Kotlin Night in London on October 12th, 2016

Kotlin is a programming language invented by JetBrains that simplifies and even beautifies programming for Java Virtual Machine. Although syntactically it differs from Java, it provides full access to existing Java libraries.

Practically it's a wrapper around Java programming language that behind the scenes generates some boilerplate code that simply became too time-consuming to keep taking care of again and again and again... As a result, the code becomes more readable even for those Java programmers who is not really familiar with Kotlin yet. Look for more details about it on JetBrain's website.

Kotlin Night in London, Real World Kotlin, was quite interesting, informative and even surprising. The venue was almost full, some presentations were done by those practitioners who actively use Kotlin in their day work for production code already.

Takeaway points are:

1. Kotlin combines object-oriented and functional programming styles in a way when coding efficiency is the must. In other words, it was built by practitioners for practitioners.
2. Kotlin is free, it really costs nothing to start using it.
3. It does not generate any new kind of binaries. Kotlin code is translated to Java and then compiled into normal Java binaries.
4. Kotlin code looks way cleaner than Java, it's easy to read and understand what it does.
5. JetBrains seems to be a pretty decent and reliable vendor to be behind things like that.
6. If a Java programmer is familiar with some functional programming then it would be very easy for him/ her to pick up Kotlin in no time at all.
7. If I'm to start a new Java project, I'll definitely give it a go.

Recording of presentations from that night could be found here.

IP EXPO EUROPE @ ExCel London on 5-6 October, 2016

This was quite interesting exhibition saturated with well-organised presentations. There were lots of big and small companies that offered stand-alone and cloud-based products and services for Cyber Security, Networks and Infrastructure, Data Analytics, DevOps and Open Source sectors.
Multiple presentations were going on simultaneously in different venues. I've have scheduled my own list beforehand and was jumping from place to place trying to catch as much as I could.
Unfortunately, most presentation were conducted by business/sales representative and were not very useful from technical perspective. I really liked topics discussed by Splunk, ASI Data Science, AppCheck NG, Alibaba, First Base Technologies and Libelium. Below are some notes taken there.

Spunk (Reinventing IT Operations):
They put monitoring of applications and infrastructure on a new level when a monitoring solution could be plugged into existing systems literally within a day. A list of clients where they have already installed their solution was quite impressive. It would be a good idea to compare their functionality (and overall prices) with Zenoss that I used quite often in the past.

Claire (DevOps Platform for the Evolving Enterprise):
The idea: different teams (dev, business, testers, etc) use different tools (Jira, PM, etc), tools orchestration is complex, data synchronisation used by those tools is cumbersome. Continuous integration is difficult. Clarive offers Lean Application Delivery.
I liked their idea as it ticks all major check boxes: application lifecycle, release management and change request handling. Possibly these components combined under one umbrella may become a 'holy grail' knowledge management systems that I was looking for a long time.

Rubrik (Recover, Manage and Secure Data in the Enterprise Cloud):
Although a typical Enterprise favours delegation of extensive data processing (e.g. concurrent parallel calculations) elsewhere, it is quite cautious (as well as often constrained legally) about keeping its data on the Cloud. Because of Security... Rubrik tries to convince the public that they can keep the data on the Cloud and handle its security nicely:











Citrix (When Big Data meets Small Things – Secure Event Delivery for the Internet of Things):
This presentation was a clear message that Citrix is in IoT already and in regards to security it take the IoT services on the Cloud very seriously:












Puppet (Continuous Delivery: DevOps Holy Grail):
Well-known company with a great product. The speaker was good but his presentation was kinda useless - it was not exciting from business perspective and it was too shallow for techies, a pretty general talk about continuous delivery and how Puppet could help with it.

ASI Data Science (Practical machine learning for business applications):
These guys were amazing! A relatively small London-based company somehow accomplished 120 data science projects in a relatively short time! Well, some of those projects were probably small but the overall number of them is still astounding. They have developed their own framework that looks quite practical. I reckon that 'Data Science Project Cheat Sheet' is the most valuable screenshot I took on IP EXPO. I asked them for their presentation in electronic form and will upload it here as soon as (and if) they send it to me.
(TODO: publish ASI Data Science presentation slides)















AppCheck NG (Web Application Security: Challenges Old and New):
It was a good educative presentation. I didn't take any photos as they promised to make the slides available on their website. I haven't found it there yet and sent them a message. I'll upload their presentation here as soon as I get it.
(TODO: publish AppCheck NG presentation slides)

Avaya (Internet of Things – Forget the hype this is the reality...):
The presentation was given by Jean Turgeon in the biggest venue available. Hardly any chairs were left empty.  The talk hasn't been very technical though. I guess, the main message was that Avaya understands popularity of IoT and it is aggressively investing into this market sector.




Alibaba (Alibaba Cloud, More than just cloud):
Although the venue was small and many chairs stayed empty, the presentation was a Big Surprise! In short, Alibaba is The Real Deal on the Cloud and it's coming to Europe. I took few shots but the presenter, Mr. Yeming Wang accidentally (I hope that was an accident) removed them from my iPhone Notes when he was typing in his email address (apparently, he had no business cards left). He promised to provide me with his presentation in electronic format that I will happily publish here as soon as I receive it from him.
(TODO: publish Alibaba presentation slides)

First Base Technologies (Major Real World Red Team Exercise - The story you are about to hear is true...):
That was a very educative story about hacking into some sort of military or police database where important artefacts were stored in various electronic formats. The story was full of tiny and very interesting details. Apparently, technical hacking is greatly enhanced by social hacking. Below is just a part of that story:
They found all remote branches that the target databases is accessible from. They identified the less secured branch and looked for names of its employees. Once few names were known (some employees would go out for a lunch with their security badges attached to their clothes in a plain view), they collected personal information from social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc).
Now imaging that a guy has just returned from his holidays in Spain. He receives an email message with a logo of a hotel his family stayed in and an offer for a relatively good discount for the next trip. All he has to do is to open an attachment (then kinda print it, sign it and send it back). Once the attachment is opened, voila, intruders got a remote access to his machine! It's phishing, isn't it? Everybody knows about it, right? Do you know in how many cases this kind of files got opened? Well, in thrilling 50%...

Libelium (IoT Interoperability: any sensor, any protocol and any cloud):
This relatively small Spanish company happened to acquire a lot of knowledge in IoT space, particularly in various sensors design, implementation, installation and maintenance. Below is a short summary of what has been said there, some points could be invaluable for newcomers:

• At the moment there are no unified standards for connection between IoT sensors and back-end systems.
• New technologies keep appearing every year.
• Everyone wants to get it into IoT.
• There is a lack of clearly defined roles in implementation of IoT solutions.
• Libelium works with sensors and communication only, it nothing to do with clouds, integration and analytics software,  they are trying to stay as close to the customers who use sensors as possible.
• Solutions for Industrial IoT (IIoT) are very difficult to replicate. 

Lessons learnt:

1. Sensors are nothing but the tracks (customers ask for higher quality sensors) meaning that they are the base of the business.
2. Interoperability is the key - this means that any sensor on any cloud should be connectable using any communication protocol.
3. IoT players need to quickly adapt to new technologies, tight coupling with selected technologies is deadly
4. Installation and maintenance do matters.
5. Don't go for quantity but for quality and accuracy.
6. Be easy to evolve, for ex. iPhone app-sensor that helps to prototype a new system.