Registration, Breakfast, and Welcome

The Passionate Programmer

Chad Fowler

What should the career path of a programmer be? How do you know what you're aiming for? What defines success?

Many of us started out assuming the answers to these questions included slowly climbing a corporate promotion structure, ultimately becoming a people or project manager and no longer a programmer.

But we didn't get into software development so we could fill out spreadsheets and attend status meetings. We got into software development because we were excited about it. We wanted to be creative and to build great things.

From the author of The Passionate Programmer, this session will walk through how a software developer can not only succeed but work toward building a remarkable career. We'll draw examples from business, the arts, music, and sports. By the end of the presentation, we will have laid out a structured framework for radically succeeding in the software industry.

TurboGears: An Exercise in Natural Selection

Chris Perkins

These days there's a web framework for everyone. Java, Ruby, PHP, even Scala have their own frameworks. In the Python world, the creation of WSGI (Web Standard Gateway Interface) has exacerbated web framework proliferation; it's just too easy to roll your own. The question is: has WSGI rendered the concept of a framework passe?

TurboGears is a Python web framework that helps the developer by providing an intelligent set of defaults, while enabling the developer to choose his favorite database mapping, templating language, or adjunct WSGI software to add to the stack.

This talk will examine how TurboGears aims to "Make the simple things easy. Make the difficult things possible." while maintaining the idea that choosing your own framework is valuable.

Break

The Cloud - Real World Applications and Pragmatics

Rob Sanheim

There is a lot of buzz and hype about building apps in the cloud, but not a lot of practical, real world advice or techniques. This talk will cut through the crap and demonstrate an approach to building cloud based apps learned through experience in building apps at Relevance and RunCodeRun. We'll use messaging and services to keep small pieces loosely joined, cook up configuration management to allow you to actually 'auto scale', and discuss practices to keep your app stable and happy in production. Leave your paradigm-shifting markitecture synergies at the door. No ESB-based SOA orchestration allowed. We're gettin' down to business.

Playing Nicely with Others

Jeremy Hinegardner

In the course of writing applications you need more than just a single programming language to get the job done. In most cases there will be more than one language involved in the application.

This talk will cover cross-language tools that ever developer should consider to help solve the problems they face. I will cover several non-traditional queueing, hashing and data storage servers and libraries that will be an asset to any developer.

The common factor in all these tools, is an interface that is programming language independent, or an interface exists for multiple programming languages.

Lunch

Lightning Talks

Email Interfaces for Your Ruby Apps

David Eisinger

Email-based user interfaces are an easy and powerful (but often overlooked) way to add a lot of value to web applications. In this presentation, we’ll discuss the advantages of providing an email interface to your app, take a look at some real-world examples (like Posterous, TripIt, and I Want Sandy), and then provide several specific techniques for adding this functionality.

Stepping Up: A Brief Intro to Scala

Derek Chen-Becker

The Scala programming language has been gaining momentum recently as an alternative (and some might say successor) to Java on the JVM. This talk will start with an introduction to basic Scala syntax and concepts, then delve into some of Scala's more interesting and unique features. At the end we'll show a brief example of how Scala is used by the Lift web framework to simplify dynamic web apps.

Break

Core Animation on the iPhone and Mac

Bill Dudney

Loving your iPhone? Think the UI to Front Row or the Apple TV is amazingly cool? Ever wonder how they do that beautiful animated UI? Of course! Developers love to take stuff apart and see how it works. Come to this talk and see how animation works on the iPhone and the Mac. Core Animation is the tech behind these animated UI's. In this talk we will cover the big picture of how Core Animation works and then look at some code to see how to build your own elegantly animating user interfaces for the iPhone or Mac.

The Archaeology of Language Features in C++, Java and Python

Bruce Eckel

It's comforting to think that features are carefully selected and placed within a language, but in many cases this isn't so. Some features exists because of constraints imposed by larger design decisions. Many are based on assumptions about requirements – usually about efficiency or safety. And some are there because somebody wasn't thinking clearly, or didn't do the research. You'll learn why features look like they do in these three languages and others.

Happy Hour