Build Stuff'15 Lithuania

In this talk, I'll share what my experience has been working in the gambling business, how moving to events helped us gain a better understanding of the domain and which techniques and models casinos have perfected over the years to keep people playing.

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Last year I ventured into the domain of (online) gambling. Given that the industry has been around since forever, I expected most problems to be of the technical kind. As it turned out, the struggle with technology was only part of a bigger problem; to move forward we needed to fully grasp the industry and its consumers.

Domain events started out as a way to dismantle a legacy system, but quickly proved to be an effective tool to gain a deeper understanding of our domain. Visualizing event streams, we discovered patterns that helped us identify what drives different types of users.

Having a better understanding of what customers are looking for, we dove into existing literature to learn which techniques and models casinos use to cater for each type of user. We learned how to program chance while staying true to the Random Number God. Even when variance is brutal, casinos have enough data and tools to steer clear from the pain barrier.

All of this entails interesting problems and software, but isn't my code damaging society? Or is gambling just another human trait?

At BuildStuff'14, Kevlin Henney presented an excellent talk titled "Seven ineffective coding habits of many programmers". As an attendee that day and someone who has exhibited many of these habits over the years, I came to realize that using F# has cured me of many of these ineffective habits!

In this talk I'll share my thoughts on how the use of F# and functional programming techniques can help form and nurture good habits and give you the perfect practice you need to make perfect.

So this one day, I am playing the board game Quarto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto_%28board_game%29) with my friend and I wonder, can this game end in a tie, or is there always a winner?

Normal people might have squabbled or shrugged, but not us nerds! We obviously abandoned the game, took our laptops to the local pub and started hacking. In this talk I will explain how I used F# to transform this problem to satisfiability, and ran it through a sat solver to discover if it can indeed end in a tie.

I will also show how to apply the same technique to more useful problems such as scheduling and register allocation.

At Jet.com, we've based our architecture around cloud-based event-driven microservices, and over the last several months, have schooled ourselves on what works and what doesn't. This session will walk you through the lessons we have learned on our way to developing our platform.