Salt Lake Software Symposium
July 8 - 9, 2011 - Salt Lake City, UT
View the event details here ».
Session Descriptions
Peter Bell - Evangelist/hacker for hackNY
Essential Complexity: Developing and maintaining complex software
Some apps are little more than CRUD. The interesting projects are those with essential complexity in the domain. In this presentation we'll show how ideas from Domain Driven Design, Domain Specific Modeling and Domain Specific Languages can be used to more effectively design, refine and maintain the code at the heart of complex applications.
Gradle - Hands on Workshop
In just 90 minutes, we'll install Gradle and develop a range of build scripts. Whether you're just looking to improve your builds or to create sophisticated project automation scripts, get some hands-on experience with the framework that won a Springy at SpringOne2GX for "Most Innovative Product/Project".
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.
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
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.
Complexity Theory and Software Development
Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.
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.
Gaelyk: Lightweight Groovy on the Google App Engine
You love Groovy and you're a believer in cloud computing. For a larger project you might choose Grails and hosting on Amazon EC2, but what if you want to take advantage of the nearly massless deployments of a cloud provider like the Google App Engine? You could make Grails work, but it's not always the best fit. Enter Gaelyk.
Getting Started with Grails
Grails is emerging as a standard JVM web framework in environments ranging from startups to the enterprise. It's a full-stack solution build on rock-solid components, fully relying on convention over configuration, and using the best application language the JVM has yet seen: Groovy. This is the place to be for web apps on the JVM.
In this introductory talk, we'll get a whirlwind introduction to Grails, visiting seven things you need to know about the framework to get started.
NoSQL Smackdown!
You've read that the relational model is old and busted, and there are newer, faster, web-scale ways to store your application's data. You've heard that NoSQL databases are the future! Well, what is all this NoSQL stuff about? Is it time to ditch Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server in favor of the new guard? To be able to make that call, there's a lot you'll have to learn.
Programming HTML5
HTML5 wants to make some major changes to the way we deliver media over the web and the way we mark up our pages, but it also gives us a bunch of new stuff in the browser's programming model. To ignore these new JavaScript APIs is to give up on a richer browser UI and a lot of fun.
Hamlet D`Arcy - Sr. Java/Groovy Developer, Groovy Committer
Code Generation on the JVM: Writing Code that Writes Code
"The Pragmatic Programmer" admonished us all to "write code that writes code": use code generators to increase productivity and avoid duplication. Today's language communities have clearly caught on, as more and more frameworks generate code at compile or runtime. This session covers Project Lombok, Cofoja, Spring Roo, GContracts, Groovy++, and more. We'll reviews the different approaches, including examples of how and why we'd want to do this. Come see how these frameworks are using things like Java and Groovy AST Transformations, AspectJ intertype definitions, and ASM bytecode generators. You'll get an in-depth look at language tools and production deployed AST Transforms and code generators. Audience: developers searching for cutting edge solutions to increasing team velocity.
Effective Groovy
"Effective Java" by Joshua Bloch is the gold standard for how to write correct and idiomatic Java code. Wouldn't it be great if the same thing existed for Groovy? Well here it is. This interactive, live coding session discusses what separates good Groovy code from the bad, what makes some code great, and how best to use the many available libraries. We'll also look at several static analysis tools for Groovy that aid in these pursuits. This session appeals to both those with a Java knowledge looking to learn Groovy and advanced Groovy programmers looking to learn more.
Java Boilerplate Busters
Java has a reputation for boilerplate code: ubiquitous getters and setters, a verbose anonymous class syntax, and redundant declarations to name a few. It doesn't have to be this way! There are many ways to bust the boilerplate and this session provides a solid understanding of the most modern techniques. Come learn about inversion of control idioms, Proxy objects, code generation tools, and the latest libraries that both create and manage boilerplate code so you don't have to. A leaner, meaner codebase is yours for the taking.
New Ideas for Old Code
Left unattended software can expand into a complex, brittle maintenance nightmare. But don't despair! This session teaches strategies for modernizing even the most horrid code swamps, examining incremental refactorings and the dos and don'ts of testing legacy code. We'll also tackle the harder, cultural issues: how to inspire your co-workers and keep your moral high even on the dirtiest jobs.
Slimmed Down Software: A Lean Approach
Waterfall, Scrum, XP, Crystal... there are a lot of software methodologies on sale in the world today, but Lean Software brings something different to the table. This session uses practical examples to explain what makes software valuable and which parts are waste. Come explore how systems thinking can lead your team to deliver faster, create knowledge, and eliminate waste, and return to work Monday with news ideas about delighting your customers.
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.
Testing the Entire Stack
This talk covers testing the entire stack: unit, integration, functional, behavior-driven, databases, user acceptance, mocking & stubbing, and other topics and strategies.
Prerequisite: Confusion about what to test when and where
Matthew McCullough - Head of Training, GitHub
Cascading through Hadoop: A DSL for Simpler MapReduce
Hadoop is a MapReduce framework that has literally sprung into the vernacular of "big data" developers everywhere. But coding to the raw Hadoop APIs can be a real chore. Data analysts can express what they want in more English-like vocabularies, but it seems the Hadoop APIs require us to be the translator to a less comprehensible functional and data-centric DSL.
The Cascading framework gives developers a convenient higher level abstraction for querying and scheduling complex jobs on a Hadoop cluster. Programmers can think more holistically about the questions being asked of the data and the flow that such data will take without concern for the minutia.
We'll explore how to set up, code to, and leverage the Cascading API on top of a Hadoop sample or production cluster for a more effective way to code MapReduce applications all while being able to think in a more natural (less than fully MapReduce) way.
Prerequisite: A very basic knowledge of MapReduce and Hadoop
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.
Git Going with Distributed Version Control
Many development shops have made the leap from RCS, Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, CVS, BitKeeper or SourceSafe to the modern Subversion (SVN) version control system. But why not take the next massive stride in productivity and get on board with Git, a distributed version control system (DVCS). Jump ahead of the masses staying on Subversion, and increase your team's productivity, debugging effectiveness, flexibility in cutting releases, and repository redundancy at $0 cost. Understand how distributed version control systems are game-changers and pick up the lingo that will become standard in the next few years.
Prerequisite: Basic understanding of Subversion or similar version control system
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.
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 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 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 Multi-Paradigm Design
The Java Virtual Machine is home to several different languages beyond Java, many of which mix ideas (paradigms) together to create a flexible language. Languages which support these different paradigms can be awkward and hard to understand how to use at first.
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.
Nathaniel Schutta - Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.
Code Craft
Despite what some developers think, we spend a lot more of our time reading code, code that was often written by someone that isn't around anymore. How do we deal with this common scenario without resorting to burning our predecessor in effigy? Better, how can we write code in such a way that our successors will heap effusive praise upon us at the mere mention of our name? During this talk, we'll read actual code discussing ways it could be improved. As we work through real examples, we'll explore the importance of patterns, principles like SOLID and SLAP and essential practices like unit testing and continuous integration.
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.
JavaScript Beyond the Basics
JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages around and yet its also one of the most misunderstood. With Ajaxified UIs becoming the norm, this humble language is once again at the forefront.
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.
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.
Resource-Oriented Architectures : Semantic SOA
The sixth 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.
Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
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.
Integrating JVM Languages
Quite a few languages have raised to prominence on the JVM. A frequently asked question is "How do I integrate my Java code with these?" This session answers that very specific question.
Keynote: The rise and fall of empires: Lessons for language designers and programmers
Keynote on lessons we can learn from our civilizations and evolution.
State of Scala
Scala, the hybrid functional, fully object-oriented language has evolved over the years. In this presentation we will talk about what has changed in this language in the recent release and look at some cool things you can do with this very powerful language.
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.
