Laurie Williams

Effort and risk estimation are both important and problematic in software engineering. Inaccurate effort estimates can lead a team to making unrealistic commitments for completing a software project. Effort estimation models can be complex and require a significant amount of historical data to be collected and analyzed. As a result, effort estimates are often done in an ad hoc manner by management and/or team leaders. Likewise, software teams often estimate and rank their risks in a subjective manner due to problems quantifying the probability of a risk occurring and the impact of the risk. This talk will present the Planning Poker and Protection Poker “games” for collaborative effort and security risk estimation.

Chad Humphries

Everyone has reinvented the wheel at one point or another. I'm here to tell you there is nothing wrong with that.

In this talk you will see how reinventing the wheel played into the development of Rspec 2.0. I will also cover many of the problem areas of Rspec 1.0 that prompted a re-write, and some of the exciting new features of Rspec 2.0.

Clinton Nixon

Play! is an exciting web application framework I found this year. It's speedy; it's easy to debug; it's got simple templating; it's solidly RESTful; it's got caching baked-in; and there's no waiting around for files to compile. The surprising part: it's built in and for Java. We're going to see how to rapidly create web apps that perform well and are plain fun to make, and you'll leave with a new-found appreciation for how simple Java can be.

Sean Cribbs

Many developers will be familiar with lex, flex, yacc, bison, ANTLR, and other related tools to generate parsers for use inside their own code. For recognizing computer-friendly languages, however, context-free grammars and their parser-generators leave a few things to be desired. This is about how the seemingly simple prospect of parsing some text turned into a new parser toolkit for Erlang, and why functional programming makes parsing fun and awesome.

James Avery

In this talk James Avery will cover the history and continued growth of Open Source in the .NET ecosystem including recent open source projects from Microsoft as well as from the community. James will talk about his experiences building a SaaS ad server using open source .NET tools like ASP.NET MVC, nHaml, MbUnit, and more. James will also talk about working with open source tools like jQuery, RabbitMQ, and MongoDB from .NET.

Rebecca Murphey

I’ve been using, teaching, and evangelizing about jQuery for years. The library's simplicity is seductive; after a while, it kind of writes itself. So why did I venture into the unknown world of Dojo for a recent project? Find out what I learned about JavaScript code organization, inheritance, dependency management, and more in a whirlwind beginner's tour of a toolkit that answers some of the big questions surrounding JavaScript development.

Ben Scofield

Over the past year, NoSQL has been one of the most active movements in technology. We've seen the emergence of dozens of new options for persisting data, and the re-emergence of choices that had been used in specific niches. In addition, many of the tensions that characterized the movement initially have been resolved (or at least minimized), leaving open a new way forward.

In this session, we'll examine the current state of the NoSQL options, including the four major families (key-value stores, document- and column-oriented databases, and graph databases). We'll see examples of how to use representatives of each family in Ruby, and when you might be better off moving to one of them from a relational database. Finally, we'll explore the possibilities of hybrid systems.

Justin Gehtland

* where by "them" I mean "important social and community problems" and "energy legs" I mean "l337 haX0r skillz."

Software developers have enormous leverage; everything runs on code these days. There is no part of life where our skills cannot make a difference. And a scalable difference at that. Let's talk about how to harness what you do for the good of your community, your environment, and yourselves.