GOTO Copenhagen day 2 continued

After lunch I picked a talk by Dave Thomas on Fast data - tools and peopleware. Dave threw some punches at SCRUM and OO languages, while describing the challenges of handeling the huge amounts of data and the variery of devices that we have today. With that he concluded that the amount of serialization and modelling we are doing is hopeless and that going through layers like ODBC is terrible. Instead we need vector based systems with value types and native operations queries using functional programming. He therefore forsees a future where applications are built around collections and queries. The hard part being that education in these areas is really bad, so not many people truly know how to do advanced querying. To solve this he showed parts of a system he worked on, that provides SDL's and tooling on such a platform for solving problems around cyberattacks.

Afterwards I went for a talk on IoT on Windows by Sebastian Brandes. He talked about Windows IoT core, Raspberry PI and arduino boards leading to a nice demo of his plant watering system built using universal apps, service bus, event hub and stream analytics on Azure. Cool stuff!

Security is one of those topics that we sadly need but most pay too little attention to. So to do my part I saw Thomas Kristmar from the centre for cyber security talk about recent lessons not learned. Currently they see espionage from foreign governments, political activists, cyber sabotage and supply chain attacks as the biggest threats. 3F and parlament have been subject to attacks. Ministry of foreign affairs and ministry of business and growth are frequently targeted along with CSC. To prevent or soften such attacks he encouraged us to think about architecture, contingency plans and testing hardware as well as software. He went on to explain how attacks are usually carried out and how people are targeted to be exploited for access using waterholes or spearfishing. As it turnes out lots of attacks are quite straight forward security holes when developers don't learn from the past like not validating certificates, leaving access open from certain IP-ranges and developers inventing their own crypto. Interesting and somewhat paranoia inducing stuff.

The last talk on my list this year was about micro services in large enterprises by Zhamak Dehghani. She gave a good talk on real world problems when moving to microservices, and how organisation disruption and breaking apart monoliths can be difficult. In reality developers need to become better salesmen, to argue business cases for organisational restructuring according to Zhamak.

Summing up it has been another good GOTO conference in Copenhagen, that has once again manager to provide a diverse mix of talks. I have been happy to see how successful the Microsoft tracks have been, with all the new exciting things happening I think it is very well deserved.