BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER GATHERINGS

Sci-Fi 2008

Scott W. Ambler
Monday, March 3, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

The 2007-2008 television and movie season has provided us with a bonanza of science fiction: Jericho, Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman, Torchwood, Dr. Who, Stargate Atlantis, Iron Man, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Star Trek XI … Let's get together and share our opinions about what is actually worth watching. If you like we can even discuss why none of the other captains hold a candle to James T. Kirk.

Are Software Coding Skills Necessary?

Christian Gross
Monday, March 3, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Back in the early '90s, when writing code, it was necessary to understand things like large, medium, small and compact memory models—and you needed to understand why you prefixed a method call with loaddx. At that time, it was mainstream software development. Here we are in 2008, and raw software skills aren't as crucial anymore, at least in mainstream development. What's crucial today is in-depth business knowledge. However, "the business" seems to want developers to read its mind and understand the business problems intuitively. That can only happen by truly knowing "the business." How does one develop the necessary business knowledge? Are we acquiring the right skills, studying the right topics? How do we prepare ourselves for working in this environment? Come and join the discussion and debate the possible pros and cons of this approach.

Mobile Development Meets Open Source (and Vice Versa)

Yael Aharon
Ravi Belwal
Oren Levine
Monday, March 3, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

That phone in your bag is a powerful computer, and is becoming a full participant in the open source revolution. Nokia's S60 platform and Apple, among others, used the open source WebKit engine to create desktop-quality mobile browsers. Symbian and S60 added POSIX and other standard C API's to their SDK so that developers can use open source code in their mobile application projects. Join us to discuss the S60 experience with these open source developments, and your ideas for how to make open source more mobile, and mobile more open.

Leverage or Die: Challenges and Opportunities in the Era of Mixed Code

Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet
Gary Phillips, Director of Open Source Initiatives at Symantec Corporation
Bill McQuaide, Senior EVP of Product Development at Black Duck Software
Bernard Golden, Chief Executive Officer at Navica
Tuesday, March 4, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Developers face a multitude of challenges when working with mixed code. Beyond just support and maintenance, developers must react quickly to security vulnerability alerts and control version proliferation. Join industry leader Bill McQuaide, Senior Vice President of Product Development of Black Duck Software (formerly SVP at RSA Security) and a panel of distinguished panelists as they debate and discuss the challenges facing developers in the era of mixed code.

Parallelism Has Gone Mainstream - Maximize Application Performance with Intel Software Development Technologies

Intel Technical Consulting Engineers
Tuesday, March 4, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

This session will describe the current state of the art for optimizing and programming for parallelism for multi-core processors using the technology found in the current Intel® software development products. The session will also cover some new techniques and methods for implementing parallelism that you may see in compilers in the future. We’ll look at some different parallelism methods under development, such as software transactional memory, array notations and others that our research labs are investigating. These sessions are expected to be interactive to get your feedback on these new ideas.

Inside LinkedIn: Developing Scalable Social Networks in the Real World

Ruslan Belkin, Director of Engineering, LinkedIn
Nicholas Dellamaggiore, Principal Engineer, Networks Group, LinkedIn
Sean Dawson, Sr. Software Engineer, Communication Platform, LinkedIn
Tuesday, March 4, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

LinkedIn grew to be the largest and most reputable professional network in the world in less then 5 years. During this interactive presentation we will share with audience the experience of building scalable social network applications the agile way – the challenges, the solutions, the technologies and the processes.

Let's Fork! Hacking the JDK

Elliotte Rusty Harold
Thursday, March 6, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Now that Sun has open sourced Java, how do we take advantage of that? Can/should we explore language variants? What bugs can we fix? What libraries can we replace? And just how do we redistribute all this without running afoul of Sun's lawyers? This will be a brainstorming session to kick off some serious fun and maybe even useful work with Java.

SD Investment Club

Christian Gross
Thursday, March 6, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Now that Sun has open sourced Java, how do we take advantage of that? Can/should we explore language variants? What bugs can we fix? What libraries can we replace? And just how do we redistribute all this without running afoul of Sun's lawyers? This will be a brainstorming session to kick off some serious fun and maybe even useful work with Java.

Native Code is Not Dead

David Intersimone
Thursday, March 6, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

With all the buzz about managed code and dynamic languages, a developer might think that native code is dead. The reality is that most of the real world still runs on native code. ISVs and Micro ISVs thrive because they rely, every day, on native code to deliver packaged software. The next C++ standard, "0x", has helped focus attention on native code programming. The ubiquity of multi-core systems has also invigorated native code use. Come and join a discussion about native code development - "the rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated".