Twin Cities Software Symposium: Spring
March 12 - 14, 2010 - Minneapolis, MN
Michael Nygard
Agile technology leader and dynamicist
Michael strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers across the country. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Michael has spent the better part of 20 years learning what it means to be a professional programmer who cares about art, quality, and craft. He's always ready to spend time with other developers who are fully engaged and devoted to their work--the "wide awake" developers. On the flip side, he cannot abide apathy or wasted potential.
Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has delivered running systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. More often than not, Michael has lived with the systems he built. This experience with the real world of operations changed his views about software architecture and development forever.
He worked through the birth and infancy of a Tier 1 retail site and has often served as "roving troubleshooter" for other online businesses. These experiences give him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.
Most recently, Michael wrote "Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software", a book that realizes many of his thoughts about building software that does more than just pass QA, it survives the real world. Michael previously wrote numerous articles and editorials, spoke at Comdex, and co-authored one of the early Java books.
Presentations
Software Architecture for the Cloud
Servers, storage, networking, backups... they're all vanishing into the "clouds". Cloud Computing is the emerging architecture for massive, scalable infrastructure that your company doesn't have to own or operate.
In this session, Michael will discuss the ingredients of real cloud computing and how you can apply it to your applications. He will show several architectures and discuss applications that fit each of these models. Finally, he will also talk about some of the pitfalls and problems that cloud computing customers can encounter.
The term "Cloud Computing" can be applied to everything from Software-as-a-Service (formerly known as Application Service Provider) to virtual infrastructure, grid computing, and even remote backup services. Some of these make sense, but some are just bandwagon-jumping and buzzword bingo.
From the "zero servers" web startup to the corporate IT department battling server-sprawl, cloud computing has many manifestations. This session will differentiate among the various types of cloud computing and describe applicable use cases.
Design for Operations
If your software fails in production, nobody will care how great the development project was, or how well the system passed QA. Production operations, the domain of your systems' least-appreciated stakeholders, is where the rubber meets the road. Come learn how to build your systems to thrive in Operations.
We will explore the most critical foundations for success in Operations: transparency, control, deployments, and configuration.
Along the way, we'll see some of the organizational dysfunction that prevents smooth, successful operations. You'll learn what you can do today to avoid these dysfunctions, even if you've inherited a legacy of distrust between Development and Operations.
If you don't want to wear a pager for the rest of your life, this session is for you.
DSLs in Scala: Internal and External
We're no longer working in a single language. Programming today is about both consuming and creating languages.
We've all heard a lot about domain specific languages (DSLs). So much so, in fact, that it seems like more people are talking about it than doing it. In this session, Michael will present a real domain with familiar problems. He'll then demonstrate both an internal DSL and an external DSL that solve the same problem. Along the way, we'll cover fluent interfaces, composing multiple DSLs, and the very cool parser combinators.
If you've ever left a DSL talk wondering when we're ever going to get past the "coffee ordering DSL" or the "Waffle House breakfast DSL", then you will want to see this session.
This session walks through the creation of a domain model with an internal DSL based on a fluent interface in Scala. Although this is not an introduction to Scala, the necessary Scala concepts will be covered sufficiently for anyone to follow.
After demonstrating the domain and the internal DSL, Michael will use parser combinators to build a grammar in just a few lines of code. This grammar will lex and parse the input files, along with constructing domain objects for further use.
High Performance Persistence with Redis
Redis is one of the fresh crop of "NoSQL" storage solutions. It's a distributed key-value store that knows how to deal with data structures. Oh, and it happens to also be incredibly fast. Like, microseconds per write.
This session shows how to get Redis set up in standalone and replicated mode and how to start using it for persistence. It will also show some techniques to structure your data to achieve consistency without transactions.
Books
by Michael T. Nygard
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Whether it's in Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails, getting your application ready to ship is only half the battle. Did you design your system to survivef a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users?
If you're a developer and don't want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.
In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face. You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.
Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the design.
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Whether it's in Java, .NET, or Ruby on Rails, getting your application ready to ship is only half the battle. Did you design your system to survivef a sudden rush of visitors from Digg or Slashdot? Or an influx of real world customers from 100 different countries? Are you ready for a world filled with flakey networks, tangled databases, and impatient users?
If you're a developer and don't want to be on call for 3AM for the rest of your life, this book will help.
In Release It!, Michael T. Nygard shows you how to design and architect your application for the harsh realities it will face. You'll learn how to design your application for maximum uptime, performance, and return on investment.
Mike explains that many problems with systems today start with the design.
by Bryan Morgan, Michael Morrison, Michael T. Nygard, Dan Joshi, Tom Trinko, and Mike Cohn
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A reference guide to the Java language, migrations and integration, the Java compiler, Java application development, the Java interpreter and applet viewer, HTML, browsers and the Java debugger. Descriptions and examples of every type of Java package, class and interface are included.
- A reference guide to the Java language, migrations and integration, the Java compiler, Java application development, the Java interpreter and applet viewer, HTML, browsers and the Java debugger. Descriptions and examples of every type of Java package, class and interface are included.



