QCon returned to London this past March for its fourteenth year in the city, attracting over 1,600 senior developers, architects, data engineers, team leads, and CTOs.

The conference opened with Alasdair Allan, setting the scene with "The Internet of Things Might Have Less Internet Than We Thought." Allan highlighted areas where software adds value to our daily lives — everything from smart light bulbs to virtual assistants. However, he also outlined the challenges and negative failure modes and provided motivation for writing effective (and secure) software for IoT products, edge devices, and consumer goods.

Our day two keynote from Anjuan Simmons focused on "Technical Leadership through the Underground Railroad." Simmons used a historical lens to look at the importance of leaders and their associated skills when working within software projects. Sharing the technical vision, working to be constantly prepared, and being bold with your actions are all vitally important regardless of what type of software is being delivered.

The third day of QCon London contained two keynotes. The morning keynote was presented by Katie Gamanji, and discussed the "Interoperability of Open-Source Tools: The Emergence of Interfaces." Gamanji provided insight into the current cloud technology landscape and explored the evolution of related interfaces that is being driven by the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) communities.

In the evening, QCon London closed with a superb keynote from Prof Richard Wiseman, where he presented "The Apollo Mindset: Making Mission Impossible, Possible." Wiseman provided a historical overview of NASA’s Apollo project and argued that we should all aim for the stars. He stated that seemingly impossible goals can be achieved if we approach them "one step at a time."

Over the initial three days of the conference, the major trends in modern software development were well represented across the 18 individually curated tracks. The QCon London 2020 tracks featured deeply technical topics such as next-generation microservices, streaming data pipelines, cloud and Kubernetes, machine learning/AI, developer experience, architecture, modern language innovation, and more.

In addition to featuring technical leaders and software engineering practitioners from popular technology organizations, like Docker, Deliveroo, Monzo, IBM, BBC, and the FT, the conference included other practitioners from the resilience engineering and psychology fields. Dr. Laura Maguire provided a fascinating insight into the costs of coordination during outages and production incidents. Andrea Dobson-Kock discussed balancing risk and psychological safety, and how to use insight from this field to build learning organizations. In total, the conference featured 174 speakers (a 9-1 attendee to speaker ratio) over the three days of the conference.

Workshop sessions on days 4 and 5 included a remote meeting masterclass, introduction to AI/ML for software engineers, tech lead skills for developers, and courses on designing, building, and debugging microservices. Several additional workshops provided a deep-dive into specific technologies, such as Terraform, Istio, Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, and Java.

InfoQ had a number of editors at the event, and you can read the QCon London news coverage online. We’ve already started making the videos and complete transcripts from the event, available online.

QCon London Key Takeaways

This article summarizes the key takeaways and highlights from QCon London 2020 as blogged and tweeted directly by the attendees that were there.

Keynotes

• Interoperability of Open-Source Tools: The Emergence of Interfaces - by Katie Gamanji
• Technical Leadership through the Underground Railroad - by Anjuan Simmons
• The Apollo Mindset: Making Mission Impossible, Possible - by Richard Wiseman
• The Internet of Things Might Have Less Internet Than We Thought? - by Alasdair Allan

Tracks & Talks

Architectures You've Always Wondered About

• eBPF: Rethinking the Linux Kernel — by Thomas Graf
• Evolution of Financial Exchange Architectures — by Martin Thompson
• Lessons from DAZN: Scaling Your Project with Micro-Frontends — by Luca Mezzalira

Bare Knuckle Performance

• Does Java Need Inline Types? What Project Valhalla Can Bring to Java - by Sergey Kuksenko
• Maximizing Applications Performance with GraalVM - by Alina Yurenko
• Quarkus - by Sanne Grinovero

Building High Performing Teams

• How to Debug Your Team - by Lisa van Gelder
• How to Supercharge a Team with Delegation - by James Stanier
• Optimize for Time - by Andrew Walker

Chaos and Resilience: Architecting for Success

• Growing Resilience: Serving Half a Billion Users Monthly at Condé Nast - by Crystal Hirschorn
• Rethinking How the Industry Approaches Chaos Engineering - by Nora Jones

Driving Full Cycle Engineering Teams at Every Level

• Should We Really Run It if We Build It? - by Paul Hammant

Evolving Java

• A Year with Java 11 in Production! - by Andrzej Grzesik
• Java in Containers: Part Deux - by David Delabassee
• Modern Banking in 1500 Microservices - by Matt Heath & Suhail Patel

Kubernetes and Cloud Architectures

• A Kubernetes Operator for etcd - by James Laverack
• Cloud Native Is about Culture, Not Containers - by Holly Cummins
• Kubernetes Is Not Your Platform, It’s Just the Foundation - by Manuel Pais
• Lessons Learned from Reviewing 150 Infrastructures - by Jon Topper
• The Evolution of Distributed Systems on Kubernetes - by Bilgin Ibryam

Leading Distributed Teams

• Remote Working Approaches That Worked (And Some That Didn’t) - by Charles Humble
• Tough Call: Handling "Difficult" Remote Conversations Like a Pro - by Judy Rees

Next Generation Microservices: Building Distributed Systems the Right Way

• Beyond the Distributed Monolith: Rearchitecting the Big Data Platform - by Blanca Garcia-Gil
• Monolith Decomposition Patterns - by Sam Newman
• To Microservices and Back Again - by Alexandra Noonan
• Why Distributed Systems Are Hard - by Denise Yu

Scaling Security, from Device to Cloud

• Keep Calm and Secure Your CI/CD Pipeline - by Sonya Moisset
• Security Vulnerabilities Decomposition - by Katy Anton

The Future of the API: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, and More

• A Brief History of the Future of the API - by Mark Rendle
• Introducing and Scaling a GraphQL BFF - by Michelle Garrett
• The Future of Cloud Native API Gateways - by Richard Li

When Things Go Wrong: GDPR, Ethics, and Politics

• DevOps Is More Complex and Harder Than You Think. Personal Lessons - by Patrick Debois
• Managing for Mental Wellbeing in the Tech Industry - by Michelle O’Sulivan
• When All the Things Go Wrong - by Colin Humphreys

Sponsored Solutions:Track I

• Fast and Efficient Java with GraalVM and Helidon — by Alina Yurenko, Peter Nagy

Sponsored Solutions: Track II

• Kubernetes for Developers, Architects, and Other People — by Michael Coté

Opinions about QCon

Conclusion

InfoQ produces QCon events in multiple cities across the globe. All of our sessions are practitioner-focused with a skew towards early adopter topics. Our goal is to provide actionable takeaways that attendees can immediately put into practice within their own organizations when they return to their office. Every editorial talk is hand-picked by a fantastic team of track hosts and program committee members, who themselves are also practitioners and leaders from within the software delivery industry. We’ll be back in London in the spring of 2021.

QCon London 2020 Publishing Schedule

Check out full videos on InfoQ.com

Videos of most presentations were available to attendees within 48 hours of them being filmed, and we have already begun to publish them on the InfoQ site. You can view the publishing schedule on the QCon London website. There are also numerous QCon photos on our Facebook page.

How to work remotely: Best practices and resources from QCon & InfoQ

Many people will be experiencing a sustained period of remote working for the first time. To help you, we’ve collated remote working best practices and resources. While remote working may appear straightforward, there are common issues that come up as you shift to this way of working that may not be apparent, even if you’ve done regular remote days as part of your working week. These resources will help you navigate these issues so you can work effectively in the current times.

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