Ted Young

Speaking Sessions

• Make Your Code More Testable with the Hexagonal Architecture

  11:00 AM Saturday   Room: Fireside C

  In this session, you'll learn the details of the Hexagonal architecture (aka "Ports & Adapters") and how it helps keep your code clean and well-tested. You'll find out how can scale from small microservices to much larger applications and how it's superior to traditional tiered and horizontally layered architectures.

  You'll see how the core domain is easily augmented with RESTful APIs, a Web UI, database persistence, and calling out to external APIs. You'll learn how each part fits nicely into place in the Hexagonal architecture, yet are expendable when external needs change, without causing a major overhaul.

  While this talk is full of multiple examples of working Java code (Spring Boot) that implements this architecture, it is directly applicable to other languages, such as PHP and JavaScript.

• How Humans Learn and Why It Matters

  9:15 AM Sunday   Room: Fireside D

  Learning how people (not machines) learn is not something we're taught in school, or what we were told is not backed by scientific evidence. Understanding how we learn, from a scientific point of view, helps us better communicate information to others so it will be understood and remembered.

  We'll start with laying down an evidence-based foundation by looking at how we take in and process information in working memory and, if we're lucky, gets stored in long-term memory. Getting the information into long-term memory is a struggle, so we'll see ways to make that process easier by having images and words work together instead of fighting each other.

  We'll then learn why forgetting is a good thing; mixing things up instead of cramming makes improves remembering; and attack some of the myths of learning. We'll find out there's the good way of making brains work hard during learning as well as bad ways, and see how learning is similar to isolating muscles when strength training.

  You'll see examples along the way that will demonstrate applying this research and you'll come away with solid tips to confidently improve technical documentation, training manuals, video courses, and presentation slides.