Erik Onnen, Urban Airship, Director of Delivery and Architecture

Erik is a Senior Engineer and Analytics team lead at Urban Airship, the leading provider of Push, In-App Purchase and Subscription services for mobile applications. He specializes in distributed systems at scale. Prior to joining Urban Airship, Erik was a platform lead for Jive Software where he lead the development of the activity and recommendation engine services.

Presentation: "Java.next"

Track: Why is Java still sexy

Time: Wednesday 14:05 - 15:05

Location: Olympic

Abstract:

Programming server-side Java can still be concise, effective and iterative but doing so requires changing long-standing assumptions about how Java should be written. For Java to continue to compete for developer mindshare, Java idioms need to be informed by frameworks like Sinatra and languages like Scala and Erlang.

This talk will cover techniques for writing Java applications that are highly performant and operate at scale while keeping maintenance and operational impedance low. The talk will challenge long held beliefs about Object Oriented programming, IoC and ORM frameworks and techniques for building HTTP services. The talk will attempt to demonstrate that by using simplified idioms while leveraging the power of Java tooling (such as IDEs), Java is still one of the best programming languages for the JVM and the best for deploying high performance applications on the JVM.

Presentation: "Uptime in High Volume Messaging Systems — Lessons Learned"

Track: Systems that never stop

Time: Thursday 15:35 - 16:35

Location: Metropolitan Ballroom II & III

Abstract: This talk will cover lessons learned at Urban Airship building highly available, high volume messaging systems that operate with a minimum of customer-visible downtime. We will highlight techniques and practices from low-level software idioms, mid-level component approaches up through higher-level architecture philosophies that are currently in production at Urban Airship serving billions of notifications to hundreds of millions of devices. The talk will not only cover current approaches but will also include unsuccessful approaches that should generally be avoided.