iO Associates are delighted to bring you our next Java Virtual Meetup!

The topic of this session was ‘Kubernetes for Java Developers’, with guest speaker Rob Barr, Applications Development Senior Manager at Citibank.

Kubernetes is the definitive winner of the container orchestration wars. Originally created by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it is the de facto standard for automating scaling, provisioning and monitoring of modern cloud applications.

In this talk we delved into what K8s is and how to package and deploy your Java apps using technologies like Jib, Docker, Helm, Skaffold and Istio.

About the speaker:

Rob Barr has been a Java developer for over twenty years, working in financial services with a focus on high performance systems. He is passionate about building communities and leveraging modern technologies. He coaches teams to adopt proven Agile, Lean and DevOps methodologies which deliver value to the enterprise.

iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK. We’re really keen to help keep our community positive and engaged hearing from the best speakers on the topics of your choice so encourage you to share this with your team and the wider community.

Details matter when it’s time to scale and milliseconds add up quickly. Understanding the relevant details of the .NET subsystems can make the difference between scaling and failing.

We are joined by David Fowler, Principal Software Architect at Microsoft and Creator of SignalR, who delivered a session on ‘Implementation Details Matter’.

About the speaker:

David Fowler has been at Microsoft for 13 years working on developer frameworks and tools in the .NET space. He’s one of the creators of several popular OSS frameworks and tools such as NuGet, SignalR and ASP.NET Core.

He’s an avid open source advocate and developer currently focused on helping teams at Microsoft adopt .NET 5/6 and beyond. iO Associates, tech and digital recruitment specialists, have always been a very active member of multiple Meetup groups across the UK.

We’re really keen to help keep our community positive and engaged hearing from the best speakers on the topics of your choice so encourage you to share this with your team and the wider community.

iO Associates bring you our latest .Net Virtual Meetup. We are joined by William Eastbury, Principal Azure Architect and Engineer at Microsoft, who deliver a session on ‘Implementing the Geode Pattern in Azure with Front Door, Azure App Service and Azure Cosmos DB’.

Many large-scale services have specific challenges around geo-availability and scale.

The Geode pattern involves deploying a collection of backend services into a set of geographical nodes, each of which can service any request for any client in any region. This pattern allows serving requests in an active-active style, improving latency and increasing availability by distributing request processing around the globe.

We walk through a practical demo of this architecture and built a cloud-scale, globally geo-resilient, and globally performant scaled data storage service architecture that will perform at scale from all corners of the globe.

About Will:

Will is a Principal Engineer on the FastTrack for Azure Engineering team at Microsoft, helping customers to build, deploy and scale cloud solutions. A 25 year technology veteran in the sector, Will helps customers ask, and answer the hardest challenges around cloud technologies, regardless of size or budget.

Here we are joined by Rupert Madden-Abbott, Senior Developer at YellowDog, who delivered a session on ‘Monitoring a Murmuration of Microservices’.

This was a deep dive into how we gain insight into our production applications at YellowDog using technologies like Grafana, Loki, Promtail and Prometheus and how we integrate them with Spring Boot.

About our speaker:

Rupert Madden-Abbott has been a software developer for 10 years and nowadays mostly focusses on Java. At YellowDog he works on Spring Boot microservices that enable their multi-cloud compute provisioning and workload scheduling.

iO Associates present to you our next .Net Virtual Meetup, and our second Meetup with Scott Hunter, Director of Programme Management at Microsoft! Scott delivers a fascinating session on ‘.NET 6 and Cloud Native’.

About our speaker:

Scott Hunter is responsible for the Microsoft’s .NET platform, which includes the .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, .NET Tools, Web Tools and the managed languages (C#, F# and VB). Prior to leading the .NET Platform, Hunter helped the Azure Developer Experience team build the Azure SDK’s, App Service Tooling, Azure Redis Cache, Azure API Management, ASP.NET, Entity Framework and the Web Tooling. In his spare time he loves hiking mountains around the world. Scott grew up in Little Rock, AR and went to college in Fayetteville before heading to the West Coast for a startup and Microsoft.

The topic of this session is ‘Making Change Stick’.

The session includes a number of panellists to discuss the topics. Our speakers include Fredrik Hagstroem, CTO of Emergn, Ravi Lal-Sarin, Partner & Co-Founder at Arca Blanca, Simon Adams, Managing Consultant & Executive Board Member at Nine Feet Tall, Zoë Gould, Principal Delivery Manager at Kainos, and Stephen Moffitt, Partner at We Are Atmosphere. The topic of the session was ‘Making Change Stick’.

In this session, we covered:

– Who should drive the change – the leaders or the consultancy?
– How to best develop a network of internal change ambassadors
-The importance of benefits realisation – how to best utilise this part in the change programme to ensure current & future success.

The session included a number of panellists to discuss the topics. Our speakers included Adam Skinner, Director of Consulting at P2 Consulting, Andrew Pitkeathly, Head of Manchester Division at Nimble Approach, Darren Lynch, Head of Delivery at Difrent, and Ben Davison, Director at Axiologik, who participated in our session surrounding ‘Digital Transformations: What to do when it all goes wrong?’.

In the second instalment of our Leaders in Transformation Consulting series, we turned the tables and focused instead on what to do when a transformation has failed.

We ask our panellists to discuss several talking points, including:

• Why ‘failure’ has a different definition based on who you ask
• Repairing client relationships
• Recovering projects before it’s too late

About our speakers:

Adam is a Transformation Consultant of 20 years, and P2 Consulting’s Director of Consulting, with responsibility for the quality of their 200 strong consulting team, services, and consulting support. Adam specialises in providing organisations with pragmatic maturity assessments of their transformation ability, and then supporting them through engaged mentoring and coaching to deliver those transformations in a fully stable fashion.

He is also the co-author of the APM’s Portfolio Management Specific Interest Group’s ‘Portfolio Management: a practitioner’s guide’, and their publication ‘The Agile Portfolio: Fact or Fiction’.

Andrew has been in the IT Industry over 20 years working as Project Manager, Programme Manager and now Head of Manchester Division for Nimble Approach. Andrew has worked on the client side, as a consultant, and as a Programme Manager delivering large scale IT delivery for customers for a top 10 European IT consultancy. 

Darren is a specialist in delivering large scale digital transformation & change programmes across both public and private sectors. Delivering end to end services, utilising multidisciplinary teams and Agile methodologies, Darren has 20+ years experience in IT related service delivery and managed services.

Ben is an expert digital transformation leader and general manager with an impressive track record of delivering results on complex and challenged transformation programmes and in struggling business environments.

Ben has led high value, complex digital transformations on both the client and supplier side and has worked across the full programme lifecycle from systems engineering through to service management. This, coupled with his track record in turning around struggling organisations, gives him a highly balanced viewpoint and the leadership skills to take on the most complex challenges.

In this session we are joined by Gerald Versluis, Senior Software Engineer – .Net MAUI at Microsoft, who delivers a session on: ‘Introduction to App Development with .NET MAUI’.

.NET MAUI provides an extremely flexible and powerful way to create apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows, from very simple to extremely robust and complex. Is this one size fits all? Where should you start?

In this session, Gerald runs through:

– What .NET MAUI is

– How it fits in the .NET ecosystem

– Differences with Xamarin

– How to get started yourself

About our speaker:

Gerald Versluis is a Software Engineer at Microsoft from the Netherlands. After years of experience working with Azure, ASP.NET, DevOps, Xamarin and other .NET technologies, he has been involved in a number of different projects and has been building several real-world apps and solutions.

Not only does he like to code, but he is also passionate about spreading his knowledge – as well as gaining some in the bargain. Gerald involves himself in speaking, providing training sessions and writing blogs (https://blog.verslu.is) or articles, answering questions on Stack Overflow and contributing to open-source projects in his spare time. Twitter: @jfversluisIWebsite: https://gerald.verslu.is

We held another of our ever growing Tech meetups, this time kindly hosted at UCAS in Cheltenham. Our meetups provide a platform for the tech community to exchange ideas and keep up-to-date with the latest movements and shifts in software development.

For this event we are lucky enough to have secured a well renowned Google software engineer, author and Stack Overflow contributor Jon Skeet. Jon delivered an insightful and engaging discussion on the upcoming C# 8.0 and will further be hosting another meetup with us at Argus Media in London on the 11th September.

Jon commented; 
“Though we don’t have a released date for C# 8.0 yet, it’s close enough that it’s worth learning about. The most important, complex, and potentially disruptive feature in C# 8 is nullable reference types, but there’s more than that. There’s also pattern matching enhancements, switch expressions, index and range literals, greater async integration and more. These events provide a great opportunity to find out what the future holds and how to get ahead of the game…”

Danny Watts, Senior .Net Contract Associate at iO Associates said;

“The feedback we’ve had from this meetup already is incredible, so a massive thank you to Jon. I’m so proud to see our Cheltenham/ Gloucester group has grown so massively, from humble beginnings with 25 attendees in February we’ve grown to a meetup that attracts well over a 100 tech enthusiasts! These events offer us a fantastic opportunity to stay on top of the industry trends, catch up with our network and share our knowledge of the market.”

We have several Tech Meetups throughout the South so, if you enjoy technology and would like to socialise with fellow technologists, please come along or join our group to find out more and keep up to date. You can find out more details here:

London
Cheltenham/ Gloucester
Reading
South West

Discover more .NET talks here.

In this session we are joined by Kris Foster, GraaIVM Product Management at Oracle Labs, who delivered a session on ‘GraalVM, Spring & Containers – The benefits of native executables in Containers’.

This talk takes a look at how you can use GraalVM Native Image to package your Java Spring Applications as a native executable within Docker containers. We start out with a Simple Spring application, look at how we can “dockers” it and then took a look at various performance characteristics.

We then move onto to how to create a native executable of this application, using GraalVM Native Image. We packaged it in a couple of containers (including Distroless) and saw how we can shrink the container size, reduce the start-up time and reduce the memory consumption.

About Kris: Kris works with the Java sales team to raise the profile of GraalVM, Oracle’s new Java Runtime, as well as helping to identify applications, sectors and businesses that would benefit from GraalVM’s unique feature set. Kris is also responsible for working with customers on Proof-of-Concepts that help them to establish the value of GraalVM, within their organisations.