2009 Highlights
Scrub & Spin: Stealth Use of Formal Methods in Software Development
Gerard Holzmann discusses Spin, a design analyzer tool, and Scrub, a code review tool, used by Jet Propulsion Laboratory to analyze and fix the software used for critical solar system exploration missions.
Watch the video on InfoQ.
Facebook: Moving Fast at Scale
Robert Johnson discusses Facebook’s approach to scalability issues resulting from a large growth of the user base. He talks about: why one needs to prepare for horizontal and not vertical scalability, very short release cycles which are better because they introduce fewer bugs, the need to streamline to deploying process for short release cycles, and making the entire process faster every day.
Watch the video on InfoQ.
Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site
Brion Vibber discusses the challenges of working with user communities, social bottlenecks, the Wikipedia article deletion process, scalability of software vs communities, new approaches to scaling communities, ongoing challenges with MediaWiki community, using git to scale the code commit process, automated Wikipedia edit filtering, flagged protection pages, and remaining challenges to face.
Watch the video on InfoQ.
OOPSLA 2009 Keynote: The Power Of Abstraction
In a reprise of her ACM Turing Award lecture, Barbara Liskov discusses the invention of abstract data types, the CLU programming language, clusters, polymorphism, exception handling, iterators, implementation inheritance, type hierarchies, the Liskov Substitution Principle, polymorphism, and future challenges such as new abstractions, parallelism, and the Internet.
Watch the video on InfoQ.
