Hacking the phone system & Cassandra the database you can’t turn off

Free beer!

6.30pm - Beer
7.00pm - Introduction
7.10pm - Apache Cassandra
7.55pm - Break, more beer
8.10pm - Hacking the phone system
8.55pm - Finish

Hacking the phone system : Development solutions which change how people communicate
Tom Morgan (@tomorgan (https://twitter.com/tomorgan))

The PBX is an endangered species! Around the world companies are replacing old-style phone systems with VOIP solutions. Microsoft’s VOIP offering is called Microsoft Lync and is changing how people work. In 2015 Lync will be renamed Skype for Business and will offer integration to the rest of the Skype ecosystem. The great news for developers is that there are a collection of well-maintained APIs to help you integrate communication into your company in ways you’ve only dreamed of! After a lightning-fast roundup of Lync’s features and capabilities, I’ll dig into the different APIs available, what you can do with them and how they can change how your organisation thinks and works, including code samples so you can see how easy it is. Always wanted to create a custom IVR system for your company to look up order information? We’ll cover that…and lots more.

Tom is an experienced .NET developer with over 10 years development experience. For the last 3 years he has worked at Modality Systems, a specialist provider of Universal Communications services, where he produces software which interacts with Microsoft Lync. As a senior software engineer he is responsible for designing, developing and deploying development services projects for a varied client list including FTSE 100 companies, multi-national corporations, government organisations and charities, as well as maintaining and developing Modality’s product line of Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP) applications. In the past he has worked with Scott Hanselman (Microsoft) on a community project ( LyncAutoAnswer.com), and wrote a community tool (AutoAssist) which eventually was acquired by Modality Systems and turned into a commercial product. He blogs about Microsoft Lync development at ThoughtStuff (thoughtstuff.co.uk (http://thoughtstuff.co.uk/)). In his spare time (when not blogging!) he is a PADI Scuba Diving Instructor and enjoys DIY.

Apache Cassandra: The database you can’t turn off
Christopher Batey (@chbatey (https://twitter.com/chbatey))

Apache Cassandra is a the database of choice for people who need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Cassandra's replication achieves fault tolerance and zero down time on commodity hardware.

However to take advantage of a database like Cassandra developers need to get out of a relational mindset, so in this talk we’ll cover:

• Overview of Cassandra including a deep dive into the internals to see how it achieves high throughputs and fault tolerance

• Getting technical: CAP theorem, latency vs consistency and the dynamo paper

• Core Cassandra use cases, with the aim to leave attendees with a good understanding of whether Cassandra is the right choice for their next project•

• Interacting with Cassandra from Java with examples that use the raw driver and mapping APIs

• A taster of more complicated topics such as light weight transactions, batches and load balancing

The goal is to have attendees gain an understanding of when Cassandra is the right fit and how it achieves scalability and tolerance to hardware failure all while showing how the modern drivers make it easy to use from a variety of programming languages.

A Software Engineer by trade and is currently employed by DataStax as a Technical Evangelist for Apache Cassandra. Chris has also worked for Sky, where he helped build their online television platform, and IBM, where he helped develop a variety of messaging products.

He spends a lot of his own time contributing back to the software community. He's founder of an open source test double for Apache Cassandra: Stubbed Cassandra, helps with the running of the London Java Community and blogs regularly at: http://christopher-batey.blogspot.co.uk/ .