Memphis/Mid-South JUG

Who's Coming?

Tim Berglund will be in town courtesy of the No Fluff Just Stuff tour (and hosts of the first annual Mid-South Software Symposium - April 23-25, 2010 at the Memphis Hilton) to talk about agile database development!

We probably have room for 2-3 lightning talks - please let Matt know ASAP if you'd like to give a talk. Thanks!

We will again be treated to dinner/snacks courtesy of our principal sponsor, Vaco Technology. We will also have several exciting door prizes, including a free pass to the NFJS event!

Speakers:

• Jonathan Rossi

  

  Over 18 years with IBM in roles ranging from application development in NASA's Mission Control Center to technical sales.

  Topic: Data Grids

  The talk will cover how Data Grids can reduce the workload on backend databases and scale well beyond traditional caches. Some better known Data Grids are products like IBM's WebSphere eXtreme Scale, Oracle's Coherence, JBoss Infinispan and Terracotta.

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• Tim Berglund

  

  Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the August Technology Group, which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.

  His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at user groups in the United States, and helps lead IASA Denver and the Denver Open Source User Group. He is currently writing the book, Deploying Grails (to be published by O'Reilly), due out in 2010.

  He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.

  Topic: Practical Agile Database Development

  Do your team's agile practices extend to the database? Agile methods are fairly well-understood as they apply to code, but these principles are not commonly understood or practiced on the databases that typically accompany enterprise software projects. Learn the tools, techniques, and mindset your team needs to make incremental improvements to the database’s design over time with confidence.

  We'll cover Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage's vision of database agility as described in their book Refactoring Databases. We'll discuss the five-pointed constellation of evolutionary design, refactoring, automated testing, source control, and developer sandboxes, and how each of these practices contributes to successful database development. In particular, we'll look at how these practices are enabled by the open-source tool, Liquibase. We'll study a database badly in need of reform, select some refactorings from Ambler's catalog, and implement them in real time in a way that can satisfy the development team and the maybe even the production DBAs! This tool and the practices that animate it produce real results, cleaning up an area of development that is all too often left messy and uncontrolled. If there is a relational database in your life, you will benefit from this talk.

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• Tim Berglund

  

  Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the August Technology Group, which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.

  His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at user groups in the United States, and helps lead IASA Denver and the Denver Open Source User Group. He is currently writing the book, Deploying Grails (to be published by O'Reilly), due out in 2010.

  He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.

  Topic: Then Our Buildings Shape Us: Form and Content in Software Development

  The talk draws on examples from architecture and the arts to argue that creative artifacts adhere to a "form" which constrains what kinds of messages they convey. You can't delivery a eulogy in limerick, and you don't sing dirges at weddings. This concept applies to technology, which suggests that we should compare languages and platforms by looking at how they are typically used and what their communities value rather than by running benchmarks. It's difficult to summarize in a paragraph, but the argument ends up being coherent, if not universally accepted.

  As an aside, the idea for the talk came from this outstanding book, which has nothing to do with technology, but is worth reading:  

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• Matt Stine

  

  Matt is the Group Leader of Research Application Development in the Research Informatics Division of Information Sciences at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital here in Memphis, TN. Matt has been developing and supporting enterprise Java applications in support of life sciences research for St. Jude since 2001. Matt is a committer to multiple open source projects and is the founding member of the Memphis/Mid-South JUG. Matt earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Mississippi, and was a graduating member of the inaugural class of the Sally McDonnell-Barksdale Honors College. His current areas of interest include Groovy/Grails, cloud computing, Java concurrency, and functional programming.

  Topic: Readable Recipies

  From whom do you write code? For the compiler? Or for other humans? For whom should you write code? This talk will attempt to answer that question.

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• Pankaj Gupta

  

  Pankaj works as a Bioinformatics Application Developer in St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. He is enthusiastic about Linux and other open-source technologies.

  Topic: SQLLite

  A brief discussion of the SQLLite DB system.

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