Software Development Events

Twenty-Five Things about SD West 2009 … Or I’ve Spent Too Much Time on Facebook this Year

tamicarter — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:11:13 +0000

Last year, when Marketing first suggested we set up a Facebook group and a Twitter account for SD Events, I was skeptical. Isn’t that just for college kids, I asked. When they informed me that I had to join Facebook and Twitter, I was downright annoyed, but complied (eventually). Today, even my inner luddite has to admit that social networking sites have hit a critical mass—and are one example of the radical ways software development has changed, in a very short time, the way we live, work and communicate with each other. SD West has been about how software changes our lives since its inception—and 2009’s event is no exception.

So, in honor of change and–and all those folks that have tagged me to write one of those “25 things about me” notes–I offer instead “25 Things You Can’t Miss at SD West.”

Uncle Bob’s keynote on March 9 at 12:15 PM. Extreme Programming may be 10 years old, but it still attracts controversy and debate. Has agile really improved the way we create software?
The “Is SOA Dead?” panel. Was SOA ever more than just an acronym? Has it been supplanted by mashups, BPM, SaaS and Cloud Computing? Moderator Christian Gross and panelists Juval Löwy, Michèle Leroux Bustamante get bottom of the controversy on March 9.
The XP Card Sharks. Join Industrial Logic’s Joshua Kerievsky for a couple rounds of XP War, XP poker and eXPlanations on Monday night.
Better Software, No Matter What. Scott Meyers’ full day tutorial on improving software quality is a can’t-miss on Monday.
Drink beer and eat pizza while finding out about life inside LinkedIn Engineering at Monday night’s Birds-of-a-Feather gathering.
Get around the Scrum pyramid scheme. Learn about the agile method, using the agile method in Mike Vizdos’s half-day tutorial on Tuesday, March 10.
Tuesday’s Booth Crawl through a jam-packed expo floor, featuring platinum exhibitors IBM and Intel, along with a host of other leading software development companies.
The most comprehensive and complete C++ training available anywhere, taught by such C++ Gurus as Dan Saks, Stephen Dewhurst, David Abrahams and more…
Intel Chief Software Evangelist James Reinders outlines why you need to go parallel in his keynote on Tuesday, March 10.
IBM’s Scott Ambler and Terry Quatrani debate agile and traditional software development in their Wednesday afternoon keynote.
The 19th Annual Software Development Jolt Awards, March 11 at 6:30 PM. Who will win that Lucite-encased can of soda this year?
Wii’ve got game. Don’t miss out on the Conference Attendee party on March 11. It’s your chance to compete against your peers at Rock Band, Wii Bowling, Golf and more.
The Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming Award: Who will join Dr. Dobb’s Editorial Director Jon Erickson on stage this year?
Your chance to grill the tool vendors: 90-minute technical sessions presented by Coverity, OpenMake, SmartBear, Replay Software and more on Wednesday and Thursday.
The SD West Developer Bowl: Four teams enter, one team leaves victorious. Will the IBM team successfully defend their championship on March 12?
My keynote introductions. Last year an attendee helpfully wrote “Tami must have many talents, but introductions are not one of them.” Come see me prove him/her wrong—or fail miserably.
The State of the Mobile Union: Mobile Connect Conference Chair David Berlind interviews Evans Data John Andrews and Canaan Partners’ Maha Ibrahim on Thursday, March 12.
Meet your software development heroes face to face at lunch, coffee, parties, BoFs and more.
Prizes, surprises. Don’t miss out on your chance to win a Wii and other fun gifts in our Passport to Prizes on the Expo floor.
End-to-end training in .NET 3.0 – 4.0: How-To’s, tools, technologies and case studies.
Get beyond the Web 2.0 buzzwords with in-depth sessions on Web 2.0 security, Comet, Ajax, jMaki, Flex and more.
Tutorials and sessions on the “DD”s: The ins and outs of Test-Driven Development, Behavior-Driven Development and Agile Model-Driven Development.
Get the skinny on Spring from the framework’s creator Rod Johnson on Friday morning.
Learn a new language: Scala, jRuby, Clojure …
Discover the entire software development enchilada. Five days, 160+ sessions, 13 tracks. There’s something for everyone.

Done! And I didn’t even scratch the surface.

Hope to see you at SD West!

SD West Goes Parallel–or Tell Me What You Really Think

tamicarter — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:07:24 +0000

Pollsters and telemarketers love me—when they can get me on the phone, that is. After working a series of customer service-related jobs early in my work life (ah, McDonald’s), I’ve been unable to simply hang up on these folks. Caller ID helps me surmount my empathy, but curiosity sometimes gets the best of me. In the past year, I’ve offered my opinion on local propositions, presidential politics and my favorite brand of toothpaste—and told poor “Mike” (a.k.a. Anil) that we really don’t want Dish Network’s South Asian package.

Not everyone’s like me, however. Most have no qualms about hanging up on a telemarketer, and people generally only provide feedback when something’s really gone awry. That’s why I’m constantly amazed at the amount of feedback we receive each year from our attendees. Whether it’s the post-conference attendee survey or the individual course evaluations, participants not only consistently check off those ratings boxes, but take the time to write detailed and helpful comments. The write-in comments from last year’s SD West survey filled 28 pages when I converted it to Word, and that’s 28 pages of advice, questions and ideas on keynote speakers, current technology, real-world development problems and more.

You Asked for It

The advisory board and I take those comments to heart—and in fact many of those ideas become courses, if not entire tracks, at the next conference. Skeptical? Well, here’s just one example from the SD West 2008 survey.

“Please, please, please, can you have more tutorials and session on parallel programming/concurrency—especially for C++? It’s the elephant in the room that was tackled during two keynote sessions this year (Bjarne Stroustrup and Intel’s James Reinders), but then almost completely ignored by the conference sessions.”

Parallel computing and concurrency have been a hot topic of conversation during our board meetings in prior years. After all parallelism isn’t new; there are articles from the early ’90s referencing the topic on drdobbs.com. What’s different is that parallel computing is no longer simply found in the academic realm. Sure grid-computing projects like SETI@home or IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer Big Blue are examples of this technology at work, but parallel computing has become essential in fields like finance and economics (Monte Carlo simulations, for example), in game development, bioinformatics and much more. As “many-core” machines become commonplace—servers with 64 processor cores are expected by 2009, with desktops following a few years later—and parallel computing continues to grow in importance outside research labs, the need for software developers skilled in the subject will become acute.

And as Java Track Chair Paul Tyma puts it, “This stuff is cool. I’m probably biased, but I love the concurrency stuff. And new languages [Clojure, etc.] are emerging to give us new ways to program concurrently.”

Thanks to you, the attendees, and folks like Paul, you’ll find top-notch training on the entire parallel computing ecosystem at SD West 2009. And since many of these courses can be found across multiple tracks, here’s a handy list of our favorites:

The Seductions of Scala, Dean Wampler
Building Multi-core Systems that Work, John Mithchell
Concurrent Programming and Test-Driven Development, Brett Schuchert
Concurrent Programming with Clojure, Stuart Halloway
Modeling Concurrency with UML, Bruce Powel Douglass
Parallel Computing APIs with .NET 4.0, Mark Michaelis

Your Chance to ‘Stump the Chump’! Developer Bowl Returns to SD West.

tamicarter — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:49:36 +0000

I’ve always had a secret desire to appear on Jeopardy. My mind is full of what my husband terms “useless knowledge”: definitions of rare linguistic terms, far-flung capitals and the complete names of D-list celebrity stars from long-forgotten TV shows. If you need a second for your pub quiz team, I’m your gal.

So, it wasn’t a surprise to anyone that I lobbied for the return of SD’s Developer Bowl during a brainstorming session two years ago. Our version of a TV trivia show was always a lot of fun and has proven to be one of the highlights of SD West for the past two years, with top-notch teams from such companies as Google, IBM, CodeGear, Yahoo and Intel.

In fact, Google swept the competition in 2007, defeating Yahoo in the first round. CodeGear’s team , lead by David Intersimone, competed valiantly against Google in the finals, but the search-engine giant was victorious, thanks to team members Peter Norving (AI Guru), Josh Bloch (Java Superstar), Guido Van Rossum (Python) and Peter Weinberger (creator of awk). In 2008, IBM’s team, lead by Chris Laffra, came out on top, narrowly defeating Google in the championship round.

This year, SD’s Developer Bowl will be Thursday, March 12 at 5:30 PM at SD West 2009. I’ll be there, timing the rounds with my handy stopwatch (well, cellphone!), along with Dr. Dobb’s Editorial Director Jon Erickson, who has graciously agreed to be our Alex Trebek once again.

Which teams will vie for bragging rights this year? Stay tuned.

What questions will be thrown at them? Well, that’s where you come in.

We’re asking for your help putting together this year’s questions. Send me any and all questions related to software development’s past heroes, new languages, bleeding-edge open source tools, and other industry-related trivia at tcarter@techweb.com document.write( ‘‘ );
// –>. If we pick your question, we’ll give you your 15 seconds of fame, and let the teams and audience know who to blame!

OK, send those questions on. I’ve cleaned out my inbox and am waiting to hear from you.

Linux, QT, LGPL and the Desktop

tamicarter — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:33:04 +0000

About a month ago, I got a call from Christian Gross, SD West Advisory Board member and resident idea guy. Now anyone who knows me, knows that I work East Coast hours despite living on the West Coast, so I often get early morning calls from Christian, since he’s in Zurich. He has a lot of crazy ideas, and that’s what we love about him. His crazy ideas are often proven to be more prescient than crazy.

His latest lightbulb? Linux may finally have a shot at conquering the desktop–thanks to Nokia’s purchase of Trolltech and the decision to make QT LGPL. In the past, QT was available under GPL and a commercial license. If you wanted to develop commercial apps, you had to fork over nearly 5K for the multiplatform license.

This morning I find this posting on slashdot and, in an aside, it looks like Ubuntu Mobile may be switching from Gnome to QT thanks to the LGPL change.

So is this really a turning point for Linux on the desktop? Or will Windows still dominate? Let me know what you think.