The 10 Best Code Mesh Tech Talks (Part 1)
At Code Mesh the focus has always been on non-mainstream, alternative technology and the use of the right tool for the job rather than the tool at hand.
Knowing that we have a lot to learn from the past, and that many problems have already been solved, we try to create a mix of well-known computer scientists alongside like-minded, less known practitioners.
As we get closer to Code Mesh V 5-6 November, our exciting first virtual edition of Code Mesh, what better time to revisit and remember some of our favourite talks?
A LANDSCAPE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
THE SPEAKER - SARAH ALLEN
Co-Creator Adobe After Effects/Shockwave Flash Video
Throughout her career, Sarah has leveraged deep experience in one technology to create innovation with the next. Around the time that Erlang was being invented, Sarah was coding in C for 3D computer graphics. She applied concepts of 3D modelling and animation in her first startup, creating After Effects to let artists control how two-dimensional video changes over time and space.
How do we design software that will do what it was designed to do without making humans and connected systems vulnerable?
Sarah shares lessons learned from Shockwave and Flash, and the kinds of modern exploits that ought to keep you up at night, along with both modern and time-tested techniques that every developer should know.
WHY FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING MATTERS
THE SPEAKERS - MARY SHEERAN AND JOHN HUGHES
Mary is a Professor at Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden and co-leader of the Functional Programming Group there. She has pioneered the use of functional domain specific languages in hardware design and verification, and in resource aware parallel programming. Founder member of IFIP Working Group 2.8 on Functional Programming.
John has been a functional programming enthusiast for more than thirty years, at the Universities of Oxford, Glasgow, and since 1992 Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. He served on the Haskell design committee, co-chairing the committee for Haskell 98. With Koen Claessen, he created QuickCheck, the most popular testing tool among Haskell programmers, and in 2006 he founded Quviq to commercialise the technology using Erlang.
25 years ago John Hughes published "Why Functional Programming Matters", a manifesto for FP--but the subject is much older than that! In this talk we'll take a deep dive into history to revisit our personal selection of highlights.
BREAKING BLACK-BOX AI
THE SPEAKER - EVELINA GABASOVA
Machine learning and data science researcher
Evelina works as Principal Research Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. She is a member of the research engineering team where she is connecting academic research with real-world applications. Her passion is to make data science understandable and accessible to everyone.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming wide-spread and productionalised. You can just call an API and you get the answer! But beware - all the algorithms have some cases when they fail to deliver what you're expecting.
This talk is packed with live demos that show failure cases of popular algorithms, from linear regression to cutting-edge deep learning.
CONCURRENCY BEFORE ERLANG
THE SPEAKER - BJARNE DÄCKER
Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering.
For five years chairman of the committee for funding Computer Science research. For six years Swedish member of the committee for the EU's IT prize. Member of the society of researchers and members of parliament.
Bjarne worked for 36 years at Ericsson and together with 3 others proposed the creation of the Computer Science Lab which pioneered Unix, and the software technology for telecoms programming which led to the definition of Erlang.
This talk covers (1) concurrent languages at Ericsson before Erlang, (2) imperative concurrent languages Modula, Chill and Ada (the last two large international efforts), (3) start of the Computer Science Lab at Ericsson and experimentation with language paradigms, and (4) the prototyping that led up to Erlang.
APPLYING PRINCIPLES OF CHAOS ENGINEERING TO SERVERLESS
SPEAKER - YAN CUI
Yan is an experienced engineer who has worked with AWS for nearly 10 years. Some of his work can be found in the Serverless Well-Architected whitepaper published by AWS. He is a regular speaker at user groups and conferences internationally, and he is also the author of Production-Ready Serverless and a co-author of F# Deep Dives. In his spare time he keeps an active blog at [theburningmonk.com](https://theburningmonk.com/) where he shares his thoughts on topics such as AWS, serverless, functional programming and chaos engineering and he is part of the team shaping this year’s Code Mesh schedule.
Yan shares his thought experiments, and actual experiments, in his pursuit to understand how we can apply the principles of chaos to a serverless architecture. How can we apply the same principles of chaos to a serverless architecture? 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?
What To Expect at Code Mesh V in November
If you want to be there (virtually) to enjoy talks like this and pose your questions to our speakers don’t miss your opportunity to be part of this year’s Code Mesh V - running virtually over 2 days and 2 time zones to make this potentially one of our most exciting conferences to date.
