Neal Ford
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 11 - 13, 2011
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
Build Your Own Technology Radar Workshop for Architects
A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company. This talk discusses using the radar for personal breadth development, architectural guidance, and governance.
Agile Engineering Practices
Most of the time when people talk about agile software development, they talk about project and planning practices and never mention actual development practices. This talk delves into best development practices for agile projects, covering all of its aspects.
Emergent Design
Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers the theory behind emergent design and shows examples of how you can implement this important concept.
The Curious Clojureist
Why is Clojure the best new language on the JVM? Come to this session and see why this functional, dynamic Lisp is the best thing on the JVM since Java.
Functional Thinking in Java 8, Clojure, Groovy, and Scala
Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.
Agile.next
Agile has matured to the point of mainstream success. Even large companies have discovered that it helps them build better quality software faster. But the agile practices that are mainstream today have been around for a long time. What is the next wave of innovation in the Agile world going to bring?