Matt Stine

By Matt Stine

One of the greatest benefits of OSGi is its firewall-esque encapsulation of implementation details. The only traffic that gets in or out is the traffic that you explicitly specify; otherwise, all bets are off. The aspiring polyglot can bring in the right tool for the right job by hiding it behind OSGi services as an “implementation detail,” provided that only Java language types are exported.

This talk will:

• give a brief introduction to OSGi and polyglot programming
• explore the pros and cons of the polyglot OSGi approach
• experiment with Groovy, Clojure, and Scala in an OSGi container
• look at some of the “gotchas” one might encounter along the way

By Matt Stine

Grails provides outstanding support for building e-commerce sites, both from the standpoint of general web development capabilities and from a rich set of available plug-ins targeted at e-commerce. This talk will walk through building a complete online shopping experience, starting from the point at which a customer is ready to add items to his/her shopping cart, continuing through the checkout process, and then closing out with payment processing.

We'll cover the following topics in detail:

• Building Product CRUD and Categorization
• Building Product Customization forms with a basic Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) domain model
• The Grails Shopping Cart plugin
• Payment processing with the Grails PayPal plugin
• Building a wizard-like checkout process with Grails in-built support for Spring Web Flow
• Payment processing alternatives (PayPal Pro, Amazon FPS, Google Checkout)

By Matt Stine

So you discovered agile software development this weekend. You've finally found the tools that you're going to use to fix your team. Do you rush in to work Monday morning with a slide deck in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, ready to bludgeon the first person who checks in untested code? How do you think that's going to work out for you? I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't play out too well. There is a better way.

In this talk, we'll look at strategies for taking a guerrilla warfare approach to agile adoption. We'll walk through many of the agile practices and discuss how we can apply them on our own and still deliver value, including:

• test-driven development on an island
• underground continuous integration
• personal kanban
• the daily "walk around" meeting
• and more...

After we've gotten as agile as we can on our own, we'll show how you can infect your team and your boss with the agile bug by demonstrating the dramatic increase in your own productivity and code quality. After all, sometimes it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

By Matt Stine

Tracer Bullet Development (TBD) is a technique that allows you to prove out the proposed architecture of your system by firing a "tracer bullet" through a vertical slice of your system that exercises all of its horizontal components. It has multiple benefits, including encapsulation, decoupled code, parallel code development, and more. OSGi is a specification for a dynamic module system for Java with multiple open source implementations. It allows you to modularize your system into "bundles" which essentially firewall their own classloader space. Objects running within a bundle can only see types that they explicitly import and only expose types that they explicitly export. They interact with other bundles by expose and consuming services which are registered under a public interface. It seems that Tracer Bullet Development and OSGi are a match made in heaven!

In this talk, we'll examine the principles undergirding TBD, the pros and cons of this approach, and walk through the design of a system using TBD. We'll also get a brief introduction to OSGi and its various implementations, look at some of the tools available for OSGi development, and then implement our TBD design.

By Matt Stine

Flow. That state you get in where it's just you and your code, and everything else fades to black. Before you know it it's 5 o'clock, and you've been incredibly productive.

Most of us struggle to get into that state of flow. Instead, we often find ourselves much closer to unproductive chaos. Why? Because of our own inappropriate management of the "stuff" in or lives - those things that we have allowed into our psychological or physical worlds that don't belong where they are, but for which we haven't determined our desired outcome and the next action step. Rather than manage these things, they manage us. Our brains are cluttered, hopelessly trying to keep all of our commitments and stuff in view. Not only do we not feel good about what we're doing right now, we don't feel good about what we're NOT doing now.

There is a better way. We can get into that state of perfect readiness - in karate they call it "mind like water." How do we get there?

Getting Things Done is a productivity methodology created by David Allen that has spawned a subculture. It's especially geek friendly, and I've personally used it to keep myself organized as a developer, tech lead, and manager over the past five years. In this talk, we'll look at how you can apply this to your work.

We'll cover:

• Inboxes
• The Trusted System
• Workflow
• Weekly Reviews
• Tools for implementing GTD
• and more!