We had two speakers at Brighton Java this week. I was the support act, kicking off with an introductory talk on Alexa in Ten Minutes. I enjoyed putting together such a brisk technical presentation, which came to 34 slides. I managed to finish dead on time and had some interesting questions afterwards. The slides are online, along with a video of the evening. I also took my Echo Dot along, so that Alexa could speak with me:
Some links from the talk:
- Alexa Skills Workshop in Brighton on 3rd July 2017.
- Samples from Amazon’s SDK
- Setting up Alexa on a raspberry pi (I’ve posted a response about this)
The second presentation, from David Ellis, was about CQRS and event sourcing. It was very timely for me as I’m reviewing the design of a platform I’m working on.
CQRS stands for Command/Query Responsibility Separation and is the idea of using a different data model for reads and writes. One way of doing this is event sourcing, which records a system’s full history as a series of immutable events. These become an append-only system of record for the system (as well as a full audit). Representations of state can then be built from this (including in-memory where speed is needed). You can also produce representations of specific times – a form of time travel. David ran through the basics and showed how event-sourcing worked as a means for CQRS.
While I’ve read about CQRS and event sourcing before, it’s great to hear someone talking about it. It also amused me that David’s examples were “written in Scala so that they fit on the slides”.
Given that the talk was at Brandwatch, there was some good discussion afterwards about the possibility of using Kafka. I’ve also been wondering today about combining CQRS and REST and hope to research that next week.
So, all-in-all, a good evening. My talk seemed to go well, and I learnt about CQRS. Thanks, once again, to Brandwatch, who hosted the event, as well as providing drinks and pizza. Luke and Adina helped set up the night, with Luke doing an amazing job with the tech side of things, handling sound, streaming and technical gremlins.