Build Stuff'15 Ukraine

In an extremely short time interactive information appliances such as mobile devices, computers, and interactive kiosks such as ATMs have exploded into common use all over the globe. An understanding of how these appliances work must now join arithmetic and the calendar in the migration toward universally accessible simplicity. This migration will require a radical simplification of the conceptual model for the internal workings of interactive appliances that is more intuitive than algorithms for the mass of people. 

The talk presents a hybrid unidirectional-flow/message model of the internal operation of interactive information appliances that is intuitive, generally applicable, and largely algorithm-free. It also presents design principles that formalize what-you-see-is-what-you-get construction-tool behavior. Finally, the talk demonstrates a proof-of-concept application builder that conforms to these design principles and that builds small applications that work according to the new conceptual model.

Systems built as Reactive Systems are more flexible, loosely-coupled and scalable. This makes them easier to develop and amenable to change. They are significantly more tolerant of failure and when failure does occur they meet it with elegance rather than disaster.1

The approach to the design and development of manufacturing processes for the production of new drugs within the pharmaceutical industry has changed dramatically over the last decade. Focus is given to designing systems that are responsive to issues and constraints, through knowledge of the impact of exceeding standard operating ranges and the use of real-time analytics; resilient to failures that could occur at any point within the system; elastic to changing demands that occur during the lifecycle of manufacture through a flexible and well understood approach to scalability; and message driven, whereby the resources used and specifications required for a specific segment of the system are derived by the demands external to that segment. With Quality by Design2 applied throughout the development process, the industry is now beginning to reap the benefits from the flexibility that Reactive Systems provide in production.

In this presentation we will use learning’s from the Pharmaceutical Industry to explore the extent of the Reactive Manifesto for software development, and we will look specifically at how this relates to functional programming. The public demands high and consistent quality from the medicines that we take, and we should demand that same quality from the software that we develop. If you are passionate about the quality of your code, then this talk will provide you with a new perspective on how you think about your craft.


1 http://www.reactivemanifesto.org
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_by_Design