Neal Ford
ÜberConf
Denver · June 24 - 27, 2014
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.
Introduction to Clojure Workshop Part 1
Clojure is the most interesting new language on the JVM, both from a syntactic and capabilities standpoint. This workshop teaches attendees Clojure syntax, Java interoperability, and how to build applications, both Swing and Web, using Clojure.
Introduction to Clojure Workshop Part 2
Clojure is the most interesting new language on the JVM, both from a syntactic and capabilities standpoint. This workshop teaches attendees Clojure syntax, Java interoperability, and how to build applications, both Swing and Web, using Clojure.
Continuous Delivery Workshop
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.
Continuous Delivery for Architects
This multi-disciplinary session takes a deep dive into
the confluence of topics required to fully understand the intersection
of Continuous Delivery and architecture, including evolutionary
architecture and emergent design, with an emphasis on how
architectural decisions affect the ease in changing and evolving your
code, the role of metrics to understand code, how Domain Driven
Design's Bounded Context reifies in architecture, how to reduce
intra-component/service coupling, and other techniques.
Keynote: This is Water
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?“
David Foster Wallace, from This is Water