Lone Star Software Symposium: San Antonio
April 13 - 14, 2012 - San Antonio, TX
Session Descriptions
Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Agile Engineering Practices
Most of the time when people talk about agile software development, they talk about project and planning practices and never mention actual development practices. This talk delves into best development practices for agile projects, covering all of its aspects.
Prerequisite: Having worked in an organization that values bureaucracy more than individuals
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 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. This workshop focuses on the Deployment Pipeline concept from Continuous Delivery.
Continuous Delivery Pt 2: 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. This workshop focuses on the agile infrastructure required to implement a deployment pipeline and continuous delivery.
Functional Thinking
Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.
Douglas Hawkins - Lead Software Engineer
Examining Java Byte Code
Ever wondered what byte code looks like? Wondered how type erasure works? Or, wondered how other JVM languages can have all exceptions unchecked?
Inside Android's Dalvik VM
Android is gaining popularity rapidly, but why does Android use its own implementation of Java?
Understanding Garbage Collection
Most of us don't want to go back to the days of malloc and free, but the garbage collector isn't always our friend.
Daniel Hinojosa - Independent Consultant/Developer
Joda Time and a Brief History of the World
JodaTime is Java Date/Time and Calendering done right. There are many problems with the original Date/Time API that came prepackaged in the early Java days. There are even One of the obvious issues is that Calendar is mutable and can unintentionally be changed. Another issue is that constructing Calendars in Java involves setting certain fields at certain times during coding, but not always getting the expected result. Joda Time repairs those issues and offers a robust and immutable date, time, and duration API.
Making Java Bearable with Guava (2013 Edition)
This presentation covers the Guava library developed by Google (http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/). Guava provides collection extensions to the Java Collection API and, along with this, a cornucopia of time-saving utilities that bring Java as close as possible to some of the more functional and dynamic language competitors like Scala, Ruby, and Clojure.
Personal Agility with the Pomodoro Technique
Time is very precious and is often threatened by phone calls, emails, co-workers, bosses, and most of all, yourself. The Pomodoro Technique reigns in unfocused time and gives your work the urgency and the attention it needs, and it's done with a kitchen timer.
Scala Koans - A new and fun way to learn a Scala programming language (Bring a Laptop)
Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.
If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?
Scala: Demystifying The Funky Stuff
Scala is known for both its clarity in some cases, and its obscurity in others. Well, this presentation sticks with the obscurity. We will cover abstract types, the Predef, implicit conversions, creating infix types, singleton types, type variance, type bounds, type variance, partially applied functions vs. partial functions, type projections, and overcoming type erasure using Manifests.
Howard Lewis Ship - Creator of Apache Tapestry
Backbone.js: Run Your Application Inside The Browser
Follow the trends and you'll notice that, increasingly, web applications are running in the browser. That can be great news … until you have to write the JavaScript for all that client-side behavior. Fortunately, a new breed of client-side MVC frameworks have emerged, including Backbone.js. You still have controllers, models, and views … just in the browser.
Modern Application Foundations: Underscore and Twitter Bootstrap
We're all increasingly in the business of writing richly interactive applications using HTML and JavaScript … that's a given. But the devil's in the details, and most applications get those details wrong. Building visually attractive applications that work in all browsers takes a lot of work ... and good as jQuery is, as more logic moves to the browser, something as sophisticated as jQuery is needed for data, not DOM, and that's Underscore.
Spock: A Highly Logical Way To Test
Spock is a fabulous new testing framework for the JVM. Spock leverages all the DSL power of the Groovy language to make testing a breeze. Spock tests are concise and readable, with excellent support for error reporting and for mock object creation. Spock removes much of the pain from test driven development!
Testing Web Applications with Geb
If you build web applications and cringe at the phrase "but how are we going to test it?" you're going to love Geb: the browser automation and testing tool. Geb is a Groovy framework for testing web applications: it builds on Selenium, but draws ideas from jQuery and elsewhere to make it productive and fun to test your applications in-browser.
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.
Leading Technical Change
Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are "working" today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?
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?
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.
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.
The Elusive Truth and False Dichotomies in a Broken Reality
"To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true" -- Aristotle
Web Security Workshop
As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.
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)
Semantic Web Workshop
The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.
Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.
Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will provide you with the understanding of a technological tidal wave that is heading in your direction.
Matt Stine - Enterprise Java/Cloud Consultant
Code Archaeology
Feature requests are steadily pouring in, but the team cannot respond to them. They are paralyzed. The codebase on which the company has "bet the business" is simply too hard to change. It's your job to clean up the mess and get things rolling again. Where do you begin? Your first task is to get the lay of the land by applying a family of techniques we'll call "Code Archaeology."
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.
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
Practical Lean for the Practicing Developer
Much is said today by the software methodology "talking heads" about the need for organizations to "go lean." The question is, what does it mean to go lean? Is this the job of IT management? Or is it the job of the practicing software developer? And furthermore, does this simply mean the adoption of of another set of processes and procedures? Or is it something entirely different?
Ultimately, going lean simply means removing all of the impediments that prevent our organizations from achieving more of "the goal." While that goal may differ from context to context, for the vast majority of us that means "making more money," by improving our efficiency at moving from, as the Poppendieck's have so aptly said, from "concept to cash."
While a great many of us do not have the role power necessary to spur top-down organizational change, there are many practical things each of us can do to bring the power of "going lean" to our teams. As we apply these principles and practices to our day-to-day work, we can build the credibility necessary to become change agents.
Rock SOLID Software
Object-oriented programming was formally introduced in the 1970's with the advent of Smalltalk. C++ took it mainstream in the 1980's, and Java carried it to the next level in the 1990's. Unfortunately, if you examine the vast majority of Java codebases, what you'll find is a bunch of C-style structs (a.k.a. JavaBeans) and functions. As these codebases grow, a number of design smells can potentially crop up, which in turn cripple our ability to respond to change. We need SOLID principles that we can apply to keep our software clean and malleable.
Spring-Loaded Enterprise Integration
The book Enterprise Integration Patterns gave us a consistent vocabulary and notation with which to describe solutions to common integration problems that arise in the modern enterprise. Spring Integration (http://www.springsource.org/spring-integration) harnesses that vocabulary, providing a very natural extension to the well-known Spring programming model that enables the construction of loosely-coupled, messaging-based applications that can also integrate with services in the wild via a variety declarative adapters for heavily used protocols. This talk will provide an overview of the Spring Integration framework, it's relationship to the patterns, and to the problems they aim to solve. We'll also look at several integrated case studies.
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.
Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action
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
Spring MVC Workshop
For as long as there has been a Spring Framework, there has been Spring MVC, a web framework built around the principals of Spring. Although it was originally designed around a deep hierarchy of controller classes and focused on HTML-oriented views, Spring MVC has evolved in the past few years to embrace an annotation-oriented model and RESTful web development.
