Twin Cities Software Symposium
March 2 - 4, 2012 - Minneapolis, MN
View the event details here ».
Session Descriptions
Tim Berglund - GitHubber
Cassandra: Radical NoSQL Scalability
Want to go deep on a popular NoSQL database? Cassandra is a scalable, highly available, column-oriented data store in use at Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Rackspace, and other web-scale operations. It offers a compelling combination of a rich data model, a robust deployment track record, and a sound architecture, making it a good choice of NoSQL databases to study first.
Prerequisite: None, but NoSQL Smackdown! would be helpful preparation.
Database Refactoring Workshop
Take one ugly legacy schema, a toolbox full of simple database refactorings, and a world-class schema refactoring tool, and you've got 90 minutes of workshop that will equip you to bring a culture of database responsibility to your team.
Prerequisite: Database Refactoring with Liquibase
Decision Making in Software Teams
Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.
Lightweight Web Apps with Ratpack
Ratpack is a hyper-lightweight, Groovy-based web framework for developing and deploying simple apps in a hurry. Like its high-achieving cousin Gaelyk, it provides Groovy developers with a way to create web apps without days of iteration zero setup time.
NoSQL Smackdown 2012
Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you're going to have to look at code.
Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
4 Practical Uses for Domain Specific Languages
Domain Specific Langauges seems like a cool idea, but where's the payoff? This talk provides an overview of how to build both internal and external DSLs (including the state of the art tools), stopping along the way to show how this is practical to your day job.
Build Your Own Technology Radar
A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company.
Continuous Delivery All-day Workshop Pt 2: Agile Infrastructure
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.
Continuous Delivery All-day Workshop, Pt. 1: Deployment Pipelines
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.
Matthew McCullough - Head of Training, GitHub
Adam Smith Builds an Application
Economics, psychology, game theory, and marketing; those fields of study imply a distinct lack of semicolons and curly braces. However, even the venerable Adam Smith, were he alive today, would recognize the applicability of those seemingly tangential components to the business we call software.
Many of us self-identify with the hard core branding of "geek" and "nerd," or the softer choices, "programmer" and "developer." However, we rarely hear mentioned "business person," "saleswoman," salesman," "inventor," "strategist," or "economist," yet they are equally, if not more accurate in the description of the talents of a software craftsperson. Though unstated, we, as developers, are expected to be skilled in each of those areas. Rarely in business are so many combined talents expected from an individual contributor.
Build Lifecycle Craftsmanship Tools
You've heard a bit about Git, Gradle, Jenkins, and Sonar, but are you putting them to use? Are you maximizing what they can offer in terms of standardized project models, faster incremental compiles, automated commit-triggered builds, and rapid source code analysis? In this intense presentation, live demonstrations will be given for all of the latest versions of the aforementioned tools and what they have to offer a highly proficient Java developer.
Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)
Git is a version control system you may have been hearing a bit about lately. But simply hearing more about it may not be enough to convince you of its value. Getting hands on experience is what really counts. In this workshop, you'll bring your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop and walk through downloading, installing, and using Git in a collaborative fashion.
Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of a version control system. Subversion knowledge is a plus, but not imperative.
Gradle Workshop (Bring a Laptop)
Gradle. Another build tool? Come on! But before you say that, take a look at the one you are already using.
Whether your current tool is Make, Rake, Ant, or Maven, Gradle has a lot to offer. It leverages a strong object model like Maven, but a mutable, not predetermined one. Gradle relies on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) lifecycle like Maven, but one that can be customized. Gradle offers imperative build scripting when you need it (like Ant), but declarative build approaches by default (like Maven). In short, Gradle believes that conventions are great -- as long as they are headed in the same direction you need to go. When you need to customize something in your build, your build tool should facilitate that with a smile, not a slap in the face. And customizations should be in a low-ceremony language like Groovy. Is all this too much to ask?
Prerequisite: Knowledge of any build tool such as Ant, Maven, Rake, BuildR, Make, Leiningen, or SBT.
Sonar Code Metrics Workshop (Bring a Laptop)
You're serious about improving the quality of your code base, but with 10,000 lines of code, where do you start and how do you ensure the greatest ROI for the re-work your team members will perform?
Sonar is an open source tool that brings together the best of breed static and dynamic analysis of Java projects. The result is a unified view of problematic areas of your code on a time-line basis, allowing the team to attack the problems with the best ROI, and maintain a more watchful eye for positive and risky trends in the codebase in the future.
Prerequisite: Knowledge of any build tool such as Ant, Maven, Rake, BuildR, Make, Leiningen, or SBT.
Paul Rayner - Founder and Owner at Virtual Genius
Domain Modeling Using Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
This presentation seeks to provide a solid introduction to the fundamentals of DDD. Learn why modeling a complex business domain in software is so advantageous to your business and ways in which your team can go about delivering software models to give your business a competitive edge.
Introduction to Lean-Agile Software Development
Successful software development is about building the right product at the right time for your customers. This means focusing attention on the right places in the portfolio of projects and products that your company provides, and optimizing the entire value stream from "concept to cash" for your customers and the development teams.
Measure for Measure – Lean Principles for Effective Metrics and Motivation
This presentation explores the nature of motivation and the place of metrics and measurement in software development, and how lean software development principles and practices shed light on motivation and metrics and how they can be used to support deep organizational improvement.
Strategic Design Using DDD
Not every part of a software system will be well-designed. How do you know where to put the time and effort to refine the design, or refactor existing code? Learn how strategic Domain-Driven Design (DDD) patterns can show you how to know which parts of your system matter most to your business and how to focus your team's design efforts most effectively.
Using DDD Patterns for Supple Design
Come on a guided tour of how applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) building block patterns can make your code cleaner, more expressive, and more amenable to change. We cover examples of DDD patterns such as entities, value objects, closure of operations and side-effect-free functions. We will focus particularly on how implementing value objects can lead to more supple design.
Mark Richards - SOA and Integration Architect, Author of Java Message Service
AMQP: From Concept To Code
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a new way of looking at messaging that is quickly gaining in popularity and use, particularly in the financial services industry. Unlike JMS, which defines a standard API across platforms, AMQP defines a standard wire-level protocol across languages and platforms, finally making true cross-platform messaging a reality. In this session I will start by describing exactly what AMQP is and what problems it specifically solves (that JMS can't!). I will then describe the basic architecture and how AMQP routes messages, and then, through live interactive coding, demonstrate how to build a simple producer and consumer using RabbitMQ to send and receive AMQP messages. We will also take a brief look at other aspects of AMQP such as performance and how to guarantee that the message reaches a consumer.
Prerequisite: basic knowledge of general messaging
Integration Architecture: Concepts and Patterns
Very few applications stand alone anymore. Rather, they are combined together to form holistic systems that perform complex business functions. One of the big challenges when integrating applications is choosing the right integration styles and usage patterns. In this session we will explore various techniques and patterns for application integration, and look at what purpose and role open source integration hubs such as Camel and Mule play in the overall integration architecture space (and how to properly use them!). Through actual integration scenarios and live coding examples using Apache Camel you will learn which integration styles and patterns to use for your system and how open source integration hubs play an part in your overall integration strategy
Know Your Enemy: Understanding AntiPatterns
The ancient Chinese warrior Sun Tzu taught his men to "know your enemy" before going into battle. For us, the same thing is knowing and understanding anti-patterns - things that we repeatably do that produce negative results. Anti-patterns are used by developers, architects, and managers every day, and are one of the main factors that prevent progress and success. In this session we will look at some of the more common and significant software development anti-patterns. Through coding and design examples, you will see how these anti-patterns emerge, how to recognize when the antipattern is being used, and most importantly, how to avoid them. Although most of the coding examples will be in Java, this is a technology-agnostic session. Remember, like motorcycles, anti-patterns are everywhere - so be careful out there!
The Art of Problem Solving
I commonly think of those of us in the IT industry as problem solvers. Whether developer, designer, or architect, we are all presented with problems and work to find a way to solve them, usually through technology. In my opinion this is what makes this industry so much fun. Let's face it - we all love challenges. Sometimes, however, the problems we have to solve are hard - really hard. So how do you go about solving really hard problems? That's what this session is about - Heuristics, the art of problem solving. In this session you will learn how to approach problems and also learn some the common techniques for solving them effectively. So put on your thinking cap and get ready to solve some easy, fun, and hard problems.
Prerequisite: An open mind and a willingness to learn how to better approach and solve problems
Understanding Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one of the most misunderstood terms in our industry. Ask 10 people what EA is and you will get 10 different answers. To better understand what EA is and how it impacts your company (and you!) we will go back in time to maritime Britain in the late 1700's. Through exercises in designing a fleet of war ships and making decisions about what to do with the fleet you will understand the various approaches, directions, and implications of EA and how necessary EA is to achieve any company goal. So put your admirals hat on and climb aboard for a maritime adventure you won't forget!
Prerequisite: Not prone to sea sickness, willingness to have fun
Nathaniel Schutta - Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.
Beyond jQuery
It's been ages since you copied random JavaScript off a nameless webpage and your JavaScript is every bit as elegant as any server side code. You know the ins and outs of jQuery and you've even built a plugin or three...but is that it? How do we build rich web applications without resorting to heavy weight proprietary components? How do we leverage HTML5 and everything it brings to the table? How do we craft elegant user experiences that integrate fully with the RESTful web services that are all the rage on the backend? How do we build apps that are at home on a 3.5 inch phone as they are on the 15 inch notebook? This talk goes beyond jQuery to explore new libraries like Backbone are bringing even more to the front end developer's toolbox.
Designing for Mobile
The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app...it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.
JavaScript Libraries You Aren't Using...Yet
You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.
The Mobile App Smackdown: Native Apps vs. The Mobile Web
Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.
Ken Sipe - Architect, Web Security Expert
Complexity of Complexity
Of all the non-functional requirements of software development, complexity receives the least attention and seems to be the most important from a long term standard point. This talk will look at some of forces that drive complexity at the code level and at a system level and their impact. We will discuss what causes us to over look complexity, how our perception of it changes over time and what we can do about it?
Enterprise Security API library from OWASP
When it comes to cross cutting software concerns, we expect to have or build a common framework or utility to solve this problem. This concept is represented well in the Java world with the loj4j framework, which abstracts the concern of logging, where it logs and the management of logging. The one cross cutting software concern which seems for most applications to be piecemeal is that of security. Security concerns include certification generation, SSL, protection from SQL Injection, protection from XSS, user authorization and authentication. Each of these separate concerns tend to have there own standards and libraries and leaves it as an exercise for the development team to cobble together a solution which includes multiple needs.... until now... Enterprise Security API library from OWASP.
Getting Agile Right!
Whether you are just getting started, or you’ve made an attempt and well… it could be better… a lot better, this session is for you. Ken has been working on Agile projects as a coach and mentor for a number of years. Come discover the common reasons teams fail to get it right. Bring your own challenges and lets discuss. This is set to be an engaging and illuminating discussion.
Groovy Power Tools
Groovy has been around for some time and is generally recognized as a highly productive object-oriented language with a tight association with Java. Groovy seems to be going through a second wave of popularity with a more diverse repertoire of benefits, including building, deploying and testing, in addition to rapid web development. The fastest growth of productivity tools are all powered by Groovy. Discover the Groovy Truth!
MongoDB: Scaling Web Applications
Google “MongoDB is Web Scale” and prepare to laugh your tail off. With such satire, it easy to pass off MongoDB as a passing joke… but that would be a mistake. The humor is in the fact there seems to be no end to those who parrot the MongoDB benefits without a clue. This session is about getting a clue.
Spock - Unit Test and Prosper
Spock is a groovy based testing framework that leverages all the "best practices" of the last several years taking advantage of many of the development experience of the industry. So combine Junit, BDD, RSpec, Groovy and Vulcans... and you get Spock!
This is a significant advancement in the world of testing.
Prerequisite: junit
Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer
Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDF/SPARQL
The fourth of a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDFa
The fifth in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I
The first in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST II
The second in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST III
The third in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Prerequisite: Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I (or a good understanding of REST)
Matt Stine - Enterprise Java/Cloud Consultant
Cooking Up Infrastructure with Chef
Chef is a community-developed platform for automated provisioning, configuration, and integration of software infrastructure. It currently boasts 190+ individuals and 40+ companies (including parent company OpsCode) as contributors, and companies like EngineYard, ElectronicArts, GoTime, and Rhapsody as adopters.
Chef achieves fully automated infrastructure via three primary disciplines:
- Automated provisioning of bare metal, virtualized, and cloud environments
- Configuration of servers via roles ("webserver", "appserver", "loadbalancer") and recipes, which are declarative descriptions of resource (e.g. Apache, MySQL, Hadoop) configurations written in a Ruby DSL
- Systems integration via dynamic lookup and discovery
Effective Java Reloaded
Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.
Effective Java Reloaded, Part II: Hello, Project Coin!
Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.
Prerequisite: Incredibly useful to attend Part I, but not strictly required.
Executable Specifications: Automating Your Requirements Document with Geb and Spock
One of the hallmarks of lean software development is the elimination of waste. Several of the key wastes in software development revolve around incomplete, incorrect, or obsolete documentation, especially documentation of requirements. One effective means of ensuring that your requirements documentation is complete, correct, and up-to-date is to make it executable. That sounds nice, but how do we get it done, especially in the world of modern, cross-browser web applications?
Master of Puppet
Puppet is a powerful framework for the automation of tasks typically performed by system administrators as part of software infrastructure provisioning and maintenance. Puppet adoption is rapidly increasing, boasting use by companies such as Google, RedHat, Constant Contact, Zynga, and Shopzilla.
Puppet is composed of three principle components:
- a declarative language for expressing system configuration,
- a client and server for distributing it,
- and a library for realizing the configuration
Stop, DevOp, and Roll Out Software
What is the DevOps movement? It a nutshell, it is the idea that the days of silos are over. Development, QA, and operations can no longer be thought of as separate warring divisons with their own "turfs." Instead, we must focus on the fact that we are all part of a single value stream for the customer. By collaboration and shared expertise, we can find real overlaps between our previously segregated areas of expertise and optimize that value stream.
Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
Automated testing tools and techniques for JavaScript
Programmers often complain that it is hard to automate unit and acceptance tests for JavaScript. Testability is a design issue and with some discipline and careful design we can realize good automated tests.
Programming with Actors
Actor based concurrency was popularized by languages like Erlang and Scala. This model of programming provides isolated mutability (as opposed to shared mutability) and easy way implement coordinating processes or tasks. Actors can be local to a JVM, or distributed across VMs and machines. In this presentation we will learn how to use Akka Actors to design and implement distributed concurrent Java applications.
Programming with HTML 5
Developing a rich user interface for web applications is both exciting and challenging. HTML 5 has closed the gaps and once again brought new vibe into programming the web tier. Come to this session to learn how you can make use of HTML 5 to create stellar applications.
Rediscovering JavaScript
JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It's quite popular, yet there's so much more we can do with it.
Taming Shared Mutability with Software Transactional Memory
Mutability is something we're quite used to in Java. Sharing is a good thing. However, shared mutability is pure devil's work. If we remove shared mutability, all the problems of concurrent go away. In practice, however, it's hard to completely get rid of shared mutability. This is where STM comes in with managed shared mutable variables. In this presentation we will take an example driven approach to dive deep into STM, look at what it has to offer, explore different implementations, and how we can design concurrent applications without any explicit locks.
Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action
Building Social Web Clients
You see them everywhere: "Like" buttons, "Tweet" buttons, and now there are "+1" buttons. The social networks have extended their reach beyond their own websites and into almost every web site you visit. But did you know that these simple little buttons are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to adding social features to your website?
Developing Next-Generation Applications
For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.
But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.
With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.
Effective Spring
After almost a decade and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?
Securing Spring
In this session, I'll show you how to secure your Spring application with Spring Security 3.0. You'll see hot to declare both request-oriented and method-oriented security constraints. And you'll see how SpEL can make simple work of expressing complex security rules.
Securing the Modern Web with OAuth
In this session, we'll look at OAuth, focusing on OAuth 2, from the perspective of an application that consumes an OAuth-secured API as well as see how to use OAuth to secure your own APIs.
Spring Data
This session starts with a high-level look at all that the Spring Data project has to offer. Then we'll dive deeper into a few select Spring Data modules, including Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data Redis, Spring Data JPA, and Spring Data JDBC Extensions
