Tim Berglund
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 12 - 14, 2010

VP Developer Relations at Confluent
Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Vice President of Developer Relations. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He tweets as @tlberglund, blogs every few years at http://timberglund.com. He has three grown children and two grandchildren, a fact about which he is rather excited.
Presentations
Learning Open Source Business Intelligence
Traditionally, business intelligence tools have been a high-cost part of any enterprise's software inventory. Recently, options have emerged that allow architects to build a credible business intelligence stack out of entirely open-source components. In this brief overview, we will demonstrate ETL, reporting, and analytics tool that can be deployed free or at low cost. Learn how to turn your company's transactional database into a rich data asset with a business-friendly user interface that integrates into your existing software infrastructure.
Open Source Business Intelligence Workshop
Once you're familiar with the concepts of data warehousing, star schemas, cubes, and pivot tables, then it's time to dive in and look at how the tools really work. Continuing from the quick demos in Part I, this workshop session will have you building an actual ETL process with Talend Open Studio. This hands-on exercise will acquaint you with the tooling and solidify the concepts you've learned.
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.
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.
Practical Agile Database Development
Do your team's agile practices extend to the database? Agile methods are fairly well-understood as they apply to code, but these principles are not commonly understood or practiced on the databases that typically accompany enterprise software projects. Learn the tools, techniques, and mindset your team needs to make incremental improvements to the database’s design over time with confidence.