Neal Ford
Greater Atlanta Software Symposium
Atlanta · October 23 - 25, 2009
Director / Software Architect / Meme Wrangler
Neal is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.
Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.
He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.
Presentations
Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture
Most of the software world has realized that BDUF (Big Design Up Front) doesn't work well in software. But lots of developers struggle with this notion when it applies to architecture and design. Surely you can't just start coding, right? You need some level of understanding before you can start work. This session describes the current thinking about emergent design & evolutionary architecture, including both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, composed method) approaches to discovering design. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping you code in sync with the problem domain.
Test Driven Design
Most developers think that “TDD” stands for Test-driven Development. But it really should stand for “Test-driven Design”. Rigorously using TDD makes your code much better in multiple ways.
Communication Skills for Knowledge Workers
Software is fundamentally a communications game, and good skills differentiate between good and great developers. This session describes communication techniques and skills to people who skipped English 102 to hack some code. I talk about effective communication techniques for presentations, documentation, memos, and how to sell your technical ideas to a non-technical crowd.
Visualizations for Code Metrics
Judicious use of metrics improves the quality of your code. But interpreting metrics presents a challenge. You have a list of numbers for a project - what does it mean? And what does it tell me about the health of the project overall? This sessions shows how to produce visualizations for software metrics, making them easier to understand and more valuable. It covers metrics at the individual method level all the way up to the overall architecture of the application. This isn't just a talk about how some tools produce visualizations: this session shows you how to generate your own visualizations, allowing you to customize it to the level in information density that shows real value on your project. I show how to produce projected graphs from dependencies, heat-maps for cyclomatic complexity and code coverage, using XSLT to extract visual information from XML configuration documents, and others. Metrics can't help you if you can't understand them. By creating visualizations, it helps leverage metrics to make your code better.
Real-world Refactoring
Refactoring is a fine academic exercise in the perfect world, but we don't really live there. Even with the best intentions, projects build up technical debt and crufty bad things. This session covers refactoring in the real world, at both the atomic level (how to refactor towards composed method and the single level of abstraction principle) to larger project strategies for multi-day refactoring efforts. This talk provides practical strategies for real projects to effectively refactor your code.