Rob Crowley
Chief Technology Officer @ Fluent Commerce
Sydney, Australia
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Rob is a software consultant, developer and technical leader with a passion for delivering systems that perform at scale. Rob has over 20 years of experience building distributed systems on the web stack and has read more RFCs than he cares to admit. Rob is an active member of the Perth IT community and regularly shares his ideas at various Meetups and conferences around Australia and internationally. He is also a co-organiser of DDD Perth, the largest IT conference in Western Australia.
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Topics
Crafting compelling real-time web experiences with GraphQL and React
Users expect real-time data. They want their banking transaction notifications now. Their orders confirmed now. They need prices accurate as of now. They want their user experience to feel—connected. The world has moved to push and users are waiting for the data-driven experiences we create on the web to catch up.
GraphQL is Facebook’s response to this challenge and it is quickly proving itself as an attractive alternative to RESTful APIs for a wide range of contexts. GraphQL is a query language that provides a clean and simple syntax for consumers to interrogate your APIs. These queries are strongly typed, hierarchical and enable clients to retrieve only the data they need.
In addition to the familiar pull based request-response pattern, GraphQL provides a mechanism for clients to subscribe to real-time updates in the form of Subscriptions. Subscriptions are exciting as they represent the core ability we need to satisfy the connected experience that our users demand.
In this talk, we will take a hands-on look at GraphQL and see how it can be used to build real-time APIs that are a joy to use. Additionally, we will explore how to integrate a React client with GraphQL using the ultra flexible, community driven Apollo client. By the end of the session you will understand what is required to craft a compelling real-time user experience with GraphQL, and have the knowledge to deliver on these requirements.
Effective Communication in a Remote First World
2020 has seen a seismic shift in how we work across the IT industry. Remote working, previously the choice of a small minority of IT professionals, has become the de-facto standard. This trend is likely to strengthen as workers and companies embrace the myriad potential benefits. The companies that will thrive in this brave new world will be those who can adapt most nimbly. Unfortunately, many have lurched into this situation with little deliberate thought on how their approach to communication should evolve to suit this new operating context. Simply substituting in-person meetings for virtual ones misses the major opportunities to eliminate waste, boost organisational memory and enhance engagement.
Join Rob as he shares the lessons he’s learned leading delivery teams across five timezones and three continents on the path towards remote working. We will take an in-depth look at communication from three perspectives; intra-team, inter-team, and finally customer-facing. For each of these focus areas, we will explore:
* How to choose the optimal channel for a given interaction
* Why asynchronous communication is more important than ever and what skills are required to make it shine
* Why tooling represents one aspect of the solution but is far from a silver bullet
Additionally, we will see how leaders can maintain strategic alignment and avoid feelings of isolation within their team. By the end of the session, you will not only understand how to communicate effectively while working remotely but also have the knowledge to put this into practice. If you want to improve the quality of your remote interactions with others, then this is the session for you. See you there!
.NET Rocks Live – the API in 2020
Join Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks for this live recording of a .NET Rocks panel discussion including Heather Downing, Rob Crowley and Irina Scurtu on making APIs in 2020.
Programmers have been calling APIs for as long as there have been computers available to execute code. But the expectations around APIs are evolving – between the Internet, the Cloud, Open-Source Software, Serverless technology and more – what’s the right way to make an API today? Bring your questions and be part of this .NET Rocks episode!
GraphQL - A query language to empower your API consumers
The API economy is here, fueling disruption across many established industries. REST, as specified in Roy Fielding’s seminal dissertation, has become the architectural pattern of choice for APIs and when applied correctly allows for clients and servers to evolve in a loosely coupled manner. There are areas however where REST can deliver less than ideal client experiences. Often many HTTP requests are required to render a single view. While this may be a minor concern for a web app running on a WAN with low latency and high bandwidth, it can yield poor client experiences for mobile clients in particular. GraphQL is Facebook’s response to this challenge and it is quickly proving itself as an exciting alternative to RESTful APIs for a wide range of contexts. GraphQL is a query language that provides a clean and simple syntax for consumers to interrogate your APIs. These queries are strongly types, hierarchical and enable clients to retrieve only the data they need.
In this session, we will take a hands-on look at GraphQL and see how it can be used to build APIs that are a joy to use.
HTTP/2 - The future of the web today
Client side web technologies continue to advance at breakneck speed. The quest to deliver richer user experiences is relentless and due to the limitations of HTTP/1.x, we have been forced to develop various workarounds (domain sharding, spriting, resource concatenation and inlining) in a bid to optimize performance. HTTP/2 has been designed with the modern web in mind and eliminates the need for such compensating hacks. In this session we'll take an in-depth look at web performance optimization; the best practices that have evolved; the game changing new features of HTTP/2; and most importantly what you need to do to deliver a world class HTTP/2 experience:
- Why domain sharding, resource concatenation and image sprites are now anti-patterns
- How server push is effectively resource inlining on steroids
- What new best practices are possible with HTTP/2
- What techniques to apply during the transitional period from HTTP/1.x to HTTP/2
Additionally, we will look at the tooling available for working with HTTP/2 traffic and how we can ensure that we're getting the full benefit of HTTP/2 both client and server side.
Twelve-Factor Apps: Building compelling cloud native services
The drive to deliver products faster is relentless. In response to this, we have sought to unburden ourselves of the complexity of managing supporting infrastructure and instead adopt serverless architectures. Success in this brave new world is far from guaranteed, designing apps that run in such environments and that can take advantages of platform features such as auto scaling requires a new set of design practices.
The Twelve-Factor App methodology (https://12factor.net/), distilled from the collective wisdom of engineers with the experience of developing and deploying hundreds of apps on Heroku, defines a set of best practices for authoring code targeting modern cloud platforms.
In this presentation we will look at what the Twelve-Factor App methodology is, explore the rationale behind each factor, and demonstrate how it can be applied in practice. By the end of the session you will understand what is required to build cloud native applications, and have the knowledge to deliver on these requirements.
Service Meshes - Powering the next wave of microservice architectures
Microservices and containers have transformed application design and deployment patterns. Modern cloud native architectures - which underpin many of the world's groundbreaking tech companies such as Uber, Netflix and Airbnb - afford unparalleled levels of agility and scale but are not without trade-offs. In applications comprising hundreds of services (and thousands of service instances), concerns such as security, operability and observability pose significant challenges. Supporting compensating capabilities such as circuit breakers, retry policies and service discovery in each microservice adds undesirable code bloat and impacts our ability to choose the best language for the problem at hand should the required libraries not be available.
In this session, we will take an in-depth look at the service mesh pattern; the benefits that a decentralized microservice management approach brings; the best practices that have evolved; and most importantly what you need to know to effectively leverage a service mesh in your architecture:
- How to determine the suitability of a service mesh for your application context. Don't just drink the cloud native Kool-Aid!
- Disambiguate the overlapping responsibilities of an API gateway and service mesh in a modern architecture and demonstrate how they can be used in harmony.
- How a service mesh enables choosing the best tool or language for a given service without being constrained by the availability of libraries for each platform. Effectively it's a weight loss plan for your microservices.
- What techniques to apply when transitioning to a service mesh based architecture.
Additionally, we will take a hands-on look at what is involved to build and manage a microservice architecture leveraging Kubernetes and Istio, a leading open source service mesh. By the end of the session, you will not only understand the concepts underpinning the service mesh pattern but also have the knowledge to put them into practice.
Testing in Production for the Bold and True
Microservices and containers have transformed application design and deployment patterns. Modern cloud native architectures - which underpin many of the world's ground-breaking tech companies such as Uber, Netflix and Airbnb - afford unparalleled levels of agility and scale but are not without trade-offs. Testing in particular poses a significant challenge. With a complex adaptive system that can fail in myriad different ways, what confidence can we really gain from proving it works in a test environment with a certain data set at one particular point in time? Faced with such challenges, "testing in production" has become an attractive approach for enabling the safe deployment and release of software systems at speed.
In this talk, we will explore the gamut of techniques that comprise testing in production including: traffic shadowing at deploy time; feature flags and canarying at release time; as well as chaos testing, A/B tests and tracing post release. Additionally, we will see through a series of live demonstrations how Kubernetes and Istio, a leading open source service mesh, can bring these advanced techniques within reach of mere mortals.
By the end of the session, you will not only understand the techniques involved in safely testing in production but also have the knowledge to put them into practice.
GraphQL, gRPC or REST? Resolving the API Developer's Dilemma
GraphQL, gRPC, REST and WebHooks are among a bewildering array of technologies and architectural styles that are available to API developers today. Presented with such myriad options, how can we be confident of making an appropriate decision for the problem at hand? In search of guidance, developers often turn to online communities. This can exacerbate the problem as discussions about API styles often descend into statements about the superiority of one approach over another being presented as universal truths. Such comments invariably earn emotive rebuttals that also lack sufficient nuance. The result of such exchanges is increased confusion and uncertainty. Join me on a tour of these API styles where we will cut through this noise, demonstrate where each style shines (plus where they don't!) and ultimately resolve this dilemma of choice.
In this session we'll take an in-depth look at API design; the best practices that have evolved; the game changing supporting technologies that are now available including HTTP/2; and most importantly what you need to do to deliver a world class developer experience:
- How to determine the suitability of an API style for your application context. Don't be a victim of technology hype!
- What is required to support graceful evolution of the API contract including the potential implications of both Hyrum's Law and the Law of Implicit Interfaces
- Understand the supporting toolchains and technologies that dovetail with each API style.
- The importance of treating your API as a product with an unwavering focus on improving the ease of consumption for your clients.
By the end of the session, you will not only understand the concepts underpinning these various API styles but also have the knowledge to put them into practice. If you want to take to your API design expertise to the next level, then this is the session for you. See you there!
Unleash Your Inner CTO!
The role of a technology leader has never been more challenging. We are in the midst of unprecedented technology change fuelled by the commodification of Big Data, IoT and Machine Learning. Yet keeping abreast of such technological advances alone will not be enough to guide your organisation to success. A successful technology strategy does not exist in a vacuum. Rather it supports and amplifies the delivery of your organisation’s core vision.
Join Rob on a tour of how to build feedback loops into your organisation’s technology decisions and enable a low-risk empirical approach to change. We will take an in-depth look at what it takes to create an adaptive technology strategy and explore and ensure that your organisation’s architecture is an accelerator rather than an inhibitor of business agility:
* How to identify and measure key business-aligned metrics and use these data points to pivot your technology strategy.
* How to enable effective distributed technology decisions across your organisation
* How to build organisational memory surrounding technology decisions that can act as inputs into new decisions.
By the end of the session, you will not only understand what is involved in creating a data-informed technology strategy but also have the knowledge to put it into practice. If you want to take to your expertise in crafting effective technology strategies to the next level, then this is the session for you. See you there!
DDD 2021 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2021 Sessionize Event
DDD Perth 2021 Sessionize Event
DevDays Europe
DevDays Europe – software development conference bringing together internationally recognised speakers and developers to encourage excellence and innovation in the software development community. At this conference, we cover the emerging technologies and best practices in the software development industry – regardless of technological platform or language – without commercial hype.
Keynote: Effective Communication In A Remote First World
Confoo 2021
ConFoo is a multi-technology conference for developers. In 2021, there will be 155 presentations by popular international speakers focused on pragmatic solutions for developers.
Session: Unleash Your Inner CTO!
NDC Sydney 2020 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2020 Sessionize Event
NDC Porto 2020 Sessionize Event
NDC London 2020 Sessionize Event
DDD Adelaide 2019 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2019 Sessionize Event
DDD Melbourne 2019 Sessionize Event
DDD Perth 2019 Sessionize Event
Voxxed Days Sydney 2019
Voxxed Days is the community developer conference series
Session: Crafting compelling real-time web experiences with GraphQL and React
Voxxed Days Melbourne 2019
Voxxed Days is the community developer conference series
Session: Crafting compelling real-time web experiences with GraphQL and React
DDD Brisbane 2018
DDD Brisbane is a non profit community event run by developers, for developers
Session: Crafting compelling real-time web experiences with GraphQL and React
Latency 2018
Perth's only conference dedicated to building secure, high performing cloud native applications
Session: Testing in production for the bold and true
NDC Sydney 2018 Sessionize Event
DDD Melbourne 2018
DDD Melbourne is an inclusive non-profit conference for the software community.
Session: Service Meshes - Powering the next wave of micro-service architectures
API Days Melbourne 2018
APIdays Conferences are the main worldwide series of API industry conferences.
Session: Service Meshes - Powering the next wave of micro-service architectures
DDD Sydney 2018 Sessionize Event
DDD Perth Sessionize Event
Decompress 2018
Decompress is an affordable community day for designers and developers run by the CSSConf and JSConf AU teams. Our focus is squarely set on creating an all-inclusive space to learn, share and create.
Session: Crafting compelling real-time web experiences with GraphQL
Session Recording: https://youtu.be/Vi6vsbm20oI
DDD Brisbane 2017
DDD Brisbane is a non profit community event run by developers, for developers
Session: GraphQL - A query language to empower your API consumers
DDD Perth 2017
DDD Perth is an inclusive non-profit conference for the Perth software community.
Session: GraphQL - A query language to empower your API consumers
DDD Melbourne 2017
DDD Melbourne is an inclusive non-profit conference for the Melbourne software community.
Session: GraphQL - A query language to empower your API consumers
NDC Sydney 2017 Sessionize Event
Elastic{ON} Tour Sydney
Session: How Adopting Elastic at Bankwest was a Catalyst for Cultural Change
Session Recording: https://www.elastic.co/elasticon/tour/2016/sydney/how-adopting-elastic-at-bankwest-was-a-catalyst-for-cultural-change
Session Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/robcrowley/how-adopting-elastic-at-bankwest-was-a-catalyst-for-cultural-change-elastic-on-sydney-2016
TestWest 2016
WA's only Testing Conference for Testing Professionals
Session: Consumer Driven Contract - Say what you mean and mean what you say
DDD Perth 2016
DDD Perth is an inclusive non-profit conference for the Perth software community.
Session: Consumer Driven Contracts - Say what you mean and mean what you say
Session Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/robcrowley/consumer-driven-contracts-ddd-perth-2016
IBM InterConnect 2016
InterConnect is IBM's premier business and technology conference
Session: How Bankwest delivers business value through modern RESTful APIs with Java in CICS Liberty
Session Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/RobCrowley5/how-bankwest-delivers-business-value-through-modern-restful-apis-with-java-in-cics-liberty-80046282
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