MinneBar07Sessions


Sessions Schedule (please see the session listings below for descriptions)

 

We can accommodate a ton of sessions at MinneBar. Please feel free to add a session for anything you are interested in so like-minded folks can get together and discuss the topic(s). At minnebar sessions need not be big productions, though that's fine too. They can range from lightly structured discussions to coding jam sessions to full fledged, ready to take on the road presentations.

 

There will even be open spaces at the event for spontaneous topics and sessions just find an open s spot and some friends and start talking.

 

Session Descriptions

 

Translating Geek: Executable Documentation

Robert Fischer - Enfranchised Mind (Blog)

How to improve communication and demonstrate technical accomplishments with Fit-based executable documentation. Customers get to give requirements by example, QAs get a test case language that can be run directly in the application, developers get red light/green light specs: it's a beautiful thing.

You can do that? Selling agile to the enterprise

Ben Edwards (Refactr) & Ross Niemi (ThoughtWorks)

Clients are often wary of Agile methods, if for no other reason than we have been telling them for years that they must define every detail up front so we can build it right. Now we want to tell them that iteration and collaboration is the way to go. Why should they listen? Come discuss this topic and tell us how you do it.

Marketing Your Technology Startup

Derrick Shields & Brian "Bex" Huff

Before you can pitch Agile development methods (see above), you've got to have someone to pitch to in the first place! You've put a lot of time and hard work into developing your product, but now you need to put yourself out there. We'll discuss marketing your services if you're a service-oriented group, and marketing your Web Application if your a product-oriented company. wino kredyt mieszkaniowy sprzedam mieszkanie sprzedam bilet

 

Topics will briefly cover SEO/SEM, Social Networking (online and off), Viral Marketing, and utilizing Local Resources. This will be a very open discussion. If you have successfully launched your own brand in the past, please come and share your stories for those just starting out!

Product Launch: From the initial itch to a global marketplace

Matthew Dornquast

Have an itch? Launching a product? Launched one? Let's talk!

Over the last 6 years, Code 42 developed the technology that launched 6 other startups.

In January, we launched our own consumer product entitled CrashPlan.

I'll share why we did it, how we did it, what worked well and what did not.

 

Dojo Javascript Toolkit

Chris Barber

The Dojo Toolkit is the standard library Javascript never had. I'll talk about Dojo's package system and some of the more popular packages for doing Ajax and Widgets. Since Dojo is huge, this will be an overview, but if there's interest, I can give a second talk that dives deeper into Dojo.

Does the world need more storage?

Paul Prawdiuk

SAN, NAS and now Clustered Storage (AKA Grid Storage) Do we really need another way to store data?

FireSeed Streaming Supercomputer

Justin Kruger, Bob Waldron et al.

The FireSeed Streaming Supercomputer (FS3) is an ad hoc tech project for designing and building a GPU-cluster supercomputer. This session will give an overview of the project, elicit your suggestions, answer your questions and, with a bit of luck, interest you in participating in the project. If time permits, we'll get into some of the technical details with an NVIDIA 8800 and the CUDA SDK, or possibly have a follow-up tech session for those interested in poking at the guts of this technology.

A Highly Kinetic, Semi Dangerous Exposition

William Gurstelle

What is this about? Well, definitely *not* about virtual technology. Visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA3zqaz3kmM to get an idea of the topic

Innovation in a Convergent World

Bryan Strawser, Target Stores

In today’s world, when the world of IT and physical security are converging, how do organizations learn to work together internally and continue to innovate? In this presentation, hear one corporation’s example of managing through a major convergence effort and the lessons they learned along the way.

Revenge of the Type Systems

Paul Cantrell

Every day, the majority of the population goes about their daily lives, blissfully unaware that all around them, a secret war is raging: the war between static and dynamic type systems. Why do programmers care? Because differences in type systems, even subtle ones, present difficult and important trade-offs in how programmers work with a language. This talk aims to get past the "type wars," and take a level-headed look at those trade-offs, sans dogma. Java, Ruby, and Haskell will be under the microscope. Ace programming expertise not required — this talk is for anybody curious about the fundamental differences between popular languages, code slingers and code dabblers alike.

Functional Languages and Agile Development

Robert Fischer - Enfranchised Mind (Blog)

Functional programming provides a lot of power in a little bit of code: they are a fundamental change in the way problems are thought about, just as object-oriented languages were before them. So how does this impressive new technical paradigm fit with the impressive new technical paradigm of Agile development? What practical consequences are there for adopting Agile development methods outside of the object-oriented realm? I don't have all the answers for these questions, but I've got some choice thoughts: anyone with some ideas is welcome to discuss.

RESTful Development

J Wynia - Software Developer, Writer and Geek

While SOAP and RPC dominated the stage a few years ago, REST has been stealing the stage as a way of developing for the web that's more in line with how HTTP itself works. Where SOAP and RPC are all about the verbs, REST is all about resources. So, what does that difference mean? How do you approach RESTful development? This discussion will provide an introduction to the topic using the Atom Publishing Protocol as an example. My own implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol is in the planning stages and I'd love to hear from others interested in the topic.

Web 2.0: In business, out of beta

Bruno Bornsztein, Dan Grigsby, Aaron Mentele, Ben Moore, Matt Thompson, et al

Panel discussion: developing an app, getting noticed, building community, and making money.|

Why you need to make your Web site accessible to the disabled

Jenny McDermott

Get more customers, prepare other Webmasters for your own old age, oh and avoid lawsuits too. This session is hands-on, so bring your laptop.

Design 2.0: What's a web designer to do?

Ben Edwards, Christopher Leighton-Brooder, Stefan Hartwig, Garrick Van Buren, Norman Orstad, and Margaret Andrews.

What do web designers face today, what are some current trends that are good and what are some that need to fade away, what do we see coming in the future.

An Introduction to Groovy and Grails

or, How I learned that I could save my knowledge without losing my mind

Jesse O'Neill-Oine

Learn how Groovy and Grails can help you to move into the wonderful world of dynamic languages and convention over configuration without having to give up all your built up knowledge of Java. Groovy is a powerful dynamic language that runs on the JVM and integrates seamlessly with Java. Grails is an MVC web framework that is built on proven and scalable open source frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, Quartz, and Site Mesh.

Introduction to natural language processing

Frank Schilder, Gary Berosik

Join us for a presentation and discussion of some natural language processing techniques that can help you leverage the deeper knowledge content of unstructured and unfielded information in your files and on the web!

Coworking

Tom Brice, Justin Grammens, Dan Grigsby

A creative and collaborative environment with developers from a wide range of organizations working and sharing ideas does not have to end after Minnebar. We will have a discussion to promote and guage interest of how a Coworking environment might succeed in the Twin Cities area. We will also discuss how this concept of working space could be applied to other industries as well. The Coworking WIKI, defines Coworking as: cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.

symfony PHP5 Framework

Dave Dash

Building web applications has become a lot easier with a host of new frameworks (symfony, rails, cakePHP, django to name a few). I'll cover some of the reasons we went with symfony and cut down a lot of time. I'll try to highlight some of what symfony has to offer.

Designing for Use

Garrick Van Buren

Is your next web app build to be used or looked at? Will people want to use it the 5th or 6th time? Bring your projects and leave with napkin sketch wireframes. This is a working session on designing front-end interfaces to make people smile.

Web Framework Panel

Jack Ungerleider (Zope), Nate Straz (Django), Scott Vlaminck (Grails), Derrick Shields (Code Ignitor), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails)

A panel discussion on different web frameworks and why you should use them. Jack will support Zope (Python). Nate will support Django (Python). Scott will support Grails (Java/Groovy), Derrick will support Code Igniter (PHP), David Heinemeier Hansson will discuss Rails (Ruby).

Ruby on Rails: An Overview

Luke Francl and Jon Dahl

Ruby on Rails currently has a lot of momentum and a lot of hype. We will cut through the hype and explain what Ruby on Rails is, how it works, what makes it special, and what pitfalls to avoid.

Video Transcoding

Jon Dahl

Online video is big these days, from Youtube's $1.65B price tag, to the many Youtube clones/competitors, to video blogs, to Apple's iTunes/iTV video strategy. This session will discuss the technical and business issues related to online video, including: video codecs; accepting user-submitted video; tools for transcoding video (and audio); and deploying a video transcoder. A Ruby-based video file inspector will be shown. Discussion is encouraged, so if you have experience with or questions about video transcoding, please share!

MonoRail

Kevin Dotzenrod and Louis DeJardin

MonoRail is a dotnet based MVC Web Framework inspired by Action Pack.

It differs from the standard WebForms way of development as it enforces separation of concerns; controllers just handle application flow, models represent the data, and the view is just concerned about presentation logic. Consequently, you write less code and end up with a more maintainable application.

Startup Camp Is Coming

Dan Grigsby, Jamie Thingelstad

Inspired by Startup School and Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks, Startup Camp is Minneapolis-St. Paul's own day-long startup bootcamp. Basic premise: developers spend a day learning from successful startup founders, venture capitalists, etc. Give us 50 minutes now; help us flesh out our outline by telling us what you want out of Startup Camp and we'll put it together by the end of summer.

A look around the corner: How permission-based marketing, data-alignment, and RFID will shape the future of commerce.

Jeffery Giesener

Come and participate in a brainstorm/discussion on how technology will shape the future of marketing and commerce and how it all will affect our time, our privacy, and our business.

Me, You and EC2

Bruno Bornsztein

Join me for a look at using Amazon's infrastructure-on-demand services (EC2, the Elastic Computing Cloud) to bootstrap your next web application. EC2 means you can get the scalability and reliability of Amazon.com's data-centers without having to raise venture money first. Can you really run the next YouTube on this stuff? Come join our discussion and find out.

Emerging Technology in Social Computing

Christopher Enright

Come discuss the use of emerging technology in Social Computing with the Chief Technology Officer of a leading full-service digital agency, IconNicholson.

Flex

Matt Bauer

The Adobe framework Flex based upon Flash has been getting a lot of buzz. Come join this discussion to find out why

Faust: Flash Augmenting Standards

Matt Pennig

If you're a Flash developer, you've probably struggled with making your Flash-based site search engine-friendly. Or maybe you're a hardcore Web Standards advocate, and can't stand the thought of using Flash because of all of its poor accesbility. Now you can have your cake and eat it too. Using a method space150 has dubbed Faust, you can layer together all the best in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash to reach virtually 100% of your audience and become best friends with Google at the same time.

JRuby: A Free-form Q/A and Demo Session

Charlie and Tom from JRuby

JRuby will release 0.9.9 this week, the last major release before the 1.0 beta/RC comes out in May. Rails is now running very well, and more and more apps are being tested and deployed into production. Performance has improved by an order of magnitude since last year, and the compiler is starting to take shape. Rather than take up your time with what we think is interesting, we'd like to field your questions, your ideas of things to try out, and have an open discussion and and demo/playtime session to show what JRuby's all about.

 

The First Thing About Ajax

Michael Lehmkuhl

If you're a web developer who wants to get asynchronous or a designer who just wants to understand how it works, this is for you. In addition to an overview of Ajax technologies, we'll cover some basic how-tos with code examples, and related issues and pitfalls. If you're new to Ajax, but haven't got a clue about which library to use, we'll have a quick discussion of a few of the good ones out there. If you're an Ajax veteran, you're certainly welcome to come and participate, but your cup of knowledge probably won't be topped off.

 

Social Networks: How the GetGo Team Created GetGoMN

Scott Littman, George Reese, and Graeme Thickens

The GetGoMN team discusses how they built Minnesota's online community for entrepreneurs, investors, and those who support entrepreneurship in Minnesota. The discussion covers both the business aspects and technology of !GetGoMN.

 


 

Other Ideas

 

Mongrel or the "Best" way to deploy a large Rails app

Rails/Ruby Performance

Rails Security

Ajax

Design oriented discussions, interaction, visual, information,etc.

Development with Virtual Machines/VMWare appliances (J Wynia)

Adobe Apollo/Spry Frameworks (someone should really do this :)

Microformats

Accessibility and Usability

Search Engine-Friendly Ajax/Flash/etc.

Integrated Marketing, web 2.0 style

Groovy - Java's best friend!

Dynamic Languages Panel

symfony framework

lucene search engine and zend search lucene

Technology and Society-The Future -broad concepts

 

 

Also see the MinneBarDemos page or go back to MinneBar