Venkat Subramaniam
Salt Lake Software Symposium
Salt Lake City · June 16 - 17, 2006
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
Practices of an Agile Developer
You have worked on software projects with varying degree of success. What were the reasons for the success of your last project? What were the reasons for those that failed? A number of issues contribute to project success - some non-technical in nature. In this presentation the speaker will share with you practices in a number of areas including
coding, developer attitude, debugging, and feedback. The discussions are based on the book with the same title as the talk.
Agile Methodologies
Agile development is picking up steam. You have heard about eXtreme Programming(XP). What other Agile methodologies are you familar with and what do they bring of interest or significant to the table of Agility? More important, why should you learn about these different methodologies instead of simply focusing on one?
There is no one shoe that fits all. Any methodology that requires you to follow it in totality and not let you adapt is rather dogmatic, not pragmatic. To be effective we have to take the best of different approaches and apply to our projects base on our specific needs.
Refactoring your code - a key step in agility
Refactoring is one of the core practices in Agile Software Development. Refactoring is based on some core principles that apply to more than writing good code. But, what's refactoring? Why should you do it? How do you go about doing that? What tools are available to successfully refactor your App?
Open Source Tools for Agile Development
As a Java developer, you have taken the time to learn the basics of the language and relevant parts of its rich API. However, you need more than that to develop serious industrial strength applications. In this presentation, the speaker will introduce you to a number of open source tools which you can use to improve your application quality and your development process.
Working with Rules Engines
Rule based programming allows us to develop applications using declarative rules. These can simplify development in applications where such rules based knowledge is used for decision making.
Java 5 Features, What's in it for you?
A number of new features have been introduced in Java.
What benefit do these features offer you. Are there
issues with using these features. For instance, when should you use annotation? The objective of this presentation is not simply to introduce you to the features, but to the effective use of these as well.
Groovy for Java Programmers
Object-oriented scripting languages, or agile dynamic languages, as some like to call those, are gaining programmers' attention. Groovy bring this excitement to
the Java platform with its ability to generate byte code. You can use Groovy instead of Java for some parts of your application. By learning it, you can switch between the languages where you consider fit.
Get Groovier with Grails
Inspired by the Ruby on Rails project, Grails brings the ease of web development and “convention over configuration” to the Java platform. We will learn how to create web applications using Grails, how to integrate it with Hibernate, and how to Ajax it, all using the built in features of Grails. This section assumes that you are familiar with Groovy or you have attended the “Groovy for Java Programmers” session. The session will be example driven with live coding where we will build a web application from scratch.