Join Us InAtlanta
Are you ready for DevNation? Developer Day events have succeeded around the country, and the newest incarnation is coming to Georgia!
On April 3rd, we'll be bringing a great set of talks (from local speakers!) to Atlanta – come see exceptional talks on cutting-edge technologies, and bond with your fellow developers.
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8:30 - 9:00
Registration, Breakfast, and Welcome -
9:00 - 9:40
Opening KeynoteSanjay Parekh
Sanjay is a partner at Shotput Ventures, the founder and organizer of Startup Riot, and also serves on the board of directors or advisers of a number of startups.
Previously Sanjay was a founder of Digital Envoy where he was the CEO and later the Chief Strategy Officer. Sanjay is the inventor of Digital Envoy’s patented NetAcuity IP intelligence technology. Digital Envoy was acquired by Landmark Communications in June 2007.
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9:50 - 10:30
Browser MVC with YQL and YUIStephen Owens
YQL is a highly rich and dynamic utility for capturing data from any place on the web. When we couple this functionality with YUI we have wonderful functionality for designing apps and sites easily and that scale around MVC design patterns.
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10:30 - 10:45
Break -
10:45 - 11:25
Real Software EngineeringGlenn Vanderburg
Software engineering as it’s taught in universities simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn’t produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn’t produce systems at all.
That’s odd, because in every other field, the term “engineering” is reserved for methods that work.
What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this class, we’ll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being “anti-engineering” (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development.
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11:35 - 12:15
NoSQL, CouchDB and the CloudBrad Anderson
Apache CouchdDB is a schema-free document database with unique characteristics that make it an excellent fit for a new wave of applications. It is a rapidly maturing product and one of the leaders of the NoSQL movement. We will take a look at some of these unique features, and also delve into Erlang, the programming language in which CouchDB is developed. Cloudant has developed a compelling clustering framework that allows for linear scaling of databases across large amounts of nodes in a cluster. We will discuss the fundamental features outlined in Amazon's Dynamo paper from 2007, and how Cloudant has leveraged these in its clustering layer.
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12:15 - 1:00
Lunch -
1:00 - 1:40
Lightning Talks -
1:50 - 2:30
Making Websites FastBilly Hoffman
Speed is essential when it comes to websites. Study after study has shown that faster websites lead to more traffic, more ad impressions, more engaged users, higher conversation rates, lower abandonment rates, and more revenue. And yet despite internet connections 100 times faster than a decade ago websites continue to be horribly slow. In this talk, we will show methods that will drop seconds of the page load time for your website and will not cost you a dime, We'll discuss different optimizations techniques that can be done by the web developer, web designer, or even the IT operations staff to dramatically speed up your website while reducing operational costs. We will use live examples of real sites to show how much these techniques would save as well as provide references to free tools and resources to help you speed up your websites.
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2:40 - 3:20
The Effective DeveloperJeremy McAnally
Often times developers will look at their more prolific brethren (or sistren) and ask, "How do they do it?" How do they hack out so much open source code? Or crank out 5,000 LOC in a week on our latest project? How do they write 10 books a year? How are they so effective at what they do?
Is it possible to be like them? If you're willing to make the changes, it surely is, but you have to know what they are first. I've spent years reading the blogs and books of these people and watching them do their thing, and have noticed certain patterns in behavior and personality. This talk takes a look at 5 guiding principals that these developers seem to embrace and how they make them more effective
developers. -
3:20 - 3:40
Break -
3:40 - 4:20
Mind Control: Psychology for the WebBen Scofield
Web design and user experience are about much more than making things look pretty. There's hard data underlying many design decisions, and we as developers benefit when we understand the principles at work. In this session, I'll provide an overview of some of the psychological principles that designers have begun to rely on.
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4:30 - 5:10
Why the Language Renaissance Matters to the EnterpriseNeal Ford
No one has failed to notice the language renaissance happening in the development world right now, but most enterprises ignore it. This keynote explains why the enterprise not only shouldn’t ignore this phenomenon, but must embrace it. Explaining this requires context, though, so this keynote explains why it is important, using stories, analogies, and ThoughtWorks experience with this revolution. The secret to market dominance resides here; ignore it at your peril!
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5:10 - 7:00
Happy Hour
Sanjay Parekh
Sanjay is a partner at Shotput Ventures, the founder and organizer of Startup Riot, and also serves on the board of directors or advisers of a number of startups.
Previously Sanjay was a founder of Digital Envoy where he was the CEO and later the Chief Strategy Officer. Sanjay is the inventor of Digital Envoy’s patented NetAcuity IP intelligence technology. Digital Envoy was acquired by Landmark Communications in June 2007.
Stephen Owens
TBA
Glenn Vanderburg
Glenn Vanderburg is a principal at Relevance, a development and consulting firm specializing in high-productivity platforms, tools and methods. He has 25 years of experience as a professional developer in enterprises large and small, and he is passionate about advancing the state of the art of software development.
Brad Anderson
Brad is a data warehouse and web application architect with vast design, implementation and deployment experience. He founded his first startup in 1998, a SaaS web-based business intelligence tool for the restaurant industry, now known as Mirus Intelligence. Brad has also contributed widely to the open source community on projects such as Trac and CouchDB, and founded dsource.org. He enjoys working with Erlang, D, Python, Lisp, and Javascript. Brad is co-curator of the NoSQL East conference. Currently he works for Cloudant, a startup which offers CouchDB hosting as well as integrated realtime search & data analytics solutions.
Billy Hoffman
Billy Hoffman is the founder of Zoompf, a web performance optimization company and a recognized expert in the field of the web and web security. Billy was as the lead researcher at web security firm SPI Dynamics and served as the manager for Hewlett-Packard’s Web Security Research Group following Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of SPI in 2007. Billy’s research has focused on Web 2.0 technology and security threats, automated discovery of web application vulnerabilities, and web crawling technologies. His work has been featured in Wired, Make magazine, Slashdot, G4TechTV, and in various other journals and Web sites. Billy has presented his work internationally and is regular presenter at security conferences including RSA, Black Hat, AJAXWorld, and Shmoocon. Billy is also the author of the book Ajax Security, the definitive guide to web security in a Web 2.0 world, published by Addison Wesley in December 2007. As Billy conducted web security analysis throughout the globe, he consistently noted that the performance of most websites was suboptimal. He also noted that this lack of optimization resulted in both poor user experiences and lost revenue for website providers. Recognizing an opportunity to apply his extensive web development skills in this exciting new area, Billy founded Zoompf to develop technology and services specifically designed to optimize website performance.
Jeremy McAnally
Jeremy McAnally is a software architect at Intridea. He has been developing applications with Ruby and Rails for a little over five years, but before that he tortured himself with PHP, C#, Python, VB, and other instruments of destruction. After finding the light, he worked with Ruby for a while and penned Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book (soon to be re-published by No Starch). Since then he has continued writing software, books (such as Ruby in Practice and the more recent Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook), open-source code (such as rails_upgrade, context, dcov, and more), given presentations for numerous Ruby conferences and user groups, blogs at omgbloglol.com, and has basically done anything he can to sharpen his Ruby (and Rails)-Fu. He likes good food, good times, and a mean game of Wii Sports Resort Tennis.
Ben Scofield
Ben Scofield is the Technology Director for Viget Labs, where he uses his experience working with startups like Squidoo and ODEO and his expertise in Ruby, Rails, and other technologies to help new businesses get on the right track. He's spoken at numerous conferences around the country and world, and is co-chairing RailsConf in Baltimore in 2010. He blogs at http://benscofield.com and tweets as @bscofield.
Neal Ford
Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware,
video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. Check out his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.
