Track: Excellence

One thing we have noted over the years at Øredev is that there are many sessions that do not target developers working with a specific technology. These are simply full of great advice and inspiration for any developer. It doesn't matter whether you are coding in Java, .Net or Javascript, working on enterprise systems, embedded devices or web sites, the sessions target all developers wanting to improve their skills

Thursday

10:00-10:50

Keeping up with the changing landscape of software usage. (Are you prepared for where the market is going?)

The way software is being consumed is changing dramatically. In this session we will talk about how Hardware and Software has changed and what we need to consider to make the best of the devices available. How consumers are using and accessing data from multiple locations and the challenges that brings to us as software developers; and looking into the future, we will touch on how as developers WE NEED technologies to exploit the power of not only the CPU, but also the under used GPU to safe guard our development time investment into the future.

Stephen Ball

Stephen Ball has been leading development teams for over a decade within the UK and across Europe working with a range of blue chip companies including Hilton, American Express, Fitness First, Virgin Active; Stephen is a Charted IT Professional and is now working with Embarcadero (the owners of Delphi and C++ Builder) as a product Evangelist and is regularly speaking across EMEA.

11:10-12:00

Programming and minimalism: Lessons from Orwell & The Clash

Programming is writing. A programmer's job is to express abstract ideas in a specific language - just like the poet, the essayist, and the composer. But while writers and composers spend years improving their style, many programmers think style stops with "two-space indentation". This needs to change. This presentation will discuss style in music, writing, and software. We'll look at such diverse sources as George Orwell, Mozart, and punk music, and will find that much of art revolves around complexity and minimalism - just like software. Finally, we'll look at specific patterns and tools for writing software that is not just effective and efficient, but stylistically beautiful.

Jon Dahl

Jonathan is co-founder of Zencoder, a Y Combinator-backed startup that provides awesome video encoding as a service in the cloud. Before Zencoder, ran a Ruby on Rails development shop, blogged at http://railspikes.com, wrote a Master's thesis on philosophy and theology, and tried (unsuccessfully) to become a Lisp hacker.

13:00-13:50

Fast Ruby on Rails Tests

Look at your Rails unit test suite. Now look at mine(http://screencast.com/t/O2LhGoVSG). Now look at yours again.Mine are sub-second. Yours aren't.Having a slow unit test suite can hinder an effective test-first ortest-driven approach to development. As you add tests, the suitestarts to slow down to the point where you stop running them aftereach change. Some people even talk about multi-minute unit testssuites! Band-aids like spork are just covering up the problem.Test-driven development is a major player in keeping your designmalleable and accepting of new features, but when you stop payingattention to the messages your tests are sending you, you lose thisbenefit.In this talk, I will go over some techniques for keeping your testsuite lean and fast. Along the way, we'll discuss the designimprovements that come out of these changes.Now, look at my unit test suite again(http://screencast.com/t/O2LhGoVSG). Yours can be like mine.

Corey Haines

After 12 years of coding for money, Corey Haines said enough and went on a year-long, journeyman pair-programming tour. Traveling the world, pair-programming for room and board, he spent his time teaching, learning and just living as a knowledge-cross-pollinating, little, software craftsmanship bee. For the past three years, Corey has focused his attention on helping developers improve their fundamental software design skills through the use of focused-practice events, such as coderetreat. Lately, Corey has been shifting his attention to getting kids excited about programming through building games in Scratch.

14:20-15:10

Zen and the Art of Software

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book about Quality; what it is, where it exists, and how we may try to attain it. In this talk, I will use passages from the book to introduce ideas on how we, as software developers, might try to improve the Quality both of the software we create and of ourselves. I’ll talk about what “Quality” means in the context of software, how to measure it, and the importance of close interaction with users at all stages of application development.

Mark Rendle

Mark’s career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he cares to remember. He is currently employed as Principal Architect at Dot Net Solutions, creating software with ASP.NET MVC, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Azure. He is a Windows Azure MVP. In his spare time, he enjoys learning new programming languages and paradigms (2011 is the year of CoffeeScript and F#), and works on the Simple.Data project, and Pocket C# for Windows Phone 7.

15:40-16:30

Ways to make your app more successful with social networks

Come learn best practices on how to build an app that gives your users a great social experience. Learn how to use Facebook's social channels and plugins to promote your application without spamming your users. Come see how you can use tools in the Facebook platform such as Insights, Ads, and Timeline to better understand your users and foster mutually beneficial communication. You will leave this session with a broad understanding of the many component that you can use to make your app great.

Nathan Totten

Nathan Totten is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, he is also the creator and lead developer of the Facebook C# SDK. Before Microsoft, Nathan was a Senior Software Engineer at Thuzi where he worked on social media applications and analytics tools. He has experience building Windows Azure applications that handle large traffic spikes and maintain high availability and performance. He is also actively involved in open source development and the developer community.

17:00-17:50

How to get productive in a project in 24h

So you are entering a new contract, or maybe its just a new project you are being transfered to. How do you get up, going, and committing on your first day? How to identify the areas of the system that are risky or problematic? This session looks at tools and strategies to reach this goal coming from a speaker who regularly works for less than a week with a team and needs to provide value within that period of time.

Greg Young

Greg Young is an independent consultant who lives in two suitcases (literally). When not travelling around working for clients throughout the world you can often find him on the domain driven design list, blogging at codebetter.com, or floating upside down in a kayak through rapids.