Ian McFarland

A great agile design process is complementary to a great agile development process, and is one that produces great products, that people love enough that they generate real value.

There is a tension in the agile world between the notion of ultimate flexibility that agile proposes, and the need for coherency and excellence that great design provides. This talk is intended to provide a framework to help yourself ask, as a designer or as a developer, "What is Enough Design?", and to share our experience as to what has worked well in practice on our many projects at Pivotal Labs.

Matthew Deiters

The social trend in the industry has shifted users’ expectations to highly personalized experiences. This talk will examine popular examples like Amazon's product recommendations and LinkedIn's degrees of separations to understand the challenges of implementing similar features in our applications. We'll then discuss graphs and how they can be elegant and powerful solutions to making more intelligent software. By the end we should understand:

* How to discover interesting relationships in our data
* Effectively model these relationships in a graph
* Successful patterns for incorporating graph databases in an application

Dan Melton

CodeForAmerica.org places awesome developers in cities for a year-long codefest making empowering civic and citizen engagement applications. Think startups for government. Dan Melton, CTO, Code For America, a public-minded, generation-net coder passionate about cities, urban affairs and civic action. A Ruby enthusiast, Dan has contributed to multiple open source projects and spends his off hours diving into USA spending data.

Pete Skomoroch

Pete Skomoroch will describe best practices for building data driven products. We will explore visualization as a means to guide insight and the value of leveraging multiple datasets to better understand users. A high level overview of tools and techniques for rapid development of data products will be presented, including some Hadoop & MapReduce basics. Example data pipelines will be shown that include using Pig, Voldemort, and integration with web frameworks like Rails.

Andy Gross

Andy Gross will give you a high level overview of Riak, Basho's open source distributed data store, and then show how Riak's core can be used to create "Dynamo Style Systems" using Riak's distributed systems layer.

Brian Landau

As developers build new libraries and tools, they sometimes write documentation as an afterthought, or not at all. Poor or missing documentation can prevent a library from being adopted, and can also be the sign of a poor API.

This talk will look at the idea of documenting first, as a means of driving development. Documentation upfront means you end up with better documentation and better-designed APIs, which are two key elements to a library being heavily adopted.

Tom Hughes-Croucher

Node.js is a highly concurrent JavaScript server written on top of the V8 JavaScript runtime. This is awesome for a number of reasons. Firstly Node.js has re-architected some of the core module of V8 to create a server implementation that is non-blocking (similar to other event driven frameworks like Ruby¹s Event Machine or Python¹s Twisted). Event driven architectures are a natural fit for JavaScript developers because it¹s already how the browser works. By using an event driven framework Node is not only intuitive to use but also highly scalable. Tests have shown Node instances running tens of thousands of simultaneous users.

This session will explore the architectural basics of Node.js and how it¹s different from blocking server implementations such as PHP, Rail or Java Servlets. We¹ll explore some basic examples of creating a simple server, dealing with HTTPrequests, etc.

The bigger question is once we have this awesome programming environment, what do we do with it? Node already has a really vibrant collection of modules which provide a range of functionality. Demystifying what¹s available is pretty important to actually getting stuff done with Node. Since Node itself is very low level, lot¹s of things people expect in web servers aren¹t automatically there (for example, request routing). In order to help ease people into using Node this session will look at a range of the best modules for Node.js.

Shay Frendt

Deliver less software now, rather than more later.

Stop building features and products that nobody wants, sooner.

Get in the habit of interacting with your customers earlier, and measure everything.

Start now, and ship it today.

Chris Wanstrath

Chris Wanstrath cofounded GitHub and does a bit of open source when he's not working, drinking coffee, or drinking bourbon.