Northern Virginia Software Symposium
November 4 - 6, 2011 - Reston, VA
View the event details here ».
Session Descriptions
Peter Bell - Evangelist/hacker for hackNY
How to Select and Adopt a Technology
What's the point attending a conference unless you do something with the knowledge you gain? In this session we look at practical strategies for selecting new technologies and proven approaches for driving adoption back at the office.
Prerequisite: Frustration that you don't get to use all the cool technologies you learn about at No Fluff.
NoSQL: Getting Started with Neo4j
What is a graph database, why would you use it, and how do you get started? In this session we'll look at the kinds of problems that graph databases can solve and will run through the process of getting started with neo4j
NoSQL? No Problem
You don't need to be Amazon or Google to take advantage of NoSQL data stores. Whether you want to develop applications more quickly or scale them more effectively, there are a range of NoSQL data stores that could help. This introductory session cuts through the NoSQL hype to look at the practical use cases for key value, document, column and graph data stores.
Prerequisite: Interest in figuring out why NoSQL might be relevant to your apps
Requirements and Estimating - state of the art
A chance for experience agile developers to learn and share state of the art tips for improving requirements gathering and project estimation.
Prerequisite: Experience working on agile projects
David Bock - Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.
Building Maintainable Javascript with Coffeescript
CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.
The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, and runs in every JavaScript implementation.
Building Semantic CSS with Compass and SASS
Compass is a tool that can help you build cleaner, better structured, and less error-prone CSS. Semantic CSS is a technique where your CSS vocabulary describes WHAT things are on your page, rather than WHERE they are. Together, this tool and this concept can radically improve the structure of your html.
Building Workflow Applications with StonePath
Stonepath is a workflow modeling methodology with its roots in a long-running Java project at the U.S. State Department. Starting with techniques for deriving requirements/user stories from your users, user interface patterns, state-and-task based workflow modeling, and some domain modeling ideas, you can build comprehensive 'Enterprise' applications for managing aspects of workflow and group coordination.
Metrics for steering your projects to success
There are a lot of things we can measure about our source code, but what about the "project as a whole" and its overall health? Are there ways of measuring the effectiveness of our processes? Are there things we can measure that would point to project automation wins? Is there a way to measure team 'morale'?
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.
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
Agile.next
Agile has matured to the point of mainstream success. Even large companies have discovered that it helps them build better quality software faster. But the agile practices that are mainstream today have been around for a long time. What is the next wave of innovation in the Agile world going to bring?
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.
Emergent Design
Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers the theory behind emergent design and shows examples of how you can implement this important concept.
Prerequisite: understanding of architectural and design concepts
Functional Thinking
Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.
Matthew McCullough - Head of Training, GitHub
Cryptography on the JVM: Boot Camp
Does your application transmit customer information? Are there fields of sensitive customer data stored in your DB? Can your application be used on insecure networks? If so, you need a working knowledge of encryption and how to leverage Open Source APIs and libraries to make securing your data as easy as possible. Cryptography is quickly becoming a developer's new frontier of responsibility in many data-centric applications.
Economic Games in Software Projects
The full title of this talk reveals its grand aims: Game Theory and Software Development: Explaining Brinksmanship, Irrationality, and Other Selfish Sins
Once in a while, a topic, seemingly orthogonal to software development, presents a great opportunity to showcase how engineering can benefit from knowledge of seemingly more social disciplines. In this talk, the fundamental principles of economics' Game Theory are compared to often inexplicable behaviors and decisions we frequently observe in programming projects.
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: Bringing Engineering Back to Builds
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 a build tool such as Make, Ant, Maven, SBT or Leiningen.
Simpler Cryptography with 3 JVM Libraries
Cryptography at first seems like a daunting topic. But after a basic intro and the leverage of the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE), it seems downright feasible to add encryption and decryption capabilities to your application.
Developers weren't satisfied with just the JCE and its plug-in concepts though. Over the last few years, framework architects have made strides in either wrapping or re-writing the approachable JCE in more convenient APIs and fluent interfaces that make effective and accurate crypto down right simple.
Explore three of these libraries -- Jasypt, BouncyCastle and KeyCzar -- and how they can be leveraged to make your next Java cryptography and data security effort a simple exercise and not a tribulation.
Prerequisite: Basic understanding of cryptography (hashing, symmetric, asymmetric)
Sonar: Code Quality Metrics Made Easy
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: Basic familiarity with Ant, Maven or Gradle builds and a desire to measure the quality of your code base.
Ted Neward - Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk
Architectural Kata Workshop
Fred Brooks said, "How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course." So how do we get great architects? Great architects architect. But architecting a software system is a rare opportunity for the non-architect.
The kata is an ancient tradition, born of the martial arts, designed to give the student the opportunity to practice more than basics in a semi-realistic way. The coding kata, created by Dave Thomas, is an opportunity for the developer to try a language or tool to solve a problem slightly more complex than "Hello world". The architectural kata, like the coding kata, is an opportunity for the student-architect to practice architecting a software system.
Busy Developer's Guide to CouchDB
With the rise of the NoSQL movement, a whole new crop of different ways to store data suddenly became available to the Java developer. Unfortunately,what didn't come with them was an owner's manual. CouchDB, for example, was the first of the NoSQL databases to be named as such, and offers features not found in the traditional RDBMS: A distributed, robust, incremental replication document-oriented database server with bi-directional conflict detection and management, accessible via a RESTful JSON API, stored ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space, that is both query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine that uses JavaScript as a query language. (With a list of buzzwords like that, what's not to love?)
Busy Java Developer's Guide to Android: Basics
Android is a new mobile development platform, based on the Java language and tool set, designed to allow developers to get up to speed writing mobile code on any of a number of handsets quickly. In this presentation, we'll go over the basic setup of the Android toolchain, how to deploy to a device, and basic constructs in the Android world.
Busy Java Developer's Guide to Games
Games? What do games have to do with good business-oriented applications? Turns out, a lot of interesting little tidbits of user-interface, distribution, and emergence, found normally in the games we play, have direct implications on the way enterprise applications can (or should) be built.
Busy Java Developer's Guide to Guava
"The Google Guava project contains a host of new features/classes for use by the Java programmer. Intended as a drop-in supplement for the standard JDK APIs, Guava provides features like immutable and forwarding collections, some concurrency utilities, more support for primitives, and so on.
Busy Java Developer's Guide to Java 7
With the forthcoming release of Java7, a number of things come to fruition, both in the Java language and in the libraries, and it's important for Java developers to know what those features are, and how they change the game of writing Java code--or not.
Busy Java Developer's Guide to Physics Engines
"From Wikipedia: "A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain simple physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics (including collision detection), soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics, of use in the domains of computer graphics, video games and film. Their main uses are in video games (typically as middleware), in which case the simulations are in real-time. The term is sometimes used more generally to describe any software system for simulating physical phenomena, such as high-performance scientific simulation."
Pragmatic Architecture
Building an application is not the straightforward exercise it used to be. Decisions regarding which architectural approaches to take (n-tier, client/server), which user interface approaches to take (Smart/rich client, thin client, Ajax), even how to communicate between processes (Web services, distributed objects, REST)... it's enough to drive the most dedicated designer nuts. This talk discusses the goals of an application architecture and why developers should concern themselves with architecture in the first place. Then, it dives into the meat of the various architectural considerations available; the pros and cons of JavaWebStart, ClickOnce, SWT, Swing, JavaFX, GWT, Ajax, RMI, JAX-WS, , JMS, MSMQ, transactional processing, and more.
The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Akka
With the rise of multi-core processors, and their growing ubiquity (on client machines, to say nothing of the server machines on which Java applications most frequently execute), the need to "program concurrently" has risen from "nice-to-have" to "mandatory" requirement, and unfortunately the traditional threading-and-locking model is just too complicated for most Java developers--even the brightest of the lot--to keep track of with any degree of reliability. As a result, numerous new solutions are emerging, each of them with their own strengths and weaknesses, leaving the Java developer in a bit of a quandary as to which to examine.
Mark Richards - SOA and Integration Architect, Author of Java Message Service
AMQP: From Concept To Code Part 2
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. This is a two-part session. In this session (part 2) I will move beyond "hello amqp" and discuss more detailed aspects of amqp, including such topics as performance, rabbitmq administration, exchange and queue declaration considerations (that topic is really cool), load balancing, how to implement pub/sub in amqp, and how to manage undelivered messages. I will demonstrate and explain all of the examples and topics discussed in this session with hands-on live coding.
Prerequisite: Some knowledge of the concepts of AMQP or Part 1 of this session.
AMQP: From Concept to Code Part 1
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. This is a two-part session. In this session (part 1) I will describe what AMQP is and what problems it solves, 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.
Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of messaging; JMS experience or knowledge helpful but not necessary
FDD: Doing Agile in a Non-Agile World
Are you in one of those situations where you want to use an agile methodology such as Scrum or Kanban but find yourself stuck in a company with a non-agile mentality? Or, are you using Scrum or Kanban and it simply isn't working? If so, this session is for you. In this session we will explore Feature Driven Development (FDD) in depth, with a particular focus on using it to make non-agile projects more agile. FDD is a highly iterative agile-like methodology that can be used to augment or replace traditional waterfall based approaches, particularly for those projects using remote or offshore teams. In this session you will learn what FDD is, how it is like agile, how it is not like agile, and how (and why) to integrate it with your traditional waterfall-based methodology (or replace your current agile methodology) to become more agile-like.
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.
Going Mobile with jQuery
The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. It needs to be polished and have that design stuff too. Oh and it needs to be on all the major platforms in time for the big marketing push next month. After a moment of panic, you wonder if it's too late to become a plumber but don't worry, there's hope! More and more developers are falling in love with the "write less do more" library and for good reason; it simplifies the job of today's front end engineer. But did you know jQuery could also help you with your mobile needs as well? That's right, jQuery Mobile is a touch optimized framework designed to provide a common look and feel across a wide variety of today's mot popular platforms. In this session, we'll take a look at all that jQuery Mobile has to offer and we'll convert a native application to an HTML5, jQuery Mobile masterpiece.
Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit
The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.
Usability 101
Day in and day out we are subjected to poorly designed applications. From those we experience directly to the time we waste waiting on others who are struggling with systems that seem like they were built to hinder the user. It doesn't have to be like this and many users are waking up and demanding better applications. Are you prepared to deliver? After this workshop, you will be. When you're done, you'll have the tools you need to make sure your application helps your users kick ass!
jQuery
Sure, Ajax might not be the hardest thing you'll have to do on your current project, but that doesn't mean we can't use a little help here and there. While there are a plethora of excellent choices in the Ajax library space, jQuery is fast becoming one of the most popular. In this talk, we'll see why. In addition to it's outstanding support for CSS selectors, dirt simple DOM manipulation, event handling and animations, jQuery also supports a rich ecosystem of plugins that provide an abundance of top notch widgets. Using various examples, this talk will help you understand what jQuery can do so you can see if it's right for your next project.
Ken Sipe - Architect, Web Security Expert
Continuous Delivery Best Practices
There is a new “movement” in software development circles called DevOps. It is about the automation of development best practices as well as the automation of the deployment pipeline. Answer this question, “How long does it take your organization or team to push 1 line code of change into production?” That’s what this session is all about.
Prerequisite: none
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.
Glu-ing the last Mile
How does your team handle release weekend? Is it the whole weekend? Is everyone on call? Is there a way to reverse the decision mid-stream?... How long would it take your company or team to push a single line code fix from dev into production? Way too many organizations handle the production release through manual and tedious labor following a lengthy to-do check list. Way too many organizations have no way to reproduce their production environment... because they have manually changed or updated configurations without version control... or they have OS or application server paths that are not under proper management.
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
HTML 5 Overview
People are confused about the status of HTML 5. Is it ready? Is it not? What is part of the spec and what isn't? We'll talk about the situation in the "HTML 5 and the Kitchen Sink" discussion, but as always, the proof is in the pudding. We will introduce the most exciting new features of HTML 5 and its related technologies and build examples that use them.
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.
Matt Stine - Community Engineer @CloudFoundry
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."
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?
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.
The Seven Wastes of Software Development
One of the first principles of lean software development is the elimination of waste. Shigeo Shingo identified seven types of manufacturing waste in his "A Study of the Toyota Production System." Later, the Poppendieck's translated these to seven wastes of software development.
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.
Collections for Concurrency
Traditional collections on the Java platform focused on providing thread-safety at the expense of performance or scalability. More modern data structures strive to provide performance without compromising thread-safety. Some of them require you to adopt to a different semantics or programming model. In this presentation we will explore some data structures that can help reach both thread-safety and reasonable performance.
Concurrency without pain in pure Java
Programming concurrency has turned into a herculean task. I call the traditional approach as the synchronized and suffer model. Fortunately, there are other approaches to concurrency and you can reach out to those directly from your Java code.
Keynote: The rise and fall of empires: Lessons for language designers and programmers
Keynote on lessons we can learn from our civilizations and evolution.
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.
Scala for the Intrigued
Scala is a statically typed, fully OO, hybrid functional language that provides highly expressive syntax on the JVM. It is great for pattern matching, concurrency, and simply writing concise code for everyday tasks. If you're a Java programmer intrigued by this language and are interested in exploring further, this section is for you.
Testing with Spock
Spock is an awesome tool that exploits Groovy AST transformation to provide elegant, fluent syntax for writing automated unit tests and functional tests. In this presentation we will learn how to use Spock to unit test both Java and Groovy code.
Towards a Humane Interface—Aesthetics and Usability
A successful application has to focus on three dimensions—value (business), design (engineering) and usability. Usability is not only about the wow factor. It is about making the application easier and intuitive to use. In this presentation we will learn the fundamentals of creating a usable application. We will look at some basic dos and don't. These will help you move forward from being a programmer to a good application developer.
Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action
Building Web Applications with Spring MVC
In this session, we'll start with the basics of Spring MVC development, focusing on how to leverage the new annotation-driven model. With that foundation set, we'll continue by exploring the new features in Spring 3.0 and 3.1 to build RESTful web applications that can serve both human-facing content as well as resources that are consumed by machine clients.
Developing Social-Ready Web Applications
Businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of connecting with their customers on a more personal level. Companies can utilize social networking to transition from "Big Faceless Corporation" to "Friend" by taking their wares to the online communities where their customers are. In this age of social media, those communities are found at social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In this session, you'll learn how to build applications that interact with the various social networks. We'll also look at Spring Social, a new feature in the Spring portfolio that enables integration with social networks in Spring-based applications.
NoXML: Spring for XML-Haters
In this presentation, we'll explore all of the ways to do bean wiring in Spring We'll take a pragmatic view of each style, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability to varying circumstances.
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.
What's new in Spring
In this session, I'll lead a guided tour through the latest that Spring has to offer. Whether you're a Spring veteran or a Spring newbie, there will be something new for nearly everyone.
