Monica Beckwith joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of java garbage collection. What is garbage collection? GC algorithms; history of GC in the java language; fragmentation and compaction; generational strategies; causes of pauses; impact of pauses on application performance; tuning GC; GC on multi-core and large memory machines; should production servers be implemented in non-GC languages?; going off heap and other programming techniques to avoid garbage; the future of java GC.

Mike Barker talks with Sven Johann about the architecture of the LMAX system. LMAX is a low-latency, high-throughput trading platform. Their discussion begins with what LMAX does; the origins of LMAX; and extreme performance requirements faced by LMAX. They then delve into systems that LMAX communicates with; LMAX users; the two main components of the system (broker and exchange); Mechanical Sympathy as an architectural driver; message flow using the Disruptor library; and lock-free algorithms. Mike and Sven wrap up by discussing how a well modeled domain model can improve the performance of any system; automated (performance) tests; continuous delivery; and measuring response times.

Fred George talks with Eberhard about "Developer Anarchy" - a manager-less development approach Fred has been using very successfully in different organizations - combined with microservices.

Robert Blumen talks to Christopher Meiklejohn about conflict-free replicated data types. The discussion covers consistency in distributed systems, CRDTs, and their use in NoSQL databases.

Martin Klose talks with Eberhard Wolff about Coderetreats - events where developers practice development techniques to become better programmers. He explains how to join such events and what it takes to do your own Coderetreat.

Alex Budzier of the Oxford Saïd Business School and Jürgen Laartz of McKinsey Berlin join Robert Blumen to talk about the their research on large IT project failures. Why do large projects fail and to what extent are these failures avoidable?

Johannes Thönes talks to Axel Rauschmayer about JavaScript and ECMAScript 6. They talk about the origin and version history. Then they dive into key JavaScript concepts and explain the features coming into the language with ECMAScript 6.

Sven Johann talks with Andrew Phillips about DevOps. First, they try to define it. Then, they discuss its roots in agile operations, its relationship to lean development and continuous delivery, its goals, and how to get started. They proceed to system thinking and what “You build it, you run it” means for a system when developers have pager duty. They continue with the diversity of DevOps requirements among companies and industries; copying ideas versus finding your own way; culture, mindset, and recommended practices; and the mandatory tool chain. They wrap up by discussing architectural styles that support DevOps and DevOps costs versus benefits.

John Wilkes from Google talks with Charles Anderson about managing large clusters of machines. The discussion starts with Borg, Google’s internal cluster management program. John discusses what Borg does and what it provides to programmers and system administrators. He also describes Kubernetes, an open-source cluster management system recently developed by Google using lessons learned from Borg, Mesos, and Omega