Julien's Tech Bites

The transcript for the episode can be found here.

This time we'll dive into accessibility! Nobody ever chooses by design to lock their users out of their application and applications, but this is something we do everyday without realizing it. This is one of the challenges of accessibility

To dive into this fascinating and complex topic, our guests are

• Mallory, Accessibility auditor and former front-end developer.
• Erik Kroes, Accessibility Lead and Front-End developer at ING, and accessibility auditor.

During this episode, we'll get into the basics of accessibility and what it entails. We will discuss the difference between accessibility and universal design, and how to get started with it. We will discuss why accessibility should be at the core of everyone's considerations when building applications (you're locking people out!) and strategies to improve awareness and results. We'll also look into whether we can call the job 'done' at any point.

And of course, just like each time, we'll cover the best resources to get you started; and find some potential problems to solve and learn at the same time.

Some additional links mentioned during the episode and to dive further into the topic

• Solid Start, a one pager put together by Erik Kroes and others that list how to give a 'solid start' to your application in terms of accessibility.
• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the main guidelines that aim at providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility.
• BATS, A place blind technology professionals to connect and share knowledge
• Inclusive Component design, A blog about designing inclusive web interfaces.
• Erik Kroes' Twitch channel, where he hosts weekly sessions about accessibility, runs light audits on websites or receives guests.

This podcast is hosted by me, Julien Lengrand-Lambert. Subscribe to this podcast on your preferred platform or follow Julien's Tech Bites on Twitter to learn more about our future episodes!

• Maike Fischer, Machine Learning engineer at ING and one of the creators of the 'Introduction to Machine Learning' workshop there.
• Vaidas Kurlianskas, Chapter Lead Data Science and Data Scientist at ING. Vaidas knows the challenges of developing models, but also managing the expectations of stakeholders !

During this episode, we'll get into the details of the terminology : Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence : How are those different? We'll also look into how machine learning engineers interact with product teams to help them improve their software. Then, we'll look at the different stages of building a model, from requirements all the way up to production! Finally, we'll look into the ethical issues that machine learning bring and how those impact our society.

And of course, just like each time, we'll cover the best resources to get you started; and find some potential problems to solve and learn at the same time. 

Some additional links mentioned during the episode : 

• Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera : One of the most completed Coursera courses of all time.
• Kaggle : A website with datasets and challenges to solve, with practical implications.
• TensorFlow.js : A library to do Machine Learning on the frontend.

This podcast is hosted by me, Julien Lengrand-Lambert. Subscribe to this podcast on your preferred platform or follow Julien's Tech Bites on Twitter to learn more about our future episodes!

• David Follen is Developer and Chapter Lead at ING Belgium, and has several years experience building applications using data grids.
• Nicolas Fränkel is Developer Advocate for Hazelcast, one of the leading in-memory data grids on the market.
  

During this hour, we'll be covering all the basics of in-memory data grids. What are they and what can they help you achieve. What are their advantages, but also drawbacks. In what situations can they be used to their maximum potential and to what extent. We'll also look into how to get started with in-memory data grids using available open-source projects. I hope you'll enjoy the ride!

Some additional resources :

• A definition of in-memory data grids from Hazelcast's website.
• Wikipedia's page of the CAP Theorem
• Hazelcast's main Open-Source repository, and the Getting Started.
• Apache Ignite's Getting Started
  

This podcast is hosted by me, Julien Lengrand-Lambert. Subscribe to this podcast or follow Julien's Tech Bites on Twitter to learn more about our future episodes!

• Vincent Free is a JVM developer who works on ING's global distributed tracing platform, handling up to one billion of events a day
• Alessandro Vermeulen is the engineering lead of the global application platform of ING,  and helped create the Reactive Center of expertise at ING.

We will start by looking into the basics of reactive systems. We'll discuss why they are getting so relevant lately, and what are the trade-offs of using them. We'll also check when they are best used, and how to build them.  Finally, we'll look into the tooling and the must haves when starting with reactive. 

Some additional resources : 

• The reactive manifesto, listing the properties of reactive systems.
• Event loops, where it all started
• Domain Driven Design and Event Sourcing
• Back pressure and the reactor pattern
• Akka and Akka streams
• Kafka 

This episode is hosted by me, Julien Lengrand-Lambert. Follow Julien's Tech Bites to learn more about our future episodes!