Tim Berglund

Presentations

Decision Making in Software Teams

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Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.

In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual, team, and organizational dimensions. We'll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We'll learn how a team can fall into decision-making dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to healthy functioning to an afflicted group. We'll also look at how organizational structure and culture can discourage quality decision making, and what leaders to swim against the tide.

Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well.

Complexity Theory and Software Development

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Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.

Beyond new ways of looking at ant colonies, fashion trends, and national economies, complexity theory promises powerful insights to software development. The Internet—perhaps the most valuable piece of computing infrastructure of the present day—may fit the description of a complex system. Large corporate organizations in which developers are employed have complex characteristics. In this session, we'll explore what makes a complex system, what advantages complexity has to offer us, and how to harness these in the systems we build.

Database Refactoring with Liquibase

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Most teams manage database change using an ad-hoc system of SQL migration scripts manually applied to various development, staging, and production servers. Some even contrive automated processes, but rarely does this surplus build engineering deliver value directly to the customer. We should be writing applications, not build tools.

In this session, we'll take a look at a ready-to-use, open-source database refactoring tool called Liquibase. Liquibase enables developers to make database changes with confidence, share those changes in a predictable way with other team members, and apply them to automated QA builds, staging servers, and production environments. It provides a credible path to agile database development, and it integrates well into popular build tools. It's a key enabler of the culture of database responsibility that most teams are missing.

Cassandra: Radical NoSQL Scalability

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Want to go deep on a popular NoSQL database? Cassandra is a scalable, highly available, column-oriented data store in use at Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Rackspace, and other web-scale operations. It offers a compelling combination of a rich data model, a robust deployment track record, and a sound architecture, making it a good choice of NoSQL databases to study first.

In this session, we'll talk about Cassandra's data model, look at its query idioms, talk about how to deploy it, and look at use cases in which it is an appropriate data storage solution. We'll study its origins in the Amazon Dynamo project and Google's BigTable, and learn how its architecture helps us achieve the gold standard of scalability: horizontal scalability on commodity hardware. You'll leave prepared to begin experimenting with Cassandra immediately and planning its adoption in your next project.

Gradle Jumpstart (Bring a Laptop)

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Gradle is a compelling new build tool that incorporates the lessons learned from a decade of Ant and Maven. More than just a compromise between declarative and imperative build formats, or between convention and configuration, Gradle is a sophisticated software development platform that simple builds easy and complex, highly automated continuous software delivery pipelines possible to build. Using its extensible APIs and expressive DSL, you're equipped to build your next build.

Bring your laptop to this session for the following:

• Build a Java project
• Resolve transitive dependencies
• Run unit tests
• Build a Groovy project
• Create multi-project, polyglot builds
• Wrap your build with a repeatable version of Gradle
• Extend Gradle with custom tasks
• See the plugin architecture

ClojureScript

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Clojure has recently been gaining attention as one of the most innovative languages of the JVM in current use, and it has mostly found a home on the server. In parallel, JavaScript has ascended to the position of the most important language of the web, and until recently it has lived only on the client. Few observers looked at the world of web development and predicted that these two would get together. Happily for us, they have!

ClojureScript is a dialect of Clojure that compiles to JavaScript, and targets the JavaScript runtimes of the web as a deployment environment. It offers the unparalleled expressiveness of Lisp, the performance and space efficiency of the Google Closure Compiler, interoperability with the in-browser object model, natural integration with server-side Clojure applications, and an insanely productive in-browser REPL. In a time of proliferating JavaScript extensions and client-side development frameworks, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this compelling vision of how client-side web development should be done.

Neo4J Workshop

TBA

TBA

Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)

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Git is a version control system you may have been hearing a bit about lately. But simply hearing more about it may not be enough to convince you of its value. Getting hands on experience is what really counts. In this workshop, you'll bring your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop and walk through downloading, installing, and using Git in a collaborative fashion.

The workshop style of this class will allow you to observe and discover the value of this new version control tool first hand. You'll be cloning, creating, commiting, and pushing repositories by the conclusion of this session.

PreReq: Basic knowledge of a version control system. Subversion knowledge is a plus, but not imperative.

Git from the Bits Up

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So you've gotten a handle on Git and know how to use it for everyday development tasks like committing code and pushing and pulling changes with the rest of the team. But do you really know how it works under the covers? In this brief demonstration, we'll commit a file to a brand new repository without ever touching the git add or git commit commands, and in the process learn some critical Git internals that every power user should know.

We'll also take a look at some advanced history and undo commands like reflog and reset, and how to rewrite past mistakes with interactive rebase. Bring your questions and Git challenges for 90 minutes of advanced Git fun!

Discrete Math You Need to Know

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What do you need to know about prime numbers, Markov chains, graph theory, and the underpinnings of public key cryptography? Well, maybe more than you think!

In this talk, we'll explore the branch of mathematics that deals with separate, countable things. Most of the math we learn in school deals with real-valued quantities like mass, length, and time. However, much of the work of the software developer deals with counting, combinations, numbers, graphs, and logical statements: the purview of discrete mathematics. Join us for this brief exploration of an often-overlooked but eminently practical area of mathematics.

GitHub Power Tools

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Most developers think of Git and GitHub as two sides of the same coin, but all too often our attention is focused on the Git side alone, and not on the capabilities of Planet Earth's most-used Git hosting service. More than two million developers have already joined the site that offers amazing features like pull requests, wikis, project pages, integrated web site hosting, issue tracking, metric visualizations, permission controls, and easy integration with third-party services.

Come to this talk to learn how to make better use of GitHub through the site's commonplace and advanced features alike.

First, Let's Kill All the Product Owners

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By now, we are all familiar with the new orthodoxy: the product owner discerns the needs of the customer and feeds them to developers in the form a prioritized backlog. Developers pull work from that backlog, always confident that they're working on the highest-priority feature at the moment, and never having to worry about how those priorities are allocated. This system is simple, efficient, and has helped many teams function better than they used to.

Shakespeare wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." It might be time to apply this aphorism to product management.

A few revolutionary companies are experimenting with the idea that developers should be in charge not only of when they build new features, but what features to build. Rather than mere code technicians following the will of a product and marketplace expert, developers themselves become experts in their product domain, building the tools users need—by conceiving of those tools themselves. Dispensing with the product owner creates an entirely new organizational tenor: one in which everyone is encouraged to master the business's domain, to organize their work in autonomous ways, and to take ownership of the purpose for which the organization exists.

Come ready to hear ground-breaking ideas and engage in group discussion about how these ideas might be put into practice in your workplace.