Join Us In Durham, February 27th 2010

Developer Day Durham is coming back! It's been a year since we started the Developer Day series, and it's about time we revisit where it all began. That's right - we're coming back to Durham!

TALK SCHEDULE

8:30 - 9:00	Registration, Breakfast, and Welcome
9:00 - 9:40	Let’s Play Poker: Effort and Software Security Risk Estimation in Software Engineering 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. Laurie Williams Laurie Williams is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Her research focuses on agile software development practices and processes; software reliability, software testing and analysis; software security; open source software development; and broadening participation and increasing retention in computer science. Laurie also trains and coaches agile teams. Laurie received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, her MBA from Duke University Fuqua School of Business, and her BS in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University. She worked for IBM Corporation for nine years in Raleigh, NC and Research Triangle Park, NC before returning to academia.
9:50 - 10:30	The Journey To Rspec 2.0, a tale of reinventing the wheel 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. Chad Humphries 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.
10:30 - 10:45	Break
10:45 - 11:25	Having Fun with the Play Framework 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. Clinton Nixon Clinton is development director for 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. He is a frequent contributor to open-source projects, and an enthusiast for learning new languages. He is also an award-winning role-playing game designer and has shared a breakfast with George Takei. You can find him on Twitter at @crnixon and on the web at http://crnixon.org.
11:35 - 12:15	Round PEG, Round Hole - Parsing Functionally 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. Sean Cribbs Sean Cribbs returned to programming in 2006 after three years as a professional musician and instantly fell in love with Ruby. Since 2007, he has been crafting web applications as Prime Motif, Inc. primarily in Ruby, Erlang, and Javascript. An active open-source author and contributor, he has also been lead developer and release manager of Radiant CMS since 2008. Sean blogs about technology on http://seancribbs.com, tweets as @seancribbs, and can often be found attending or speaking at user groups near Raleigh-Durham, NC.
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	Open Source .NET 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. James Avery James Avery is the founder of Adzerk LLC, which runs The Lounge and Ruby Row advertising networks as well as providing a SaaS ad delivery platform. James also co-founded TekPub, which provides high-quality programmer focused screencasts. James has been working with the web since 1996 and enjoys programming in .NET, Ruby, and Erlang. He has written books for Microsoft Press, Wrox, and O'Reilly Press as well as articles for MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobbs. James blogs at http://averyblog.com and tweets as @averyj.
2:40 - 3:20	Dojo Confessions 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. Rebecca Murphey Rebecca is an independent front-end architecture consultant, helping developers make the most of JavaScript in their web applications.. She's also a co-host of the yayQuery Podcast, a contributor to JSMag, and a contributing author in the jQuery Cookbook from O'Reilly. She's passionate about educating JavaScript developers in better ways to organize their code to increase maintainability. She lives in Durham with her partner.
3:20 - 3:40	Break
3:40 - 4:20	The State of NoSQL 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. 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.
4:30 - 5:10	Kick Them in the Face with Your Energy Legs* * 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. Justin Gehtland Justin Gehtland co-founded Relevance in 2003 with Stuart Halloway. He’s been a programmer, author, and speaker since 1994. His 2005 book, “Better, Faster, Lighter Java” won the Jolt Award for Technical Writing, and he has authored 8 technical books in all. He is currently focused on expanding Relevance’s Ruby practice and building the best team of agile developers in the known universe.
5:10 - 7:00	Happy Hour