Registration, Breakfast, and Welcome

Triadic Programming

Stuart Halloway

Since the Cold War, the secretive Dyadic Society has been stealthily sapping the strength of the software development community. Haven't heard of them? That just proves that they exist! To conceal the truth from programmers, the Dyads promote their ideology through proxies, using content-free blanket terms such as "best practices" and "design patterns."

You can fight the Dyads by avoiding so-called "best practices" such as

* polymorphism via classes and methods
* error handling via throwing and catching exceptions
* thread-safe code via objects and locks

Notice the dyads: throw and catch, class and method, object and lock. In this keynote, you will see what the Dyads fear most: a set of Triadic techniques that break the Dyadic chokehold on developers everywhere:

* polymorphism via structures, functions, and multiple dispatch
* error handling via signals, handlers, and restarts
* thread-safety via immutable data, references, and transactions

Remember: threedom is freedom.

Phenomenal Feedback

Dan Croak

Behavior Driven Development! Cloud Computing! Buzzwords? Not in the Ruby on Rails(!) world. See a live demonstration of how Rails developers use constraints and feedback loops to experiment cheaply and quickly iterate over their ideas. It will… blow… your… mind!

Break

"Comics" Is Hard: Alternative Databases

Ben Scofield

It sometimes seems like all domains easily map onto relational database like MySQL and Postgres — that we live in a happy land where all Employees are People, and all People are Mammals. Unfortunately, however, there are many domains that just don't map so easily onto a standard relational schema. In this session, we'll look at three general alternatives to the familiar model, as illustrated by some specific examples. We'll also see how some alternative databases provide a better fit for specific domains.

Cloud Talk: A RunCodeRun Case Study

Jess Martin

Relevance started building RunCodeRun internally about a year ago to meet an internal need for a continuous integration platform. Along the way, we learned a variety of technical lessons about building a product in the cloud and business lessons about how not to start a startup. Part product postmortem and part technical take-away, in this session we will look at both how to build a technically excellent product and also how to build a business on top of it.

Lunch

Lightning Talks

Bringing Your Great Ideas to Fruition - Managing a Team of One

Sara Chipps

Do you have a great idea for an awesome site but have no time to make it? Are you so frustrated that there is no tool that does (blank) and you wish someone would just get started working on it? Making your pet personal project can be quite an undertaking, so together we're going to go over:

* Choosing the right technology
* Making use of your greatest skills
* Finding the time
* Prioritizing features and knowing what to put in your beta
* Finding "cool new stuff" to implement
* Not letting your "me job" interfere with your "day job"

We're also going to take a first look at Sara's debuting project "Url Bundle," written in the ASP.NET MVC framework, We will learn some cool techniques like:

* Javascript templating with JQuery
* JSON web services for async data manipulation
* Making your own custom Url Shortener
* Social media integration

We will send you on your way prepared to share your great ideas for rocking software to the world.

An Introduction to CSS 2.1 & CSS 3

Marc Amos

CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, while not widely supported at the moment, are inching closer and closer to gaining the browser-level support we all wish for. Now that Firefox 3.5 has been released, and because of the fairly high adoption/upgrade rate of it's user-base, front-end developers are one step closer to the stress-reducing benefits these two versions of CSS provide.

In this presentation, you'll be introduced to a fair chunk of CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 selectors, properties, and values. You'll see actual code, the rendered output of that code, a few in-browser demonstrations, and we'll discuss the ways in which these new items can make your life, as a front-end developer, much easier.

If you and/or your company supports gracefully degrading certain aspects of a website's design, then you'll be able to apply a large portion of the CSS we'll be discussing right away.

Break

Enjoy Your Version Control

Nick Quaranto

For most developers, dealing with their source control can be one of the worst parts of the day. You shouldn't have to fear doing merges, making drastic changes without affecting the mainline, setting new team members up, or even just pulling down the latest changes. You'll learn why Git, a fast and distributed version control system, has gained popularity in both open source projects and the workplace, and you'll see how it's made version control enjoyable once again.

Understanding JavaScript Testing

John Resig

This talk will be a comprehensive look at what you need to know to properly test your JavaScript code. Numerous testing frameworks will be discussed and examined together with an encompassing analysis of the general families of testing techniques. If you haven't tested your JavaScript code before - or if you're looking for a better way to test your existing code - this is the talk for you.

Happy Hour