Venkat Subramaniam
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 11 - 13, 2011
Founder @ Agile Developer, Inc.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston.
He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.
Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.
Presentations
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.
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.
Scala for the Intrigued
Scala is a statically typed, fully OO, hybrid functional language that provides
highly expressive syntax on the JVM. It is great for pattern matching,
concurrency, and simply writing concise code for everyday tasks. If you're a
Java programmer intrigued by this language and are interested in exploring
further, this section is for you.
Rediscovering JavaScript
JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It's quite popular, yet there's so much more we can do with it.
Automated testing tools and techniques for JavaScript
Programmers often complain that it is hard to automate unit and acceptance tests for JavaScript. Testability is a design issue and with some discipline and careful design we can realize good
automated tests.
Keynote: The rise and fall of empires: Lessons for language designers and programmers
Keynote on lessons we can learn from our civilizations and evolution.
Towards a Humane Interface—Aesthetics and Usability
A successful application has to focus on three dimensions—value (business),
design (engineering) and usability. Usability is not only about the wow
factor. It is about making the application easier and intuitive to use.
In this presentation we will learn the fundamentals of creating a usable
application. We will look at some basic dos and don't. These will help you
move forward from being a programmer to a good application developer.