March 21st 2009 - Developer Day Durham

Staying current with the ever-evolving technological possibilities can be challenging, but you love trying. Why? Because you’re a fantastic web developer who loves building things, (and, frankly, that’s just how you roll).

Which is why this conference is perfect for you.

Hear seven presentations given by active practitioners on topics ranging from JavaScript and Scala to Rails performance and security. Each is tailored to give you insight into various topics that may positively influence how you work, regardless of your specialization.

So, come meet cool people, eat some lunch (from local Durham restaurants), and give yourself the day to learn and participate in several great discussions — all for the low, low price of $50.

Registration is closed for March 21st — but keep your eyes peeled for Developer Days in other cities!

If you were there, don't forget to rate the talks at SpeakerRate!

TALK SCHEDULE

9:00 - 9:30	Registration and Breakfast
9:30 - 10:10	Refactoring Your Wetware Software development happens in your head; not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. We’re well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware—our own brains? speakerrate Andy Hunt Andy Hunt is co-founder of The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC, and is well known as a programmer, author, and publisher. His email signature, "/\ndy", dates back to the paleolithic days of uucp and ihnp4.
10:20 - 11:00	Evolving Your Git Workflow Git has attracted many developers away from various centralized source control tools, but it’s easy to find yourself using Git like a slightly-better variant of your old VCS. “You don’t even have to be online to commit. Cool!” That’s a nice touch, but Git has way more to offer, and by picking up a few intermediate and advanced Git techniques, you can save a ton of time (and sanity) for yourself and your team. speakerrate Jason Rudolph Jason Rudolph is a Principal at Relevance, a leading consultancy and training organization specializing in Ruby, Rails, Groovy, and Grails, and integrating them into enterprise environments. Jason has more than ten years of experience in developing software solutions for domestic and international clients of all sizes, including start-ups, Dow 30 companies, and government organizations. Jason holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.
11:10 - 11:50	Optimizing Perceived Performance As Phil Karlton said, “there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” Despite enormous advances in the field of web development over the last five years, it remains difficult to use caching to allow sites to scale for expanding user bases. Fortunately, the last few years have also seen the rise of JavaScript libraries that take a lot of the pain out of client-side programming. In this talk, we’ll explore techniques for making your sites feel faster, without resorting to complicated caching schemes, while maintaining strict separation of content, style, and behavior. speakerrate \| slides \| github 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.
11:50 - 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	Getting Girls With Musical Magic and Ruby Take a song. Cut it into pieces. Stretch it. Shift the pitch. Stack it on top of other tracks. And you have a new song. We’ll show some simple algorithms for creating new songs that lets Ruby do the heavy lifting. And let Bono do the singing. speakerrate Chad Humphries & Jess Martin Jess fled from the ivory tower with a fascination for writing code that automatically generates goodness for video games—from graphics to maps to music. His fascination with rapid prototyping led him to build applications for the web where he contributed to several startups. You can now find him fretting over the front-end of many a web application. Chad has spent the last 10 years roaming the earth building web applications for companies large and small. During his journeys he has contributed regularly to open source in .NET and Ruby. He was last seen championing the causes of Behaviour Driven Development and proper use of the Queen’s English.
2:30 - 3:00	Break
3:00 - 3:40	From Paralysis to Static Analysis: A Ruby 1.9 Case Study on Upgrading RCov With Ruby 1.9 on everyone’s mind, Aaron will walk you through the real-life example of updating RCov to work with the new platform. speakerrate \| github Aaron Bedra Aaron brings the ability to quickly ninja any application. His passion for spreading the security word via his blog is kicking off a new wave of security consciousness throughout the Ruby community and creating an avalanche of better development practices. His passion for exploring new technologies and traveling new roads has quickly shot him up through the Ruby industry and on to the Relevance team.
3:50 - 4:30	Scala: A Modern Programming Language Scala is a language for the Java Virtual Machine that combines the power of Java with the flexibility of a dynamic language and the capabilities of a functional language. We’ll explore how Scala can make standard object-oriented programming more concise and powerful, and how it can make concurrency easy and clear. We’ll specifically show how these capabilities can be used with languages you might already be using, Java and Ruby. speakerrate \| slides \| more Clinton Nixon Clinton is a senior developer with Viget Labs in Durham, North Carolina. He has over 12 years of experience as a professional programmer, and has worked in environments from the NSA to a greeting card studio. A frequent contributor to open-source projects, Clinton is on the core team for the Radiant CMS and has had patches accepted in both the Python and JRuby projects. He is also an award-winning role-playing game designer and has shared a breakfast with George Takei.
4:40 - 5:20	Page Caching Resurrected: A Fairy Tale We’ve seen a number of dramatic changes in Rails over the past year, with the most surprising probably being the announcement of the Rails-Merb merger. No less important, however, is the addition of Rack support, which can have a revolutionary effect on the way we build applications today, much less how we do it when Rails 3 is released. In this session, we’ll explore how Rails on Rack revitalizes page caching as a performance strategy. speakerrate \| slides Ben Scofield Ben is Development Director at Viget Labs. He has spoken at several conferences, including Railsconf, Railsconf Europe and RubyConf, and has written a book on the benefits of building Rails applications RESTfully.
5:30 - 7:00	Happy Hour Venue TBD