Excellence
Get Excellent using Git

This workshop will take very new and emerging Git users and bring them to a heightened level of productivity by leveraging Git's powerful range of productivity features in a hands on exploration of much of what Git has to offer. Some topics to be covered include: * Rebasing * Merging * Branching models * Working with refs * Git internals * The Reflog * Reset, revert and the right way to undo * Building your own Git scripts

Excellence
Visualisations and Infographics

This class will talk about the value of good visualisations for conveying information and getting your story across. Whether that's a location privacy scandal that caused US Senate hearings, or something more day-to-day, when you're dealing with messy data presenting it in the right manner can mean the difference between fame and obscurity. A successful application, or an ignominious failure.

Excellence
Hacking Developer Productivity

Serious software development requires the proper use of tools, practices, and settings to eliminate the tedium involved with creating quality software. From the individual developer to a large distributed team, there are many tips, tricks, and shortcuts that can save seconds, minutes, or even hours every day. By using the proper tools, following the best practices, and optimizing the development environment, this talk will help you get things done more quickly and with more predictable results.

Excellence
Dev and Ops Collaboration at the Worst of Times

This talk addresses the need for developers to understand and collaborate with operations, as well as the consequences when collaboration does not happen. It's an argument for DevOps, by examining a pair of case studies: one where this collaboration happened, and one where it did not.

Excellence
A less technical talk on technical communication

As developers, we spend more time communicating with humans than we do with computers. How can we do that more effectively? How can we be more accurate and concise in our communication? How can we best find analogies which illustrate the desired point? When working with difficult to describe concepts, how can we more easily define them and improve our communication of them? What short and long term benefits can we reap from learning to more effectively communicate? (Yeah, very touchy-feely...)

Excellence
Testers and Developers Learn From Each Other

The rise of cross-functional agile teams has helped to bring a greater sense of collaboration and mutual respect between developers and testers. But many teams still struggle with the basic issues. What is the role of the tester in an agile team? How many testers do we need? What does a team gain from having professional testers? Perhaps there is another way to approach these questions.

Excellence
API - the hidden UI

Just as the food chain is made out of more actors than the bacteria and the top predator, the software chain contains more than the CPU and the end user. User experience is typically about the end user experience, but we should not forget the developers. This talk will explore the API as a user interface; what makes it more or less user friendly? What difference do things like naming, namespace structure and constructor design make? What if you could make other developers really reuse your code?

Excellence
Keeping up with the changing landscape of software usage

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.

Excellence
Programming and minimalism

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.

Excellence
Speed up your ruby on rails test suite through some simple techniques

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.

Excellence
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.

Excellence
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.

Excellence
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.

Excellence
Software development in F1

This experience report is based on more than 3 years of software development in F1 with Scrum, Lean and XP, developing evolving and maintaining software to support the F1 racing team from the vehicle conception and throughout every test and race.Have we survived the challenge? How did we survived? Which team and coding practices emerged? What are the most valuable lessons learned from this experience?

Excellence
Domain Models and Composite Applications

As developers use DDD principles to build larger and richer systems, many of them run into performance and maintainability problems as their domain model grows to meet the demands of the system. Performance problems addressed by eager fetching reappear later in other parts of the system, now requiring the use of lazy loading for the same entities. Join Udi as he shows the use of Bounded Contexts to turn monolithic systems into composite applications, now with multiple lean and mean domain models

Excellence
Credit Crunch Code – Time to Pay Back the Technical Debt

Technical debt is the cost of putting off good development practices. This debt, must be paid back to avoid the “interest payments” becoming crippling. This presentation will further define technical debt, before examining some anti-patterns and how to avoid them. We’ll then look at how to put a financial cost on technical debt, and end by examining some measures to identify technical debt in a code base.

Excellence
Development is a game!

Certifications are a mixed bag. Training is sometimes great, sometimes inadequate. How do these things affect you in your career development? In this session we talk about exciting ways to change this - to make learning fun and relevant, to make certifications have meaning, and to create a powerful community.

Excellence
My boss doesn't understand me

Well, you probably don't understand your boss either. You both have different value needs - your jobs and career paths are different, your performance metrics are different, the political games you play are different. What's needed is a value translator. Visual controls like kanban can serve as a visual translator ... while they help you and your team manage your project. Jim Benson will describe how value translators work how to gain an appreciation for other people's value needs, and how to normalize those needs for better team performance and a happier workplace.