Venkat Subramaniam
Pacific Northwest Software Symposium
Seattle · September 7 - 9, 2012
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
Programming with HTML 5
Developing a rich user interface for web applications is both exciting and challenging. HTML 5 has closed the gaps and once again brought new vibe into programming the web tier. Come to this session to learn how you can make use of HTML 5 to create stellar applications.
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.
Testing with Spock
Spock is an awesome tool that exploits Groovy AST transformation to provide elegant, fluent syntax for writing automated tests.
Programming Concurrency with Akka
I call the JDK concurrency API as the synchronize and suffer model. Fortunately, you don't have to endure that today. You have some nice options, brought to prominence on the JVM by Scala and Clojure.
CoffeeScript for recovering JavaScript programmers
Saying JavaScript is powerful is an understatement. The problem is it is way too powerful and dangerously flexible. Programmers often have trouble reaping its benefits due to its uncontrolled flexibility and, to a certain extent, lack of structure. One approach is to learn to tame the beast, like the authors of complex JavaScript libraries have done. Fortunately there is an alternative. CoffeeScript is JavaScript created in a humane way. In this session we will learn how, using CoffeeScript, we can reap all the benefits of JavaScript, but without losing our sanity in the process.
Integrating Groovy and JVM Languages
Java - Groovy integration just works, for most part. Calling into Java code from Groovy is pretty straight forward. Calling into Groovy from Java is easier than you may think (and that's the hard part!). There are a
few rough edges you will run into when you try to call from Groovy into other languages.
Applying Groovy Closures for fun and productivity
You can program higher order functions in Groovy quite easily using closures. But the benefits of closures go far beyond that. Groovy has a variety of capabilities hidden in closures.
Tail call optimization and Memoization Techniques
Recursion is a highly expressive technique that's common in divide and conquer strategy and also in dynamic programming. Modern JVM languages like Clojure, Scala, and Groovy offer techniques to optimize recursion and also to facilitate dynamic programming.
Taming Shared Mutability with Software Transactional Memory
Mutability is something we're quite used to in Java. Sharing is a good thing. However, shared mutability is pure devil's work. If we remove shared mutability, all the problems of concurrent go away. In practice, however, it's hard to completely get rid of shared mutability. This is where STM comes in with managed shared mutable variables. In this presentation we will take an example driven approach to dive deep into STM, look at what it has to offer, explore different implementations, and how we can design concurrent applications without any explicit locks.
Creating DSLs in Groovy
Domain Specific Languages have two main characteristics, fluency and context. Creating external DSLs has the advantage of good validation. However, we have to struggle with parsers. Internal DSLs offer the benefit of using the language as the host and its compiler as the parser. For a language to be a host, it needs two important characteristics: low-ceremony and metaprogramming.