Nathaniel Schutta
Twin Cities Software Symposium
Minneapolis · October 12 - 14, 2007
Architect as a Service
Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.
Presentations
Test Infecting the Legacy Organization
When starting a new project, most developers make sure that testing is a priority. However, only the lucky few live in the idyllic world of greenfield development; the vast majority of us must contend with code written when “test” was a four letter word and testing was the sole responsibility of that “other” organization. We'll examine some techniques for introducing testing - not just to your code but to the rest of your development organization.
Designing for Ajax, part 1
So you've convinced the boss that your new web application just has to have Ajax…but now what? With dozens of libraries making even the most blinkish of interactions trivial, how do you decided where to sprinkle the magic Ajax dust? This talk will give a plain old boring “web 1.0” an Ajax facelift with a focus on improving the user experience providing you with a game plan for introducing Ajax to your world.
Pragmatic Usability (aka, Software Engineer's Guide to Usability)
While some companies have the luxury of a full time usability team, most of us have to make do on our own. Sure, it might be easier (and more comfortable) to focus on all the hip back end goodness, but if your user interface makes users yack, your product is doomed.
Ajax Libraries
Ajax might not be the most complex thing the average web developer has ever encountered but that doesn't mean building Ajax applications is without some quirks. While you can certainly use the raw technologies beneath Ajax or even roll your own framework, there are a number of well-designed open source libraries that you can take advantage of. After providing a quick survey of the field, this talk will feature live coding examples comparing and contrasting some of the more mature Ajax toolkits including Dojo, Prototype, script.aculo.us and YUI. We'll show you what these various libraries do and do not provide and give you some ideas about which ones make the most sense for your needs.