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.

Use the example session below as a template if you like. Note the anchor tag that will allow you to link directly to the description

Session Descriptions

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.

Thomas Knoll (dydimustk.com)

"Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards." Find out how you can participate in the Refresh TwinCities community.

Allie Micka Advantage Labs

Each year, more award-winning, (high-profile sites are 'going Drupal'. It functions as a content management tool, a community platform, and an application framework. Is it trying to do too much? Can it be both powerful and economical? Will it work well for you? (hint: the short answers are No, Yes, and Probably ) Learn the technical and business reasons for choosing Drupal, and find out how to get the resources you need to get going.

Doreen Hartzell and Eric Hedberg (Enleiten)

Using David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system in an agile development environment. If you're using it, share your favorite tips. If you're curious, come find out the basic principles of the system and how it might work for you.

Austin Smith (Observer Media Group) and Eric Tremper (ArcStone Technologies)

An overview of several software-driven solutions to scaling high traffic web sites, including Memcache, Squid, and Varnish, several framework-specific techniques, and the beautiful basics of HTTP which enable some of these technologies. Come and discuss monitoring, tuning, and the subtle pain of caching.

Dan Grigsby (blog)

Consider the screw. Hammers, saws, levels and planes date back to pre-history. Screws are a relatively recent innovation, only finding their way into common use in the 18th century, only becoming mass produced in the 19th century, and only becoming standardized in the 20th century.

The history of the screw, particularly standardizing on the phillips head, is a parable of the future of IT. The technically inferior philips head screw won that generation of standards war, and in so doing, ushered in the era of mass produceable mechanical consumer goods.

LAMP is the philips head screw of our profession.

Don't buy it? I'll prove it using Wordpress, ActiveDirectory, the Facebook Platform and others to point to a near-future where serious web applications built by non-programmers from loosely coupled server-side components -- oh for a better term than "enterprise mashups" -- and where sys-admin joins blacksmith as a profession left behind by progress.

And that's just a setup for the next-next thing, loosely coupled zero administration virtualized applications...