Peter Grogono
Professor and Associate Chair, Concordia University
online: personal website
Modular Concurrency
Software development moves onwards and upwards to ever higher levels of abstraction, further and further away from the code that actually runs on the hardware. This is a good thing – the more details we can hide the better – but it conceals the unfortunate fact that modern programming languages match neither current software requirements nor the underlying architecture. Significant contributions to concurrency and encapsulation, made during the 1970s and 1980s, have been lost in the excitement of programming with objects and networks. Programming languages remain the basic tool of the software engineer and they must provide the reliability, security, and performance that modern applications require. In the talk, I will propose a new programming paradigm designed to meet the needs of the next generation of software. The key features of the paradigm are strong encapsulation, full concurrency, malleability, and scale-free design.
David Heinemeier Hansson
2005 Google and O’Reilly’s Open Source Best Hacker Award Recipient
Ruby on Rails Founder
online: blog | bio
Ruby on Rails: The Whirlwind Tour
Get 1st class tickets to tour with Ruby on Rails. A glimpse behind the headlines, a look at the fundamental shift that this Yet Another Framework is bringing to the world of web-application development. See the beautiful of domain-specific languages in full effect and learn about the holy cows we had to slaughter to enjoy the view.
Kathy Sierra
Co-Creator of Head First Series
Finalist for a Jolt Software Development award
Founder of Javaranch.com
online: blog | bio
Creating Passionate Users
What do game designers, neurobiologists, and filmmakers know about creating passionate users? How can we create not just user-friendly, but brain-friendly software? How can we help inspire users at a deeper emotional level?
By reverse-engineering passion, we learn the key attributes shared by the things people are passionate about. And if we can figure out how to incorporate some of these attributes into our software, APIs, and documentation, we can create applications that can inspire users to love and ultimately evangelize what you create. Thanks to the latest research in brain science, we now have a much clearer path for creating user experiences that can turn even the most mundane task into an engaging interaction.
Whether you’re building commercial applications, developer APIs and frameworks, or end-user documentation and training, user/brain-friendliness can make the difference between frustrated users and those who can’t wait to see what you come up with next.
Bio:
Kathy Sierra has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin’, MGM). She is the co-creator of O’Reilly’s bestselling Head First computer book series (winner of the Jolt Cola/Software Development Magazine award in 2004, and named to the Amazon Top Ten Computer Books of the year for the past two years). She’s also the founder of one of the largest programming community web sites, javaranch.com. A former master trainer for Sun Microsystems, she spent several years teaching engineers lthe latest Java technologies. Most recently, she’s been writing the “Creating Passionate Users” blog and book (published by O’Reilly in early 2006).
Chad Fowler
Fight the Traffic
Despite what you may have heard on the news, it’s a great time to be a software developer. Opportunities abound, but most of us just aren’t looking for them. The sky is falling, but it’s nothing to complain about. We’ll take the tumultuous environment of global software engineering and turn it into a playground for the passionate programmer. When is Starbucks better than your locally owned favorite? What can we learn from Wal-Mart? Why was Apple stupid enough to get into a commodity market like MP3 players?
Bio:
Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the world’s largest corporations. He recently lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center. He is cofounder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby Conference, and is a leading contributor in the Ruby community. Chad is a contributor and editor for numerous books and is author of the recently released, My Job Went to India (and all I got was this lousy book): 52 Ways to Save Your Job and the upcoming Rails Recipes.
Connie Heitmeyer
Head of the Software Engineering Section of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Center for High Assurance Computer Systems,
Chief Designer of the SCR
A Panacea or Academic Poppycock: Formal Methods Revisited
Most programmers avoid formal methods and their support tools due to
the perceived difficulty of applying them. This talk describes the
many different roles that formally based tools can play in debugging,
verifying, and validating software and software artifacts, with
emphasis on tools for specifying and analyzing software requirements.
Tools for requirements construction and analysis are of special
interest because capturing and documenting requirements presents one
of the most difficult problems in software development. The talk
also describes the presenter’s recent experience and lessons learned
in specifying software components of NASA’s International Space
System and in the formal specification and verification of a
security-critical cryptographic system. The talk concludes by
identifying some open problems in software engineering that require
new research.
Bio:
Connie Heitmeyer is the chief designer of the SCR (Software Cost
Reduction) toolset, a formally based set of tools which has been
distributed to more than 200 organizations in academia, industry, and
government and applied to many real-world systems. The head of the
Software Engineering Section of the Naval Research Laboratory’s
Center for High Assurance Computer Systems, she recently served as
co-program chair for MEMOCODE 2005, the 3rd International Conference
on Formal Methods in Hardware/Software Co-Design, and as co-chair of
the 2005 Experience Reports Track at the International Conference on
Software Engineering. She is a member of the editorial boards of the
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, the
Requirements Engineering Journal, and the Journal on Software and
System Modeling. Her research interests are in formal specification
and formal analysis of software and system requirements and of high
assurance software systems. She is also very interested in
transferring formal methods technology and tools to software
practitioners.
