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.
What do you want to talk about? Suggest session ideas below. Sessions will be discussions of 50 minutes in length (including time for Q&A) and can cover just about any topic you can dream up. Expect some topics to be introduced and added the day of the even as well as everyone gets a feel for the crowd and what they would like to talk about.
Projectors We plan to have projectors for sessions that need them; we'll assume you need one unless you're doing a pannel and plan/schedule accordingly.
Got an idea? Add it to the Ideas section below.
Sessions with Leaders
Executable Documentation with Fit
Robert Fischer - Enfranchised Mind (Blog)
How to improve communication and demonstrate technical accomplishments with Fit-based executable documentation. Your customers get to give requirements by example, your QAs get a scripting language they can write, and your developers get red light/green light specs: it's a beautiful thing.
You can do that? Selling agile to the enterprise
BenEdwards
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
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.
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.
JSAN
Dave Rolsky
JSAN is a project to bring the ideas behind Perl's CPAN to Javascript. JSAN is a code repository and mirroring system, but more importantly, it embodies a philsophy of building small libraries that do one thing well.
Intro to Catalyst
Dave Rolsky
Catalyst is yet another web framework, this time in Perl. Learn a bit about how it works.
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 what programmers can do with a language. This talk aims to take a level-headed look at those trade-offs, sans dogma. 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!
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.
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.
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.
Jack Ungerleider (Zope), Nate Straz (Django), Scott Vlaminck (Grails), Derrick Shields (Code Ignitor)
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), Derrick will support Code Igniter (PHP).
If you would like to join the panel, add your name and which framework you would like to support. Extra support from the audience is welcome.
- 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.
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
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.
Ideas
Ajax
Design oriented discussions, interaction, visual, information,etc.
Development with Virtual Machines/VMWare appliances (J Wynia)
Adobe Apollo/Spry/Flex 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
Also see the MinneBarDemos page or go back to MinneBar
