Tim Berglund
Greater Atlanta Software Symposium
Atlanta · September 20 - 22, 2013
VP Developer Relations at IBM
Tim serves as the VP of Developer Relations at IBM, where he and his team work to make certain parts of the IBM portfolio more accessible to developers. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He lives with his wife in Arvada, CO. He has three grown children, three step-children, and four grandchildren, with a fifth on the way.
Presentations
First, Let's Kill All the Product Owners
By now, we are all familiar with the new orthodoxy: the product owner discerns the needs of the customer and feeds them to developers in the form a prioritized backlog. Developers pull work from that backlog, always confident that they're working on the highest-priority feature at the moment, and never having to worry about how those priorities are allocated. This system is simple, efficient, and has helped many teams function better than they used to.
Git from the Bits Up
So you've gotten a handle on Git and know how to use it for everyday development tasks like committing code and pushing and pulling changes with the rest of the team. But do you really know how it works under the covers? In this brief demonstration, we'll commit a file to a brand new repository without ever touching the git add or git commit commands, and in the process learn some critical Git internals that every power user should know.
GitHub Power Tools
Most developers think of Git and GitHub as two sides of the same coin, but all too often our attention is focused on the Git side alone, and not on the capabilities of Planet Earth's most-used Git hosting service. More than two million developers have already joined the site that offers amazing features like pull requests, wikis, project pages, integrated web site hosting, issue tracking, metric visualizations, permission controls, and easy integration with third-party services.
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.