The San Francisco Java User Group

Architecture is often described as "the stuff that's hard to change" or "the important stuff (whatever that is)." At its core, architecture defines the very essence of software, transcending mere features and functions to encompass vital capabilities such as scalability, evolvability, elasticity, and reliability. But here's the real question: where do these critical capabilities truly originate?
In this session, we'll embark on a journey to uncover the secrets behind successful architectures. While popular architecture patterns may offer a starting point, it's time to unveil the startling truth – both monolith and microservices-based projects continue to stumble and falter at alarming rates. The key to unparalleled success lies in the art of fine-tuning and tailor-making architectures to precisely fit the unique needs of your organization, environment, and the teams delivering the software.
Step into the future as we introduce a groundbreaking, problem-centric approach to defining and evolving system architectures. Our practical techniques will empower you to transform constraints, both architectural and environmental, into powerful enablers of robust, valuable, and long-lived software systems. Join us and elevate your architecture game to new heights!

About Michael Carducci
Michael Carducci is an independent, hands-on software architect with a reputation for doing the impossible. His 25 years of industry experience includes over 15 years in architect roles including Chief Architect at multiple Fortune 500 companies and startups. Michael is also a sought-after speaker at conferences and events around the world.
In addition to his experience in the technology industry, Michael has earned equal recognition and renown as an award-winning professional magician and mentalist. This pursuit has earned him a unique perspective on problem-solving, human psychology, and communication.
When not on the road speaking, coding, or performing; Michael can be found exploring the mountains of Colorado on two wheels, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, or deep underwater exploring shipwrecks and reefs.

Developing high-performance large-stream processing applications is a challenging task. Choosing the right tool(s) is crucial to get the job done; as developers, we tend to focus on performance, simplicity, and cost. However, the cost becomes relatively high if we end up with two or more tools to do the same task. Simply put, you need to multiply development time, deployment time, and maintenance costs by the number of tools. Kafka is great for event streaming architectures, continuous data integration (ETL), and messaging systems of record (database). However, Kafka has some challenges, such as a complex architecture with many moving parts, it can’t be embedded, and it’s a centralized middleware, just like a database. Moreover, Kafka does not offer batch processing, and all intermediate steps are materialized to disk in Kafka. This leads to enormous disk space usage. In this talk, we will address these challenges and how real-time stream processing can be used to enhance Kafka pipelines by simplifying deployment and operations with ultra-low latency and a lightweight architecture making it a great tool for edge (restricted) environments. This talk aims to take your Kafka applications to the next level. The combination of Real-time storage and computing provides a unique synergy that enables applications to address real-time use cases at any scale.

Speaker: Fawaz Ghali, PhD

Bio: Fawaz Ghali is Principal Data Science Architect and the Head of Developer Relations at Hazelcast with +22 years of experience in DevRel, cloud, enterprise software development and deployment, ML/AI and real-time intelligent applications, management and leadership. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and has worked in the private sector as well as in academia and research. He has published +45 scientific peer-reviewed papers in the fields of ML/AI, data science and cloud computing on Google Scholar. Fawaz is a renowned expert with +200 talks and presentations at global events and conferences.

GenAI, LLM, and other buzzwords are everywhere. The sea of acronyms can feel like (and sometimes actually are) a black box for the complex logic and processes that underpin them. Does/should a Java developer care?

In this session, we’ll explore how these technologies operate and cover many of the technical terms that go along with them, such as hallucinations, grounding, and more. We will understand the abilities GenAI can provide to technical solutions alongside some of the struggles they bring, as well. Live-code examples will show how Java developers can utilize GenAI and help determine whether they are worth the hype. Come see if you should pass or play on GenAI.

Bio: Jennifer Reif is a Developer Advocate at Neo4j, speaker, and blogger with an MS in CMIS. An avid developer and problem-solver, she has worked with many businesses and projects to organize and make sense of widespread data assets and leverage them for maximum business value. She has expertise in a variety of commercial and open source tools, and she enjoys learning new technologies, sometimes on a daily basis! Her passion is finding ways to organize chaos and deliver software more effectively.