Deploying to production with confidence and Datafaker

Interested in optimising test data with Datafaker and deploying to production with confidence? Come join us on Thursday February 20th with Elias Nogueira covering Datafaker, and Andres Almiray covering deploying with confidence.

The venue opens at 16:30, the first talk will start at 17:00. In between the sessions there will be drinks and dinner.

Signing up and valid identification are mandatory as these are required to enter the building. If your name on meetup does not match your identification, please contact Martijn (organiser) with your full name.

🇬🇧Datafaker: the most powerful fake data generator library by Elias Nogueira (Backbase)
Data generators in software testing play a critical role in creating realistic and diverse datasets for testing scenarios. However, they present challenges, such as ensuring data diversity, maintaining quality, facilitating validation, and ensuring long-term maintainability.

While many engineers are familiar with these challenges, they often resort to non-specialized tools like the RandomStringUtils class from Apache Commons or the Random class, concatenating fixed data with it. This approach lacks scalability and may not yield a valid dataset.

Thankfully we have DataFaker, a library for Java and Kotlin to generate fake data, based on generators, that can be very helpful when generating test data to fill a database, to generate data for a stress test, or to anonymize data from production services.

With practical examples, you will learn how to generate data based on:
- different or multiple locales
- random enum values
- different generators like address, code (books), currency, date and time, finance, internet, measurement, money, name, time, and others
- custom (data) providers
- sequences (collections and stream)
- date formats
- expressions
- transformations
- unique values

In the end, patterns for generating better data like the Test Data Factory will also take place to add more control to the data generation.

🇬🇧Deploying to production with confidence by Andres Almiray (Oracle)
How many times have we asked ourselves if it is a good idea to release to production on a Friday afternoon? Is the production software sufficiently robust and/or resilient to vulnerabilities? How can we detect and correct security problems in production? Better yet, how can we prevent such problems or attacks?

In recent years the topic Software Supply Chain Security has taken on greater importance. Concepts like SBOMs, SLSA, Reproducible Builds, CI/CD Security are widely discussed to answer the previously posited questions. In this session we will discover what are these concepts and how you may apply them to your own projects.

About the speakers

Elias Nogueira is a Java Champion, Oracle ACE, JavaMagazine NL editor, and Senior Principal Software Engineer working at Backbase.

Andres Almiray is a Java/Groovy developer and a Java Champion Alumni, Developer Advocate for the Database Group At Oracle, with more than 2 decades of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application development since the early days of Java. Andres is a true believer in open source and has participated on popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects. Founding member of the Griffon framework and Hackergarten community event. Author of JReleaser. You can find him on twitter too as @aalmiray. He likes to spend time with his beloved wife, Ixchel, when not hacking around.