Twin Cities Software Symposium
March 2 - 4, 2012 - Minneapolis, MN
View the event details here ».
Matt Stine
Community Engineer @CloudFoundry
Matt Stine is a Community Engineer with Cloud Foundry (http://cloudfoundry.com) by Pivotal (http://goPivotal.com). He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, retail store and insurance domains.
Matt is obsessed with the idea that enterprise IT “doesn’t have to suck,” and spends much of his time thinking about lean/agile software development methodologies, DevOps, architectural principles/patterns/practices, and programming paradigms in an attempt to find the perfect storm of techniques that will allow corporate IT departments to not only function like startup companies, but also create software that delights users while maintaining a high degree of conceptual integrity.
Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and serves as Technical Editor of NFJS the Magazine (https://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/home/magazine_subscribe). Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.
Presentations
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.
In his foreward to the first edition, Guy Steele writes about the importance of learning three aspects of any language: grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. Unfortunately many programmers stop learning after mastering the first two. Effective Java is your guide to understanding idiomatic Java programming.
Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone "items," all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers. You'll pick from a menu and decide where we'll head. Regardless of the path we take, you'll leave this session thoroughly equipped to write better Java code tomorrow!
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.
Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone "items," all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers.
*In Part II of this session, we'll cover those items we were unable to reach during Part I. We'll follow that up with a dive into the new features available in Java 7, describing new idioms for effective Java programming in the following areas:
- Strings in switch statements
- Enhanced syntax for numeric literals
- Improved exception handling
- ARM (automatic resource management) blocks
- Type inference for construction of parameterized types (the "diamond" operator)
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.
We'll cover the following topics:
- Death to Silos: developing an culture of collaborative software delivery
- Developing communication and bridge-building skills
- Understanding your business and its domain
- The automated "infrastructure as code" revolution
- Driving performance, process, and people improvements through metrics
- The DevOps' Toolkit: Puppet, Chef, Flapjack, Vagrant, and friends
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
We'll dive deeply into Chef's architecture and features, including its idempotency, its thick client/thin server philosophy, its intentional lack of dependency management (preferring and order-based configuration), and its deep integration with other tools. We'll then leverage Chef to set up infrastructure of a typical JVM-based web development project with various OS, application server and datastore configurations. You'll leave a ready to get cooking with Chef on your next software delivery effort.
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
We'll dive deeply into Puppet's architecture and features, including its idempotent configurations, cross-platform resource abstraction layer, and graph-based modeling of resources, resource providers, and resource relationships. We'll then leverage puppet to set up infrastructure of a typical JVM-based web development project with various OS, application server and datastore configurations. You'll leave a "Master of Puppet," ready to apply it on your next software delivery effort.
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?
Executable web application specifications are within your reach through the combination of Spock, a testing and specification framework written for the JVM in Groovy, and Geb, an elegant Groovy wrapper around the powerful WebDriver browser automation framework. In this session we'll take a close look at Spock specifications for describing and verifying the behavior of our applications. We'll then examine how we can use Geb's implementation of the Page Object pattern and its "jQuery-ish" API for interacting with our web applications in WebDriver's range of supported browsers. Finally, by gluing these two technologies together via Geb's Spock integration, we'll automate the requirements specification for a simple web app.
Books
by
List Price: $179.00
Price: $138.56
You Save: $40.44 (23%)
-
This book will review work from a number of researchers who have produced open source software addressing the need for data management, integration, analysis, and visualization to aid cancer research. With the advent of high-throughput technologies in biomedicine, the need for data management and appropriate data analysis tools in genomics has increased dramatically, joining clinical trials data as a major driver of informatics at cancer research centers. The gathering of this data requires careful encoding of metadata, usually through the use of controlled vocabularies or ontologies, as well as the linking of data from model organisms, done at both a physiological level (e.g., anatomy) and at a molecular level (e.g., orthology). This data will then find use within computational and statistical models, which require data pipelines and analysis systems, as well as algorithms, visualization methods, and computational modeling systems. We will introduce open source tools available for these aspects of the problem. The editors plan to divide the book into five sections, beginning with a section containing high level overviews of the field and key issues. This will include an introductory review of informatics in cancer research, followed by five overviews addressing issues in authentication and authorization, data management, data pipelines and annotations, algorithms and models, and the NCI caBIG initiative. This will be followed by sections dedicated to data systems, data pipelines, algorithms for analysis and visualization, and modeling systems. Each of these areas has seen publication of open source tools, ranging from the widely known R/Bioconductor package to little known but powerful systems such as SImmune for biochemical modeling. The area of laboratory information management systems has seen development of a number of unpublished but powerful systems, which we would also include. Three groups have agreed to provide chapters in this area (USC/Norris CAFE extensible clinical trials system, St Jude Unified LIMS, Fox Chase/British Columbia flow cytometry LIMS). While there has been a great deal of development of informatics tools that can be applied to problems in cancer research, there has not been adequate dissemination of details on these tools to the community. As such, there remains low adoption of all but a few tools. This book aims to increase overall adoption of tools by providing cancer center leaders and researchers with a single volume detailing both issues that must be addressed and tools that are ready for use.
Price: $138.56
You Save: $40.44 (23%)
- This book will review work from a number of researchers who have produced open source software addressing the need for data management, integration, analysis, and visualization to aid cancer research. With the advent of high-throughput technologies in biomedicine, the need for data management and appropriate data analysis tools in genomics has increased dramatically, joining clinical trials data as a major driver of informatics at cancer research centers. The gathering of this data requires careful encoding of metadata, usually through the use of controlled vocabularies or ontologies, as well as the linking of data from model organisms, done at both a physiological level (e.g., anatomy) and at a molecular level (e.g., orthology). This data will then find use within computational and statistical models, which require data pipelines and analysis systems, as well as algorithms, visualization methods, and computational modeling systems. We will introduce open source tools available for these aspects of the problem. The editors plan to divide the book into five sections, beginning with a section containing high level overviews of the field and key issues. This will include an introductory review of informatics in cancer research, followed by five overviews addressing issues in authentication and authorization, data management, data pipelines and annotations, algorithms and models, and the NCI caBIG initiative. This will be followed by sections dedicated to data systems, data pipelines, algorithms for analysis and visualization, and modeling systems. Each of these areas has seen publication of open source tools, ranging from the widely known R/Bioconductor package to little known but powerful systems such as SImmune for biochemical modeling. The area of laboratory information management systems has seen development of a number of unpublished but powerful systems, which we would also include. Three groups have agreed to provide chapters in this area (USC/Norris CAFE extensible clinical trials system, St Jude Unified LIMS, Fox Chase/British Columbia flow cytometry LIMS). While there has been a great deal of development of informatics tools that can be applied to problems in cancer research, there has not been adequate dissemination of details on these tools to the community. As such, there remains low adoption of all but a few tools. This book aims to increase overall adoption of tools by providing cancer center leaders and researchers with a single volume detailing both issues that must be addressed and tools that are ready for use.
