David Bock
New England Software Symposium
Boston · September 14 - 16, 2012
Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.
David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.
In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.
David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.
In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.
Presentations
Metrics for steering your projects to success
There are a lot of things we can measure about our source code, but what about the “project as a whole” and its overall health? Are there ways of measuring the effectiveness of our processes? Are there things we can measure that would point to project automation wins? Is there a way to measure team 'morale'?
Estimating vs. Guessing - How Agile Teams Estimate Their Work
Estimating is regarded as little little more than 'educated guessing', but so much can hang on the quality of those estimates. With good estimates we can set clear expectations for project delivery, but with bad estimates we can run over schedule and over budget, or worse. We often estimate when we know the least about the work that needs to get done - so how can we make the best of what is potentially a bad situation?
Maintaining Source Code Quality (The Project Integrity Series)
How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a big ball of code you have to plod through to try to get anything done? Have you ever been the 'new guy' on a project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good tools to help analyze the code, we can keep our project from turning into that big ball of mud, and we can salvage a project that is already headed down that path.
Managing Complexity (The Project Integrity Series)
How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a build process that mysteriously fails, a bunch of 'TODO' and 'FIXME' comments in the source, and problems that come and go because “it works on my machine”? Does your project have a little bit of 'folk wisdom' that isn't well-known, but is necessary to get things done? How easily could you recreate your development environment if you got a new machine today?
Building Maintainable Javascript with Coffeescript
CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.
The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: “It's just JavaScript”. The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, and runs in every JavaScript implementation.