NFJS Tour Refresh

Full Site

Itineary

itineary

 

Friday, Apr. 27

 

Saturday, Apr. 28

 

Sunday, Apr. 29

 

Build Lifecycle Craftsmanship Tools

Matthew McCullough

Friday 1:15 PM - Meeting Room 5

Matthew McCullough

You've heard a bit about Git, Gradle, Jenkins, and Sonar, but are you putting them to use? Are you maximizing what they can offer in terms of standardized project models, faster incremental compiles, automated commit-triggered builds, and rapid source code analysis? In this intense presentation, live demonstrations will be given for all of the latest versions of the aforementioned tools and what they have to offer a highly proficient Java developer.

Don't struggle to get the build out, functioning, and analyzed. Develop, build, analyze and deploy smartly and efficiently with a Build Lifecycle Craftsmanship approach and tooling.


About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

 

AMQP: From Concept To Code

Mark Richards

Friday 1:15 PM - Meeting Room 8

Mark Richards

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a new way of looking at messaging that is quickly gaining in popularity and use, particularly in the financial services industry. Unlike JMS, which defines a standard API across platforms, AMQP defines a standard wire-level protocol across languages and platforms, finally making true cross-platform messaging a reality. In this session I will start by describing exactly what AMQP is and what problems it specifically solves (that JMS can't!). I will then describe the basic architecture and how AMQP routes messages, and then, through live interactive coding, demonstrate how to build a simple producer and consumer using RabbitMQ to send and receive AMQP messages. We will also take a brief look at other aspects of AMQP such as performance and how to guarantee that the message reaches a consumer.

Agenda: - What is AMQP and what problems does it solve? - How AMQP works: exchanges, bindings, queues, and routing - AMQP exchange types - AMQP message structure - AMQP Performance characteristics - Sending and receiving messages using RabbitMQ - How to guarantee message delivery in AMQP


About Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

 

NoSQL Smackdown 2012

Tim Berglund

Friday 1:15 PM - Meeting Room 6

Tim Berglund

Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future?and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you're going to have to look at code.

In this talk, we'll examine three important contenders in the NoSQL space: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We'll review their data models, scaling paradigms, and query idioms. Most importantly, we'll work through the exercise of modeling a real-world problem with each database, and look at the code and queries we'd use to implement real product features. Come to this session for a thorough and thoroughly practical smackdown between three important NoSQL products.


About Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

 

Agile Clarity

Tiffany Lentz

Friday 1:15 PM - Meeting Room 7

Tiffany Lentz

What is Agile? Where did it come from? What does it mean to me? This session gives some history of Agile as a response to the software industry in a time when it was struggling with processes that just didn't make sense. We will cover the What, the Why, the How and the Who of Agile processes.

This session does more than just scratch the surface of what Agile means. We will seek to clarify definitions, business reasons, and technology reasons for the Agile approach. We will compare and contrast Agile with traditional methods and seek to understand how the roles differ as well. We will look at samples of management, analysis, development and testing responsibilities. Building on the theory we will discuss, we will have a holistic picture of What Agile is, Why we use it, How we use it, and Who the players are.


About Tiffany Lentz

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager's job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.

 

Groovy 101: Collections, closures, and the Groovy JDK

Kenneth Kousen

Friday 1:15 PM - Meeting Room 4

Kenneth Kousen

Want to use Groovy but don't have time to read all of Groovy in Action? This talk gives you a whirlwind introduction to its capabilities, from basic data types, Groovy strings, POGOs, collections, Groovy SQL, and the Groovy JDK.

Learn the basics of Groovy through code examples, including both scripts and classes. A complete set of test cases is included, as well as a gradle build script to download everything you need and run all the tests.


About Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.

 

Effective Spring

Craig Walls

Friday 1:15 PM - Meeting Room 9/10

Craig Walls

After 9 years and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?

In this session, we'll explore several ways that Spring has changed over the years and look at the best approaches when working with the latest versions of Spring.


About Craig Walls

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.

 

Groovy 201: Builders, metaprogramming, and AST Transformations

Kenneth Kousen

Friday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 4

Kenneth Kousen

Want to use Groovy but don't have time to read all of Groovy in Action? Building on the Groovy 101 talk, this presentation reviews features of Groovy that aren't based on simplifying Java. Topics include building and parsing XML and JSON, using the metaclass to enhance existing classes, and Abstract Syntax Tree Transformations like @Delegate, @Immutable, @Canonical, and more.

Learn the basics of Groovy through code examples, including both scripts and classes. A complete set of test cases is included, as well as a gradle build script to download everything you need and run all the tests.


About Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.

 

Sonar Code Metrics Workshop (Bring a Laptop)

Matthew McCullough

Friday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 5

Matthew McCullough

You're serious about improving the quality of your code base, but with 10,000 lines of code, where do you start and how do you ensure the greatest ROI for the re-work your team members will perform?

Sonar is an open source tool that brings together the best of breed static and dynamic analysis of Java projects. The result is a unified view of problematic areas of your code on a time-line basis, allowing the team to attack the problems with the best ROI, and maintain a more watchful eye for positive and risky trends in the codebase in the future.

This workshop will get you up and running with Sonar on your laptop and analyzing the source code of a project in under 90 minutes.


About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

 

Understanding Enterprise Architecture

Mark Richards

Friday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 8

Mark Richards

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one of the most misunderstood terms in our industry. Ask 10 people what EA is and you will get 10 different answers. To better understand what EA is and how it impacts your company (and you!) we will go back in time to maritime Britain in the late 1700's. Through exercises in designing a fleet of war ships and making decisions about what to do with the fleet you will understand the various approaches, directions, and implications of EA and how necessary EA is to achieve any company goal. So put your admirals hat on and climb aboard for a maritime adventure you won't forget!

Agenda:


About Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

 

The Agile Mindset: Applying Agile in Non-Technical Areas of an Organization

Tiffany Lentz

Friday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 7

Tiffany Lentz

Agile techniques are often pigeon-holed as just applying to software projects and IT organizations. Agile techniques are a mindset more than a list of rules to follow and can bring efficiency and improvements to all areas of an organization.

This presentation will cover a case study of ThoughtWorks experience with a major bank and credit card company in the US and their application of Agile techniques. We will cover the process, outcomes and challenges of the Agile implementation.


About Tiffany Lentz

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager's job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.

 

Developing Next-Generation Applications

Craig Walls

Friday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 9/10

Craig Walls

For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.

But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.

With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.

In this session, we'll discuss what the next generation of applications looks like, exploring such things as the mobile web and cloud computing. We'll also dig into some of the technologies and practices such as REST, OAuth, and JavaScript microframeworks that enable us to move forward.


About Craig Walls

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.

 

Cassandra: Radical NoSQL Scalability

Tim Berglund

Friday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 6

Tim Berglund

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.


About Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

 

The Art of Problem Solving

Mark Richards

Friday 5:00 PM - Meeting Room 8

Mark Richards

I commonly think of those of us in the IT industry as problem solvers. Whether developer, designer, or architect, we are all presented with problems and work to find a way to solve them, usually through technology. In my opinion this is what makes this industry so much fun. Let's face it - we all love challenges. Sometimes, however, the problems we have to solve are hard - really hard. So how do you go about solving really hard problems? That's what this session is about - Heuristics, the art of problem solving. In this session you will learn how to approach problems and also learn some the common techniques for solving them effectively. So put on your thinking cap and get ready to solve some easy, fun, and hard problems.

Agenda:


About Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

 

Iteration Management: What's in your Toolkit?

Tiffany Lentz

Friday 5:00 PM - Meeting Room 7

Tiffany Lentz

Is your Agile team running smoothly? How do you know? This answer is found in your iteration and your toolkit for constant team improvement! Comparing Iteration Management skills and tools to those of the Agile Project Manager, Scrum Master and Technical Leader roles, you will see that Iteration Management encompasses end to end activities of the iteration, which are crucial to unblocking your software production line and making your team a success.

This session will enable participants to employ critical and industry proven techniques that will improve a team???s processes immediately upon application. An Iteration Manager encompasses not just project management activities, but ALL activities of iterations, including: story writing, development, testing, facilitation, visibility, communication and metrics. The session will provide hands on, proven and critical techniques to successfully managing the inner workings of iterations.


About Tiffany Lentz

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager's job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.

 

Securing the Modern Web with OAuth

Craig Walls

Friday 5:00 PM - Meeting Room 9/10

Craig Walls

In this session, we'll look at OAuth, focusing on OAuth 2, from the perspective of an application that consumes an OAuth-secured API as well as see how to use OAuth to secure your own APIs.

Web security is nothing new. As users of the web, we're all accustomed to entering our usernames and fumbling to recall our passwords when trying to access private data on one of the many online services we use. But while traditionally web security could be described as a two-party process between a web application and a user, the modern web involves applications that seek to access other applications on behalf of their users. This presents some new challenges in keeping a user's sensitive data secure while still allowing a the third party application to access it.

OAuth is an open standard for authorization, supported by many online services, that allows one application to access a user's data in another application, all while giving the user control of what information is shared.


About Craig Walls

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.

 

Connected Data with Neo4j

Tim Berglund

Friday 5:00 PM - Meeting Room 6

Tim Berglund

Neo4j is an open-source, enterprise-class database with a conventional feature set and a very unconventional data model. Like the databases we're already used to, it offers support for Java, ACID transactions, and a feature-rich query language. But before you get too comfortable, you have to wrap your mind around its most important feature: Neo4j is a graph database, built precisely to store graphs efficiently and traverse them more performantly than relational, document, or key/value databases ever could.

Neo4j is an obvious fit to anyone who thinks they have a graph problem to solve, but this is not many people. It turns out that the most interesting property of Neo4j is its architectural agenda. It wants you to think of the entire world as a graph?as a set of connected information resources. Steeped in the thinking of resource oriented architecture, this NoSQL database wants to change the way you look at your world, and unlock new value in your data as a result.


About Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

 

Improving Spring with Groovy

Kenneth Kousen

Friday 5:00 PM - Meeting Room 4

Kenneth Kousen

Groovy and the Spring framework are old friends. Spring includes dynamic beans that can be modified while a system is still running, and of course the Grails framework is built on top of Spring MVC. Here we'll illustrate all the ways that Groovy works with Spring, and show how a developer can take advantage of those capabilities right away.

Examples will include using Groovy beans in Spring systems, refreshable beans, inline scripted beans, aspects in Groovy, and even the Grails Spring bean builder.


About Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.

 

Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)

Matthew McCullough

Friday 5:00 PM - Meeting Room 5

Matthew McCullough

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.


About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

 

Then Our Buildings Shape Us

Tim Berglund

Friday 7:15 PM

Tim Berglund

Winston Churchill famously said, "First we shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us." He was talking about the reconstruction of the House of Parliament, which was damaged in a bombing raid in World War II. There was a debate about how to shape the chamber to best accommodate the deliberative activity of the body that met in it. Churchill was talking about buildings, but it turns out his insight is a very general one indeed.

Developers are constantly debating their choices of language, platform, editor, methodology, and even where to put the curly braces. The robust internal dialog in community is a healthy thing, but our debates are often focused on the wrong topics. Have you ever compared languages by performance benchmarks? Platforms by alleged claims of developer productivity? Methodologies by feature velocity? There is a very good chance you're doing it wrong.

Rather than focus on the material content of our debates?language performance, editor productivity, methodological velocity?we should take Churchill's advice and think about the form of our choices. How will our choice of language influence the way we solve future problems? What assumptions does our methodology make about the nature of work? How will our choice of database affect the kinds of problems we think of as solvable?

Drawing on lessons from building architecture, literature, music, the visual arts, and even software itself, we'll learn the priority of interpreting the form of things before attempting to understand their content. You may never look at software architecture the same way again.


About Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

 

Understanding Garbage Collection

Douglas Hawkins

Saturday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 7

Douglas Hawkins

Most of us don't want to go back to the days of malloc and free, but the garbage collector isn't always our friend.

In this presentation, you'll learn about the different garbage collection strategies used in JVMs, how to monitor garbage collection, analyze memory dumps, and why you might want to use one collection strategy instead of another.


About Douglas Hawkins

Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 10 years -- creating applications for bioinformatics, finance, and retail.

However, Doug's true interest is exploring and explaining the low-level details inside the virtual machines that we use everyday. To make byte code more accessible, he created the open-source Java Assembler Kit (JAK) which provides a fluent API for producing Java byte code and includes a REPL to allow for interactive experimentation.

Doug lives in Boston and is a regular presenter at both the Boston Java Meetup and the New England Java User's Group.

 

Spring Data

Craig Walls

Saturday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 9/10

Craig Walls

This session starts with a high-level look at all that the Spring Data project has to offer. Then we'll dive deeper into a few select Spring Data modules, including Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data Redis, Spring Data JPA, and Spring Data JDBC Extensions

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in how data is stored. Although RDBMS has long been treated as a one-size-fits-all solution for data storage, a new breed of datastores has arrived to offer a best-fit solution. Key-value stores, column stores, document stores, graph databases, as well as the traditional relational database are options to consider.

With these new data storage options come new and different ways of interacting with data. Even though all of these data storage options offer Java APIs, they are widely different from each other and the learning curve can be quite steep. Even if you understand the concepts and benefits of each database type, there's still the huge barrier of understanding how to work with each database's individual API.

Spring Data is a project that makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data, offering a reasonably consistent programming model regardless of which type of database you choose. In addition to supporting the new "NoSQL" databases such as document and graph databases, Spring Data also greatly simplifies working with RDBMS-oriented datastores using JPA.


About Craig Walls

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.

 

Know Your Enemy: Understanding AntiPatterns

Mark Richards

Saturday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 8

Mark Richards

The ancient Chinese warrior Sun Tzu taught his men to "know your enemy" before going into battle. For us, the same thing is knowing and understanding anti-patterns - things that we repeatably do that produce negative results. Anti-patterns are used by developers, architects, and managers every day, and are one of the main factors that prevent progress and success. In this session we will look at some of the more common and significant software development anti-patterns. Through coding and design examples, you will see how these anti-patterns emerge, how to recognize when the antipattern is being used, and most importantly, how to avoid them. Although most of the coding examples will be in Java, this is a technology-agnostic session. Remember, like motorcycles, anti-patterns are everywhere - so be careful out there!

Agenda

For each anti-pattern covered in this session we will look at the symptoms of the anti-pattern, what the effects are, and some techniques on how to avoid the anti-pattern.


About Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

 

Decision Making in Software Teams

Tim Berglund

Saturday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 4

Tim Berglund

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.


About Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

 

JavaScript Libraries You Aren't Using...Yet

Nathaniel Schutta

Saturday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 6

Nathaniel Schutta

You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.

You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.


About Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.

 

Gradle Workshop (Bring a Laptop)

Matthew McCullough

Saturday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 5

Matthew McCullough

Gradle. Another build tool? Come on! But before you say that, take a look at the one you are already using.

Whether your current tool is Make, Rake, Ant, or Maven, Gradle has a lot to offer. It leverages a strong object model like Maven, but a mutable, not predetermined one. Gradle relies on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) lifecycle like Maven, but one that can be customized. Gradle offers imperative build scripting when you need it (like Ant), but declarative build approaches by default (like Maven). In short, Gradle believes that conventions are great -- as long as they are headed in the same direction you need to go. When you need to customize something in your build, your build tool should facilitate that with a smile, not a slap in the face. And customizations should be in a low-ceremony language like Groovy. Is all this too much to ask?

Gradle has received the attention of major open source efforts and has chalked up significant conversions by the Spring Integration, Hibernate, and Grails projects. What do these technology leaders see in this bold new build tool? They see not only a better way to build Java applications, but an extensive ecosystem of connecting to existing Ant and Maven build files while expanding the horizon of test, CI, and deployment automation in an easy manner. Join us for 90 minutes and let us take you on this same walk of discovery of the most innovative build tool you've ever seen.


About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

 

Integration Architecture: Concepts and Patterns

Mark Richards

Saturday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 8

Mark Richards

Very few applications stand alone anymore. Rather, they are combined together to form holistic systems that perform complex business functions. One of the big challenges when integrating applications is choosing the right integration styles and usage patterns. In this session we will explore various techniques and patterns for application integration, and look at what purpose and role open source integration hubs such as Camel and Mule play in the overall integration architecture space (and how to properly use them!). Through actual integration scenarios and live coding examples using Apache Camel you will learn which integration styles and patterns to use for your system and how open source integration hubs play an part in your overall integration strategy

Agenda:


About Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

 

Code Archaeology

Matt Stine

Saturday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 6

Matt Stine

Feature requests are steadily pouring in, but the team cannot respond to them. They are paralyzed. The codebase on which the company has "bet the business" is simply too hard to change. It's your job to clean up the mess and get things rolling again. Where do you begin? Your first task is to get the lay of the land by applying a family of techniques we'll call "Code Archaeology."

In this session we will learn how to systematically explore a codebase. We'll look at what tools are available to help us out, slinging some wicked shell-fu along the way. We'll look at "code islands" and "code bridges," and how to construct a "map of the code." We'll also examine the wisdom that thought leaders like Michael Feathers and Dave Thomas have leant to this subject.

Once we've gained a thorough understanding of what we have in front of us, we'll learn approaches for getting the system under test and refactoring so that we can start to pick up the pace and respond to user requirements without making a bigger mess. You'll leave this session well prepared to tackle the next "big ball of mud" that gets dumped on your desk.


About Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

 

Building Social Web Clients

Craig Walls

Saturday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 9/10

Craig Walls

You see them everywhere: "Like" buttons, "Tweet" buttons, and now there are "+1" buttons. The social networks have extended their reach beyond their own websites and into almost every web site you visit. But did you know that these simple little buttons are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to adding social features to your website?

Several of the popular social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) provide client-side APIs that enable you to build social capabilities into you application. With these APIs, your application can not only show a simple button for your users to express their opinion, but can also let you query information about their profile, friends, interests, and much more.

In this example-driven presentation, we'll examine the client-side APIs offered by Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We'll dig even deeper than the "Like" button as we see how the APIs can be used to build rich social applications.


About Craig Walls

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.

 

ClojureScript

Tim Berglund

Saturday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 4

Tim Berglund

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.


About Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

 

Jenkins Continuous Integration (Bring a Laptop)

Matthew McCullough

Saturday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 5

Matthew McCullough

The team dynamics and agile process revolution of the last several years has taught us that continuous integration (CI) is a necessary part of a healthy agile team. Jenkins (formerly Hudson) is the idea and footprint leader in the CI space. A recent survey stated that over 70% of all CI installations have Jenkins in their DNA. What's so awesome about this particular CI tool?

Get on board with a ground-up survey of how to install, apply, upgrade, and leverage the free an open source Jenkins Continuous Integration server for your build, whether it be Ant, Maven, Gradle, JavaScript, Rake, or just shell scripts.

In this workshop, you'll learn how to add plugins for additional build and analysis phases, how to cluster Jenkins on a subnet for a swarm of CI servers that automatically load balance and collate reports, and lastly, how to manage Jenkins on a disparate set of OSes to natively test your unit and integration tests on all your supporter platforms.


About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

 

Leading Technical Change

Nathaniel Schutta

Saturday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 7

Nathaniel Schutta

Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are "working" today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?

This talk will explore ways to stay sharp as a software professional. We'll talk about how a technology radar can help you stay marketable (and enjoying your career) and how we can use the same technique to help our companies keep abreast of important changes in the technology landscape. Of course it isn't enough to just be aware, we have to drive change - but how? This talk will consider ways we can influence others and lead change in our organizations.


About Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.

 

Effective Java Reloaded

Matt Stine

Saturday 1:30 PM - Meeting Room 9/10

Matt Stine

Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.

In his foreward to the first edition, Guy Steele writes about the importance of learning three aspects of any language: grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. Unfortunately many programmers stop learning after mastering the first two. Effective Java is your guide to understanding idiomatic Java programming.

Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone "items," all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers. You'll pick from a menu and decide where we'll head. Regardless of the path we take, you'll leave this session thoroughly equipped to write better Java code tomorrow!


About Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

 

Designing for Mobile

Nathaniel Schutta

Saturday 1:30 PM - Meeting Room 5

Nathaniel Schutta

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app...it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app...it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.


About Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.

 

FDD: Doing Agile in a Non-Agile World

Mark Richards

Saturday 1:30 PM - Meeting Room 6

Mark Richards

Are you in one of those situations where you want to use an agile methodology such as Scrum or Kanban but find yourself stuck in a company with a non-agile mentality? Or, are you using Scrum or Kanban and it simply isn't working? If so, this session is for you. In this session we will explore Feature Driven Development (FDD) in depth, with a particular focus on using it to make non-agile projects more agile. FDD is a highly iterative agile-like methodology that can be used to augment or replace traditional waterfall based approaches, particularly for those projects using remote or offshore teams. In this session you will learn what FDD is, how it is like agile, how it is not like agile, and how (and why) to integrate it with your traditional waterfall-based methodology (or replace your current agile methodology) to become more agile-like.

Agenda:


About Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

 

Inside Android's Dalvik VM

Douglas Hawkins

Saturday 1:30 PM - Meeting Room 7

Douglas Hawkins

Android is gaining popularity rapidly, but why does Android use its own implementation of Java?

In this presentation, we'll dig into the details behind Android's Dalvik VM. Along the way, you'll learn about Android' s service architecture, Dalvik's byte code format, and the surprising details of how Android installs, launches, and executes your applications.


About Douglas Hawkins

Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 10 years -- creating applications for bioinformatics, finance, and retail.

However, Doug's true interest is exploring and explaining the low-level details inside the virtual machines that we use everyday. To make byte code more accessible, he created the open-source Java Assembler Kit (JAK) which provides a fluent API for producing Java byte code and includes a REPL to allow for interactive experimentation.

Doug lives in Boston and is a regular presenter at both the Boston Java Meetup and the New England Java User's Group.

 

Continuous Delivery Pt 1: Deployment Pipelines

Neal Ford

Saturday 1:30 PM - Meeting Room 8

Neal Ford

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. This workshop focuses on the Deployment Pipeline concept from Continuous Delivery.

In this workshop I move 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. I 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.


About Neal Ford

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

 

MongoDB: Scaling Web Applications

Ken Sipe

Saturday 1:30 PM - Meeting Room 4

Ken Sipe

Google ?MongoDB is Web Scale? and prepare to laugh your tail off. With such satire, it easy to pass off MongoDB as a passing joke? but that would be a mistake. The humor is in the fact there seems to be no end to those who parrot the MongoDB benefits without a clue. This session is about getting a clue.

Get past the hype and hyperbole associated with NoSQL. This session will introduce MongoDB through live working sessions demonstrating the pros and cons of MongoDB development. The session will then focus on a recent short project focused on large scale. We?ll discuss database design to support high scale read access. Throughout this case study we will discuss the consequences of the MongoDB choice. The session will finish with a review of the production topology to support growth in scale.


About Ken Sipe

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

 

Enterprise Security API library from OWASP

Ken Sipe

Saturday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 4

Ken Sipe

When it comes to cross cutting software concerns, we expect to have or build a common framework or utility to solve this problem. This concept is represented well in the Java world with the loj4j framework, which abstracts the concern of logging, where it logs and the management of logging. The one cross cutting software concern which seems for most applications to be piecemeal is that of security. Security concerns include certification generation, SSL, protection from SQL Injection, protection from XSS, user authorization and authentication. Each of these separate concerns tend to have there own standards and libraries and leaves it as an exercise for the development team to cobble together a solution which includes multiple needs.... until now... Enterprise Security API library from OWASP.

This session will look at a number of security concerns and how the ESAPI library provides a unified solution for security. This includes authorization, authentication of services, encoding, encrypting, and validation. This session will discuss a number of issues which can be solved through standardizing on the open source Enterprise Security API.


About Ken Sipe

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

 

Running Java & Scala Apps on Heroku

James Ward

Saturday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 7

James Ward

Heroku is a Polyglot Cloud Application Platform that makes it easy to deploy Java and Scala apps on the cloud. Deployment is as simple as doing a "git push".

This session will teach you how to deploy and scale Java and Scala apps on Heroku.


About James Ward

James Ward (www.jamesward.com) is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku. Today he focuses on teaching developers how to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps to the cloud. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80?s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90?s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. You can find him tweeting as @_JamesWard, answering questions on StackOverflow.com and posting code at github.com/jamesward.

 

Effective Java Reloaded, Part II: Hello, Project Coin!

Matt Stine

Saturday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 9/10

Matt Stine

Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.

Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone "items," all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers.

*In Part II of this session, we'll cover those items we were unable to reach during Part I. We'll follow that up with a dive into the new features available in Java 7, describing new idioms for effective Java programming in the following areas:


About Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

 

Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I

Brian Sletten

Saturday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 6

Brian Sletten

The first in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.

The REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style has emerged as a winning strategy for building scalable, flexible, resilient systems that lead with an information focus. Far from being the simple "Web Services through URLs" idea many people have about them, REST-based systems require a new perspective, a fair amount of consideration and the discipline to look beyond simple point-to-point interactions.

The benefits are exciting and provide a gateway to a whole new world of information technology. This first talk will be an introductory session covering the basics of the REST architectural style.


About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

 

The Mobile App Smackdown: Native Apps vs. The Mobile Web

Nathaniel Schutta

Saturday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 5

Nathaniel Schutta

Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.

Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.


About Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.

 

Continuous Delivery Pt 2: Infrastructure

Neal Ford

Saturday 3:15 PM - Meeting Room 8

Neal Ford

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. This workshop focuses on the agile infrastructure required to implement a deployment pipeline and continuous delivery.

In this workshop, I introduce agile infrastructure, including the use of Puppet to automate the management of testing and production environments. We 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.


About Neal Ford

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

 

Rock SOLID Software

Matt Stine

Sunday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 5

Matt Stine

Object-oriented programming was formally introduced in the 1970's with the advent of Smalltalk. C++ took it mainstream in the 1980's, and Java carried it to the next level in the 1990's. Unfortunately, if you examine the vast majority of Java codebases, what you'll find is a bunch of C-style structs (a.k.a. JavaBeans) and functions. As these codebases grow, a number of design smells can potentially crop up, which in turn cripple our ability to respond to change. We need SOLID principles that we can apply to keep our software clean and malleable.

Robert C. "Uncle Bob" Martin identified several design smells in his book Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices:

We can reverse and in fact avoid these techniques by following the principles of SOLID software design:

You'll leave this session equipped to ferret out design smells and apply these principles on your next project.


About Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

 

Programming with HTML 5

Venkat Subramaniam

Sunday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 9/10

Venkat Subramaniam

Developing a rich user interface for web applications is both exciting and challenging. HTML 5 has closed the gaps and once again brought new vibe into programming the web tier. Come to this session to learn how you can make use of HTML 5 to create stellar applications.

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About Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

 

Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST II

Brian Sletten

Sunday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 8

Brian Sletten

The second in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.

People already familiar with REST (or who have attended the first session) will be walked through the deeper topics of building Level 3 Hypermedia-based RESTful systems, security, content negotiation, etc.


About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

 

Enterprise Integration Agility

Jeremy Deane

Sunday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 4

Jeremy Deane

Today?s interconnected world requires that organizations rapidly deliver flexible-integrated solutions. The conventional approach is to integrate heterogeneous applications using web services but unfortunately that tends to tightly couple those applications. In this session we will explore several alternatives for achieving Enterprise Integration Agility.

According to Programmable Web in 2010 the rate of growth in public Web APIs doubled. This exponential trend continues today resulting in an ever more connected web. This connected contagion is not just relegated to the domain of Web 2.0 but has infected the corporate world. In fact, companies are becoming more reliant on Software as a Service (SAAS) to provide key business functions.

Combating this contagion requires an approach that provides a type of insurance against constant change and lays the foundation for evergreen enterprise solutions. In this session we will explore three popular architectural styles including Message Oriented, Service Oriented, and Resource Oriented Architecture that are used to achieve Enterprise Integration Agility. In addition, I will provide examples of each architectural style using Apache ActiveMQ, Mule ESB, and NetKernel.


About Jeremy Deane

Jeremy Deane has over 17 years of software engineering experience in leadership positions. His expertise includes Enterprise Integration Architecture, Web Application Architecture, and Software Process Improvement. In addition, he is an accomplished speaker and technical author.

 

4 Practical Uses for Domain Specific Languages

Neal Ford

Sunday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 7

Neal Ford

Domain Specific Langauges seems like a cool idea, but where's the payoff? This talk provides an overview of how to build both internal and external DSLs (including the state of the art tools), stopping along the way to show how this is practical to your day job.

This talk defines of DSLs (Domain Specific Languages), distinguishes the types of DSLS (internal and external), and shows examples of building DSLs of several kinds. It shows how to utilize DSLs for externalizing configuration (which you're already doing, whether you realize it or not), how to make your code readable to humans, how DSLs make developer tools better (and how to use DSL techniques to build your own tools), and how DSLs can provide your users unprecedented flexibility and power, by building DSLs customized to their job. This talk provides a good foundation for the subject if you've never seen anything about it, but keeps the focus on practical goals.


About Neal Ford

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

 

OOP Principles

Ken Sipe

Sunday 9:00 AM - Meeting Room 6

Ken Sipe

For decades object-oriented programming has been sold (perhaps over sold) as the logical programming paradigm which provides ?the way" to software reuse and reductions in the cost of software maintenance as if it comes for free with the simple selection of the an OO language. Even with the renewed interests in functional languages, the majority of development shops are predominately using object-oriented languages such as Java, C#, and Ruby. So most likely you are using an OO language? How is that reuse thing going? Is your organization realizing all the promises? Even as a former Rational Instructor of OOAD and a long time practitioner, I find great value in returning to the basics. This session is a return to object-oriented basics.

This session is intended to balance the often-touted theoretical object-oriented practices with lessons from the real world. The session will start with a review of some of the basics regarding abstractions and encapsulation. Although simple concepts, we will push the boundary of how these techniques are applied. We will discuss the difference between analysis and design and how that is reflected in our code. We will also look at the limitations of Java the language as outlined in Josh Block?s book ?Effective Java?. The session will go past the basics of object-oriented principles and into what our true goals of development really are.


About Ken Sipe

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

 

Thinking in Functional Style

Venkat Subramaniam

Sunday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 9/10

Venkat Subramaniam

Functional Programming has been around for a while, but it is gaining popularity, especially due to direct support in languages on the JVM. Writing code in functional style is not about syntax, it is a paradigm shift. In this presentation, using examples from Java, Groovy, and Scala, you will learn how to write code in functional style. We will start out discussing the elements of functional programming and then look at examples of some common operations and how you can implement those in functional style.

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About Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

 

Examining Java Byte Code

Douglas Hawkins

Sunday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 4

Douglas Hawkins

Ever wondered what byte code looks like? Wondered how type erasure works? Or, wondered how other JVM languages can have all exceptions unchecked?

In this presentation, you'll learn the basics of Java byte code, see tools for viewing Java byte code, and even see how to use this knowledge to statically analyze your applications.


About Douglas Hawkins

Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 10 years -- creating applications for bioinformatics, finance, and retail.

However, Doug's true interest is exploring and explaining the low-level details inside the virtual machines that we use everyday. To make byte code more accessible, he created the open-source Java Assembler Kit (JAK) which provides a fluent API for producing Java byte code and includes a REPL to allow for interactive experimentation.

Doug lives in Boston and is a regular presenter at both the Boston Java Meetup and the New England Java User's Group.

 

Spring-Loaded Enterprise Integration

Matt Stine

Sunday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 5

Matt Stine

The book Enterprise Integration Patterns gave us a consistent vocabulary and notation with which to describe solutions to common integration problems that arise in the modern enterprise. Spring Integration (http://www.springsource.org/spring-integration) harnesses that vocabulary, providing a very natural extension to the well-known Spring programming model that enables the construction of loosely-coupled, messaging-based applications that can also integrate with services in the wild via a variety declarative adapters for heavily used protocols. This talk will provide an overview of the Spring Integration framework, it's relationship to the patterns, and to the problems they aim to solve. We'll also look at several integrated case studies.

Topics covered will include:


About Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

 

Spock - Unit Test and Prosper

Ken Sipe

Sunday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 6

Ken Sipe

Spock is a groovy based testing framework that leverages all the "best practices" of the last several years taking advantage of many of the development experience of the industry. So combine Junit, BDD, RSpec, Groovy and Vulcans... and you get Spock!

This is a significant advancement in the world of testing.

This session assumes some understanding of testing and junit and builds on it. We will introduce and dig deep into Spock as a test specification and mocking tool.


About Ken Sipe

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

 

Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST III

Brian Sletten

Sunday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 8

Brian Sletten

The third in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.

The move to a good REST API yields an explosive combination of options due to content-negotiation and arbitrary workflows. At the same time, the uniform interface you project (representations, how you respond to verbs, response codes, etc.) becomes your contract with your clients. The API itself becomes a completely transportable, reusable bit of organizational knowledge when done well. Testing it sufficiently will give you a safety net but may drive you crazy unless you do it right. We will walk through the use of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to test these kinds of APIs.

We will highlight the problems of sufficiently testing REST APIs while providing a rich and relatively straight-forward solution to the problem. We will use a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) tool like Cucumber to establish reusable steps and comprehensive, but lightweight testing strategies for testing REST APIs.

This talk will not be an introduction to REST. If you have come to the REST I or REST II talk, or have a good understanding, it should be very accessible.


About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

 

Agile Engineering Practices

Neal Ford

Sunday 11:00 AM - Meeting Room 7

Neal Ford

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.


About Neal Ford

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

 

Practical Lean for the Practicing Developer

Matt Stine

Sunday 2:15 PM - Meeting Room 4

Matt Stine

Much is said today by the software methodology "talking heads" about the need for organizations to "go lean." The question is, what does it mean to go lean? Is this the job of IT management? Or is it the job of the practicing software developer? And furthermore, does this simply mean the adoption of of another set of processes and procedures? Or is it something entirely different?

Ultimately, going lean simply means removing all of the impediments that prevent our organizations from achieving more of "the goal." While that goal may differ from context to context, for the vast majority of us that means "making more money," by improving our efficiency at moving from, as the Poppendieck's have so aptly said, from "concept to cash."

While a great many of us do not have the role power necessary to spur top-down organizational change, there are many practical things each of us can do to bring the power of "going lean" to our teams. As we apply these principles and practices to our day-to-day work, we can build the credibility necessary to become change agents.

In their books, the Poppendieck's have helpfully summarized lean software development into seven principles:

  1. Eliminating Waste
  2. Building Quality In
  3. Creating Knowledge
  4. Deferring Commitment
  5. Delivering Fast
  6. Respecting People
  7. Optimizing the Whole

In this talk we'll walk through each of these principles and examine how we as individual contributors and software teams can make practical, actionable changes within our own spheres of influence that will ultimately help us to deliver more value to our organizations.


About Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

 

Web Security (bring a laptop)

Ken Sipe

Sunday 2:15 PM - Meeting Room 9/10

Ken Sipe

As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.

This training workshop on security will provide an overview of the security landscape starting with the OWASP top ten security concerns with current real world examples of each of these attack vectors. The first session will consist of a demonstration and labs using hacker tools to get an understanding of how a hacker thinks. It will include a walk through of the ESAPI toolkit as an example of how to solve a number of these security concerns including hands-on labs using the OWASP example swingset.

The workshop will include several hands on labs from the webgoat project in order to better understand the threats that are ever so common today.

Attendees will come away with the following skills / capabilities: - threat modeling - security audit plan - introduction to Pen testing - key / certificate management - fixing web application security issues

Don't be the weakest link on the web!


About Ken Sipe

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

 

Programming with Actors

Venkat Subramaniam

Sunday 2:15 PM - Meeting Room 6

Venkat Subramaniam

Actor based concurrency was popularized by languages like Erlang and Scala. This model of programming provides isolated mutability (as opposed to shared mutability) and easy way implement coordinating processes or tasks. Actors can be local to a JVM, or distributed across VMs and machines. In this presentation we will learn how to use Akka Actors to design and implement distributed concurrent Java applications.

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About Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

 

Semantic Web Workshop

Brian Sletten

Sunday 2:15 PM - Meeting Room 7

Brian Sletten

The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.

Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.

Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will provide you with the understanding of a technological tidal wave that is heading in your direction.

In this workshop, we will:

Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together Integrate structured and unstructured information Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, DOAP Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language Model and Do Inference with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Bring your laptops. This is a hands-on workshop.


About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

 

RESTful Imaginarium

Jeremy Deane

Sunday 2:15 PM - Meeting Room 8

Jeremy Deane

In this RESTful Imaginarium you will learn about about the core concepts of REST demonstrated through three leading RESTful web service frameworks: RESTlet, Spring MVC and NetKernel. During this daydream you will learn about the fallacies of URL parameters, the debate of PUT vs. POST and the power of HATEOAS.

RESTful web services have become the preferred approach to synchronously integrating heterogeneous systems. The architectural style?s success is due in large part to its simplicity. Furthermore, REST is based on a small set of widely accepted standards, such as HTTP and XML and requires far fewer development steps, toolkits and execution engines than conventional SOAP web services.

This session covers the core concepts of REST and then walks through how to design and implement RESTful web services using three leading RESTful web service frameworks, RESTlet, Spring MVC and NetKernel.


About Jeremy Deane

Jeremy Deane has over 17 years of software engineering experience in leadership positions. His expertise includes Enterprise Integration Architecture, Web Application Architecture, and Software Process Improvement. In addition, he is an accomplished speaker and technical author.

 

Emergent Design

Neal Ford

Sunday 2:15 PM - Meeting Room 5

Neal Ford

Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers the theory behind emergent design and shows examples of how you can implement this important concept.

This session describes the current thinking about emergent design, discovering design in code. The hazard of Big Design Up Front in software is that you don't yet know what you don't know, and design decisions made too early are just speculations without facts. Emergent design techniques allow you to wait until the last responsible moment to make design decisions. This talk covers four areas: emergent design enablers, battling things that make emergent design hard, finding idiomatic patterns, and how to leverage the patterns you find. It includes both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, metrics, visualizations, tests) approaches to discovering design, and discusses the use of custom attributes, DSLs, and other techniques for utilizing them. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping you code in sync with the problem domain. This talk shows lots of examples of how to make this concept work in your environment.


About Neal Ford

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

 

Taming Shared Mutability with Software Transactional Memory

Venkat Subramaniam

Sunday 4:00 PM - Meeting Room 6

Venkat Subramaniam

Mutability is something we're quite used to in Java. Sharing is a good thing. However, shared mutability is pure devil's work. If we remove shared mutability, all the problems of concurrent go away. In practice, however, it's hard to completely get rid of shared mutability. This is where STM comes in with managed shared mutable variables. In this presentation we will take an example driven approach to dive deep into STM, look at what it has to offer, explore different implementations, and how we can design concurrent applications without any explicit locks.

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About Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

 

Web Security (bring a laptop)

Ken Sipe

Sunday 4:00 PM - Meeting Room 9/10

Ken Sipe

As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.

This training workshop on security will provide an overview of the security landscape starting with the OWASP top ten security concerns with current real world examples of each of these attack vectors. The first session will consist of a demonstration and labs using hacker tools to get an understanding of how a hacker thinks. It will include a walk through of the ESAPI toolkit as an example of how to solve a number of these security concerns including hands-on labs using the OWASP example swingset.

The workshop will include several hands on labs from the webgoat project in order to better understand the threats that are ever so common today.

Attendees will come away with the following skills / capabilities: - threat modeling - security audit plan - introduction to Pen testing - key / certificate management - fixing web application security issues

Don't be the weakest link on the web!


About Ken Sipe

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

 

Semantic Web Workshop

Brian Sletten

Sunday 4:00 PM - Meeting Room 7

Brian Sletten

The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.

Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.

Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will provide you with the understanding of a technological tidal wave that is heading in your direction.

In this workshop, we will:

Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together Integrate structured and unstructured information Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, DOAP Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language Model and Do Inference with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Bring your laptops. This is a hands-on workshop.


About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

 

Resource-Oriented Concurrent Processing

Jeremy Deane

Sunday 4:00 PM - Meeting Room 8

Jeremy Deane

Traditional concurrent development on the Java Platform requires in depth knowledge of threads, locks, and queues (oh, my!). Fortunately, new functional languages that run on the Java Platform, such as Scala, have made concurrent programming easier.

An alternate approach is to implement concurrent processes using a resource oriented computing (ROC) platform. At the heart of this ROC platform is a microkernel that allows processing to scale linearly as more CPUs are added. Consequently, developers are freed from the complexity of Java concurrency and functional programming.

In this session, I will provide an overview of resource-oriented concurrent programming using 1060 Research?s NetKernel. I will then present examples that compare and contrast this approach against concurrent programming using Java and Scala.


About Jeremy Deane

Jeremy Deane has over 17 years of software engineering experience in leadership positions. His expertise includes Enterprise Integration Architecture, Web Application Architecture, and Software Process Improvement. In addition, he is an accomplished speaker and technical author.

 

Stop, DevOp, and Roll Out Software

Matt Stine

Sunday 4:00 PM - Meeting Room 4

Matt Stine

What is the DevOps movement? It a nutshell, it is the idea that the days of silos are over. Development, QA, and operations can no longer be thought of as separate warring divisons with their own "turfs." Instead, we must focus on the fact that we are all part of a single value stream for the customer. By collaboration and shared expertise, we can find real overlaps between our previously segregated areas of expertise and optimize that value stream.

We'll cover the following topics:


About Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

 

Build Your Own Technology Radar

Neal Ford

Sunday 4:00 PM - Meeting Room 5

Neal Ford

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.


About Neal Ford

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

 

Tim Berglund

GitHubber

Tim Berglund

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.


 

Jeremy Deane

Chief Architect - Software Engineering Aficionado

Jeremy Deane

Jeremy Deane has over 17 years of software engineering experience in leadership positions. His expertise includes Enterprise Integration Architecture, Web Application Architecture, and Software Process Improvement. In addition, he is an accomplished speaker and technical author.


 

Neal Ford

Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Neal Ford

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.


 

Douglas Hawkins

Lead Software Engineer

Douglas Hawkins

Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 10 years -- creating applications for bioinformatics, finance, and retail.

However, Doug's true interest is exploring and explaining the low-level details inside the virtual machines that we use everyday. To make byte code more accessible, he created the open-source Java Assembler Kit (JAK) which provides a fluent API for producing Java byte code and includes a REPL to allow for interactive experimentation.

Doug lives in Boston and is a regular presenter at both the Boston Java Meetup and the New England Java User's Group.


 

Kenneth Kousen

Author of "Making Java Groovy"

Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.


 

Tiffany Lentz

Principal Consultant & Program Manager with Thoughtworks

Tiffany Lentz

Tiffany Lentz, a Principal Consultant and Program Manager, is proudly employed at ThoughtWorks, a global IT services firm focused on end-to-end software delivery. She has worked extensively for large clients in the US, Canada, and China, delivering solutions for both disparate system delivery projects and agile enablement and organizational transformation efforts to incorporate and enhance efficiency and delivery processes. She is an author, mentor, coach and trainer of agile methodologies, processes, and practices. Tiffany is the author of Iteration Management Chapter in the ThoughtWorks anthology book and believes that the Iteration Manager's job is to build a well-oil delivery machine.


 

Matthew McCullough

VP of Training, GitHub

Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.


 

Mark Richards

SOA and Integration Architect, Author of Java Message Service

Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.


 

Nathaniel Schutta

Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.

Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.


 

Ken Sipe

Architect, Web Security Expert

Ken Sipe

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.


 

Brian Sletten

Forward Leaning Software Engineer

Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.


 

Matt Stine

Enterprise Java/Cloud Consultant

Matt Stine

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.


 

Venkat Subramaniam

Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).


 

Craig Walls

Author of Spring in Action

Craig Walls

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.


 

James Ward

Principal Developer Evangelist, Heroku

James Ward

James Ward (www.jamesward.com) is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku. Today he focuses on teaching developers how to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps to the cloud. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80?s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90?s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. You can find him tweeting as @_JamesWard, answering questions on StackOverflow.com and posting code at github.com/jamesward.