Neal Ford

Presentations

Agile Engineering Practices

Most of the time when people talk about agile software development, they talk about project and planning practices and never mention actual development practices. This talk delves into best development practices for agile projects, covering all of its aspects.

Most of the time when people talk about agile software development, they talk about project and planning practices but never mention actual development, as if development where an afterthought when writing software. This talk bills into the real details of how to do agile development. I discuss best practices like continuous integration, pair programming, how developers should interact with story cards, how to handle enterprise concerns like integration with other software packages, and a slew of other topics related to agile software development.

Clojure Workshop

In an increasingly crowded field of languages, Clojure stands alone. It is a dynamic, functional, high performance dialect of Lisp that runs on both the JVM and CLR. The creator cast aside assumptions from both the Lisp and Java communities to create a remarkable language implementation.

This workshop introduces Clojure to Java developers who might not have seen a Lisp and don’t yet understand why that’s such an advantage. I introduce the language syntax (what little there is of it), cover interoperability with Java, macros, mutlti-methods, and more. I also cover the functional aspects of Clojure, showing its powerful immutable data structures, working with threads and concurrency, and sequences. Beyond just showing syntax, I also show how to build real applications in Clojure, and give you a chance to do the same. Attending this workshop shows enough to pique your interest and show why many of the people who were interested in Java in 1996 are interested in Clojure now.

Build Your Own Technology Radar

A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company.

ThoughtWorks' Technical Advisory Board creates a "technolgy radar" 3 or 4 times a year. It is a working document that helps the company as a whole make decisions about what technologies are interesting and where we should be spending our time. This is a useful exercise both for you and your company. This session describes the process we use and how to adapt it to both your company and, more importantly, yourself. For career risk mitigation, you must know what the next big thing is, or at least be able to narrow it to a reasonable list. Attendees will leave with tools that enhance your filtering mechanisms for new technology and help you (and your organization) develop a cogent strategy to make good choices.

Continuous Delivery All-day Workshop, Pt. 1: Deployment Pipelines

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

In this workshop we take the unique approach of moving from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback so as to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible. At the heart of the workshop is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization's value stream for delivering software. We spend the first half of the workshop introducing this pattern, and discussing how to incrementally automate the build, test and deployment process, culminating in continuous deployment.

Continuous Delivery All-day Workshop Pt 2: Agile Infrastructure

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

In the second half of the workshop, we introduce agile infrastructure, including the use of Puppet to automate the management of testing and production environments. We'll discuss automating data management, including migrations. Development practices that enable incremental development and delivery will be covered at length, including a discussion of why branching is inimical to continuous delivery, and how practices such as branch by abstraction and componentization provide superior alternatives that enable large and distributed teams to deliver incrementally.