Mark Johnson
New England Software Symposium
Boston · March 20 - 22, 2009
Director Consulting @ Hortonworks
Mark Johnson is a Director of Consulting at Hortonworks where his day is spent helping people achieve value from their Big and complex Data repositories. Mark has worked on a wide range of technology during his career. Most recently he has focused on the Hadoop ecosystem. Mark is active in the software community as the President of the New England Java Users Group (NEJUG) and a regular presenter to user groups and various conferences. When not working, Mark can be found riding his mountain bike on local trails and playing with his family.
Presentations
Groovy and Webtest - Produce verifiable tests without the expense
The problem with testing is you need to make certain that the test is validating a “true” business requirement. Most business folks can't read code, so they have to trust that we are testing the right stuff. The reports generated as part of the webtest process are actually human readable, so you can validate with the business stakeholders that your tests properly cover “true” requirements. Throw in Groovy and closures into the mix with WebTest and you have the ability to implement many high powered, clearly understandable tests taking full advantage of re-usable code allowing for many different tests with the same code block.
Groovy Closures - The way to cleaner code
The factory patterns and callbacks have been around for a long time as a technique to provide flavor specific code variations. But they are awkward and hard to update. Enter Groovy closures. Imagine having the ability to inject different coding flavors using code closures. If you need a different flavor, then just pass a different code block. Now imagine that all of this works on the JVM!
10 Principles for Software Estimation : It Does not have to be that hard!
As developers we dread when management requests a project estimate. Typically, you do not have the opportunity to understand all the requirements, the team composition is unknown, and you have been given until tomorrow end of day to produce an estimate. Several months later everyone is yelling at you about the software estimation errors encountered during the project.
The Software Manager's Dashboard: Getting the information you really need
When we start a project, our management hands us a copy of MS Project and using this tool we are expected to accurately track the project to completion. What often ends up happening is many of the project tasks are listed as 90% complete and you don't have a clear understanding of the blocking reasons. This presentation will explore various vendor independent time efficient dashboard options you can pursue to properly track your project.
Creating a real world application in Grails - A Case Study
You have probably heard about Grails, a Rails based development framework which claims to make software development a breeze. You have heard the hype and are now wondering about the reality, will it really work in your environment? Has it really lived up to the hype? This presentation reviews the results using Grails to develop the New England Java Users Group event management web site to answer these questions.