LDNUG November 2024 with Layla Porter and Andrew Poole

After a slightly extended summer break (hey - we've been busy! 😉), LDNUG is back this November with an evening of architecture talks. Layla Porter's talking about modular monoliths, Andrew Poole's talking about fluent method chaining in C# - plus snacks, drinks, lovely people, and plenty of time to chat.

NOTE: Ian Cooper has had to reschedule, so we'll get his microservices talk at a future event - and thanks to Andrew for stepping in!

We're meeting at Zuhlke's offices, 80 Great Eastern Street, EC2A 3JL - thanks so much to Zuhlke for hosting us!

Doors 18:30, first talk starts at 19:00, and we're normally finished and in the nearest pub by 21:00.

Layla Porter: Distribu-Ready with the Modular Monolith

The past few years have seen huge hype around distributed systems and microservices. Pre-emptive implementation of a distributed architecture has led to many engineering teams struggling with vast complexity and sadly for many, the dreaded "Distributed Monolith". Some teams are in such a pickle that they are even reverting their distributed applications back to a monolith. I'm all for designing and developing for future growth, but there is a better way than diving straight into distributed architecture.

Behold, the Modular Monolith. By design, the modular monolith is "distribu-ready" and in this session, we'll cover the design principles and implementations that make the modular monolith one of the best options for future-proofing your application whilst minimising complexity.

Layla Porter is a Microsoft MVP, Progress Champion, 3 times GitHub Star, and former director on the board at the .NET Foundation. She is the co-founder of November North, a micro-game studio, developing and producing a first-person stealth game code-named "HorroTown".
Layla is passionate about .NET, enterprise software development, and system architecture. She has recently started bringing those architecture concepts into game development, live coding Unity game development on Twitch. Layla lives in the UK with her husband Jim and dogs Lily and Cookie.

Andrew Poole: Fluent Method Chaining in C# and creating super clear orchestration code!

What if there was a way to declaratively describe a chain or flow of async methods, which could be used when handling API requests or messages from a service bus queue or actually anywhere?

Recently, while refactoring a growing piece of business logic, we found a way to achieve this. The logical conclusion is that related flows can be described in one place, in a single piece of orchestration, which is very easy to understand, navigate and debug. The flows are self documenting and with some thought, even readable by product owners and business analysts etc.

Andrew Poole has been writing code for a living for 15+ years, most recently as an L5 Senior Software Engineer at ClearBank since 2020. He loves solving problems, design and architecture, communicating ideas and the incredible creativity of software engineering. He’s interested in event sourcing, immutable architecture and distributed systems. He also enjoy mentoring others and building great team culture. He has previously been a successful team lead, but what really drives him is striving to write elegant, intentional code which is easy to understand and maintain. He absolutely loves C# and only really dabbles in other languages in order to write better C#. Outside of work Andrew is a husband and father of 2 who enjoys playing bass guitar and making things in his shed.