Join Us In Boulder, October 10th 2009

Developer Day Boulder is done! Like our previous events, we had a full day of great talks, good food, and bright attendees. Keep watching for details of the 2010 schedule!

 

TALK SCHEDULE

8:30 - 9:00

Registration, Breakfast, and Welcome

9:00 - 9:40

Chad Fowler

The Passionate Programmer

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.

speakerrate

Chad Fowler
Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the world's largest corporations. He recently lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center. He is co-founder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby Conference and The International Rails Conference, and is a leading contributor in the Ruby community.

9:50 - 10:30

Chris Perkins

TurboGears: An Exercise in Natural Selection

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.

speakerrate

Chris Perkins
Chris Perkins is a developer, mentor, entrepreneur, and consultant. Chris works closely with the TurboGears development team, combining the best of breed technologies with his own intuition and sensitivity for developer and customer needs alike. Currently Chris is employed by the National Renewable Energy laboratory, where he enables scientists to access their data, and promoting Python when he can. He also works for various other firms as an independent consultant.

10:30 - 10:45

Break

10:45 - 11:25

Rob Sanheim

The Cloud - Real World Applications and Pragmatics

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.

speakerrate | slides

Rob Sanheim
Rob Sanheim is a software developer with over eight years programming experience and over fifteen years of IT experience in many domains. He loves Ruby, timeless design, and simple software that gets stuff done. Rob is a believer and practitioner of common-sense agility, open source, and software that is fun to create and fun to use.

11:35 - 12:15

Jeremy Hinegardner

Playing Nicely with Others

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.

speakerrate

Jeremy Hinegardner
Jeremy Hinegardner lives in Boulder, CO and has been programming Ruby since 2001. He writes weird corner case gems such as crate, heel, amalgalite, hitimes and a few others. Jeremy also contributes to the Fedora/EPEL community by packaging nginx, HAProxy, beanstalkd and a few other applications. He works for Collective Intellect writing Ruby applications converting social media data into market intelligence, and in his copious free time plays at being a nature photographer.

12:15 - 1:00

Lunch

1:00 - 1:40

Lightning Talks

There's a lot of great work being done locally, and we always love to hear about it — so we're adding a slot for lightning talks to the agenda. Come prepared to chat about what you're working on or are interested in!

1:50 - 2:30

David Eisinger

Email Interfaces for Your Ruby Apps

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.

speakerrate | slides

David Eisinger
David is a web developer at Viget Labs, building web applications for companies ranging from startups to established brands, as well as internal and open source projects. After several years as a PHP developer, he made the switch to Ruby in 2006 and hasn’t looked back. He specializes in Ruby on Rails, jQuery, and RESTful web services. A Washington, DC native, David now lives and works in Durham, NC. He writes online at http://www.davideisinger.com and www.viget.com/extend.

2:40 - 3:20

Derek Chen-Becker

Stepping Up: A Brief Intro to Scala

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.

speakerrate | slides

Derek Chen-Becker
Derek is a committer on the Lift web framework project and a co-author of The Definitive Guide to Lift with Tyler Weir and Marius Danciu. Derek has been working on the Lift project and Scala since 2007, and has been writing software in Java for over 12 years. Derek is currently the Senior Network Engineer and Security Architect for CPI Corporation, which owns and operates the Sears Portrait Studios and PictureMe! Portrait Studios.

3:20 - 3:40

Break

3:40 - 4:20

Bill Dudney

Core Animation on the iPhone and Mac

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.

speakerrate

Bill Dudney
Bill Dudney is a software developer and entrepreneur currently building software for the Mac and iPhone. Bill started his computing career on a NeXT cube with a magneto-optical drive running NeXTStep 0.9. He's the author of iPhone SDK Development and Core Animation for OS X and the iPhone for the Pragmatic Programmers, as well as a series of iPhone development screencasts. He has several iPhone applications currently selling on the App Store.

4:30 - 5:10

Bruce Eckel

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

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.

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Bruce Eckel
Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2006), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), First Steps in Flex (With James Ward, available at the web site), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. He provides public and private seminars & design consulting in OO Design and Python (with Flex UIs).

5:10 - 7:00

Happy Hour

WHERE TO FIND US

14th and Walnut St
Boulder, CO 80302

 

Developer Day Boulder will be held at TechStars, near 14th and Walnut Street in downtown Boulder, CO – the exact address will be emailed to registered attendees the day before the event.

QUESTIONS?

Drop us a line at bscofield@developer-day.com.