academic and non-academic research in computer-science, computer-science-education, electrical engineering, and what's in-between to everyone via online-discussion, meetups, and events. We've hosted presentations on subjects ranging from distributed-systems and consensus-algorithms to propositions as types, lock-free algorithms, garbage collection, rendering and graphics, node traversal, and even the Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. More information about the NYC chapter of Papers We Love can be found at https://paperswelove.org/chapter/newyork/. Videos are available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/paperswelove.

This June we're working with QCon New York to bring you a series of 20-minute talks on 3 different papers! We're very lucky to be able and host Carmen Andoh, Golestan "Sally" Radwan and Matt Adereth.

Papers:

Golestan "Sally" Radwan on What Does Explainable AI Really Mean? A New Conceptualization of Perspectives by D. Doran, S. Schulz, T. R. Besold:

We characterize three notions of explainable AI that cut across research fields: opaque systems that offer no insight into its algorithmic mechanisms; interpretable systems where users can mathematically analyze its algorithmic mechanisms; and comprehensible systems that emit symbols enabling user-driven explanations of how a conclusion is reached. The paper is motivated by a corpus analysis of NIPS, ACL, COGSCI, and ICCV/ECCV paper titles showing differences in how work on explainable AI is positioned in various fields. We close by introducing a fourth notion: truly explainable systems, where automated reasoning is central to output crafted explanations without requiring human post-processing as final step of the generative process. 
 

Carmen Andoh on Communicating Sequential Processes by C.A.R. Hoare:

This paper suggests that input and output are basic primitives of programming and that parallel composition of communicating sequential processes is a fundamental program structuring method. When combined with a development of Dijkstra's guarded command, these concepts are surprisingly versatile. Their use is illustrated by sample solutions of a variety of a familiar programming exercises.
 
Matt Adereth on The Mode Tree: A Tool for Visualization of Nonparametric Density Features by Michael C. Minnotte and David W. Scott:
 
Recognition and extraction of features in a nonparametric density estimate is highly dependent on correct calibration. The data-driven choice of bandwidth h in kernel density estimation is a di cult one, compounded by the fact that the globally optimal h is not generally optimal for all values of x. In recognition of this fact, a new type of graphical tool, the mode tree, is proposed. The basic mode tree plot relates the locations of modes in density estimates with the bandwidths of those estimates. Additional information can be included on the plot indicating such factors as the size of modes, how modes split, and the locations of antimodes and bumps. The use of a mode tree in adaptive multimodality investigations is proposed, and an example is given to show the value in using a Normal kernel, as opposed to the biweight or other kernels, in such investigations. Examples of such investigations are provided for Ahrens' chondrite data and van Winkle's Hidalgo stamp data. Finally, the bivariate mode tree is introduced, together with an example using Scott's lipid data.
 
 

Register here for the Papers We Love Community Night

 

June 2018 NYJavaSIG/ACGNJ Meeting

6:40 pm - Location: New York Marriott Marquis Time Square - Registration on the 6th floor

The New York Java Special Interest Group (NYJavaSIG) is based in New York City and attracts Java developers from the tri-state region. Through its regular monthly general meetings, bi-monthly specialty workgroup meetings, and its website, the NYJavaSIG brings together members of New York's Java community so they can share their tips, techniques, knowledge, and experience.

Presentations: 

"Develop your development experience with the spring boot of software delivery" - Speaker: Rod Johnson - CEO Atomist and Spring Creator 
As developers, we understand the value of what we do. We take business problems and create robust, automated solutions for them. We value engineered solutions using sophisticated modern programming languages, frameworks, and platforms. We don’t trust anything we can’t test at multiple levels.  Yet we let ourselves down in how we work and approach software delivery. Just as shoemakers’ children go barefoot, we fail to improve the daily work of our own teams. We fail to automate many of the tedious daily tasks we face. We code behaviors in untestable YAML and Bash. We resort to copy and paste when we could automate reuse. We tolerate duplication between delivery pipelines and suffer increasing, dangerous entropy over time. As we’ve moved toward microservices from monoliths, we’ve actually gone backward in some ways, as the sophisticated capabilities of IDEs solve fewer of our problems.

"Google cloud native with spring boot" - Ray Tsang - Google 
Spring Framework and Spring Boot made a huge stride to make it easier than ever to develop the next generation of cloud native applications. More importantly, a number of Spring projects provides cloud-vendor agnostic abstractions to developers, so that with a simple configuration switch, you are able to move your local application to run in an on-prem data center, or in the cloud with managed services. Google and Pivotal partnered to develop Spring Cloud adapters for Google Cloud Platform. With Spring Cloud GCP, you can quickly develop cloud native applications & harness the power of Google infrastructure. We'll introduce a number of projects we've been working on.

Learn More: http://www.JavaSIG.com

Register here for the NYJavaSIG Meeting

 

CTO School Meetup - QCon Session

6:45 pm - Location: New York Marriott Marquis Time Square - Registration on the 6th floor

A group of NYC Startup CTOs, VP of Engineering, Tech Leads, and technologists who would like to become leaders. Membership is by approval, and ONLY technical people are allowed to join. The membership is open to senior technical leaders, or people on the cusp of getting there (e.g. lead developers). The goal is to have an ongoing forum for technical leaders (esp. in startups) to discuss their issues, whether the issues related to management, process or technology. Founded in 2009, Some of the past speakers include Kellan, CTO of Etsy, Nick Ganju, CTO of ZocDoc, Mike Bryzek, CTO of Gilt, Michael Nygard, Camille Fournier, CTO of Rent The Runway, Jim Benson, author of Personal Kanban, and many others.

Presentation: "Team Autonomy Experiment and Servant Leadership at Booking.com" - Speaker: Georgiy Mogelashvili

Learn More: https://www.meetup.com/ctoschool

Register here for the CTO School Community Night

 

Serverless NYC Meetup

6:40 pm - Location: New York Marriott Marquis Time Square - Registration on the 6th floor

6:40-7: 00 pm Networking 
7:00pm-7: 15 pm Welcome, Serverless Overview - Wayne Scarano, Cloud/Security Architect, sga.com   
7:15pm-8:15pm Presentation:

"Applying principles of chaos engineering to Serverless" - Speaker:  Yan Cui - Principal Engineer - DAZN

Chaos engineering is a discipline that focuses on improving system resilience through controlled experiments that expose the inherent chaos and failure modes in our system before these failure modes manifest themselves like a wildfire in production and impact our users. Most of the publicised tools and articles focus on killing EC2 instances, and the efforts in the serverless community have been largely limited to moving those tools into AWS Lambda functions. But how can we apply the same principles of chaos to a serverless architecture built around AWS Lambda functions? Can we adapt existing practices to expose the inherent chaos in these systems? What are the limitations and new challenges that we need to consider?   Yan Cui - Principal Engineer - DAZN

Learn More: https://www.meetup.com/Serverless-NYC/

Register here for the Serverless Community Night