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.

Adam Keys

Languages like Erlang, Clojure, Scala and Haskell are all growing in popularity, each taking a very different approach to functional programming. Despite their differences, they share some important concepts. For the developer new to functional programming, the shock of new language, concepts and techniques can prove overwhelming. But, broken down to the important and common concepts, the picture becomes clearer. By tackling type systems, pure functions, lazy evaluation, data-oriented programming, concurrency and parallelism as stand-alone ideas, we can better see what functional programming is about and start learning to take advantage of it. After this session, you will know what your first (or next) step down the path to functional programming nirvana will be.

Kyle Simpson

Most web applications take UI architecture for granted, simply using out-of-the-box offerings from the framework of choice without much thought. This often yields far too complicated templating, data exchange (Ajax), URL routing, validation, etc. CVC (Client-View-Controller) is an alternative, deconstructed, framework-independent approach to building/delivering performant, maintainable web UI.

Jon Loyens

Have you ever experienced a time when you wanted to use your favorite dynamic web framework but were hamstrung by a legacy technology stack? What if you needed to create a quick one off or custom application but couldn't figure out how to access your legacy databases using your favorite rapid web development platform? At Bazaarvoice, the new multi-database branch of Django has become an invaluable tool for us to build rapid prototypes on against our existing, legacy, sharded data platform. I'll walk through how we use the multi-db branch in this capacity and then further delve into how we used Django along with a custom built SOLR datastore to solve one of our most technically challenging customer problems to date. While I'll be using Python and Django as the backdrop for this talk, hopefully it will inspire you to push the boundaries of the technology stack you use on a day to day basis in your workplaces.

Alex Sexton

Superclassy Inheritance with JavaScript is a quick look at the benefits and consequences of several inheritance patterns in JavaScript. Code reuse plays a major role in the DRY development pattern and leveraging the inheritance patterns built into JavaScript or manipulating them can change the way you build and organize large applications. Unfortunately, JavaScript's reputation and odd naming scheme have stopped people from using all the features that it has to offer. First, we'll discuss the array of options that exist and then go through a real-world example while using our newly honed inheritance-foo to make it play nice.

Aaron Bedra

Exploring new technologies can be both challenging and rewarding. A good spike can make or break a new feature for your application. Have you ever thought that a technology or practice your company isn't currently using is the perfect fit for your next iteration? This is your time to shine! In this session you will learn how to treat new technologies as first class citizens and prove that it fits your needs. You will also learn how to provide concrete evidence supporting your decision. By the end of this session your fear of introducing new technology will simply melt away leaving you with a hunger for new ideas.

Eitan Suez

Over the last decade, we've witnessed many innovations and improvements to the state of software development. Today, we're equipped with more and better software tools, with powerful programming languages, and have at our disposal a myriad of quality open source libraries and frameworks to leverage in our work. Yet despite these advances, software development today is in many ways more complicated than it's ever been. The effort required to realize a software solution today is considerable. What are the problems standing in our way? JMatter is an open source Java project that embraces many of the ideas behind the Naked Objects architectural pattern and Domain-Driven Design. Perhaps more importantly, JMatter embodies a yearning to make software development a simpler and more manageable endeavor. In this talk, Eitan will introduce the JMatter project, and discuss the ideas that JMatter promotes to address many of the problems we face today in software development.

Bruce Tate

Every foreign language you learn makes you a little smarter, and even shapes the way you think. Dave Thomas, one of the founders of the Pragmatic Press, once said that a developer should learn a new programming language every year. In the upcoming book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Bruce takes this challenging advice to the extreme. The book, in progress, helps a developer solve a nontrivial problem in each of seven different programming languages, spanning four different programming paradigms. In this keynote, Bruce will take a light hearted look at capturing the character of a programming language in a few short pages.