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MinneBarSessions

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on April 13, 2008 at 10:39:10 pm
 

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 existing sessions below as templates. Note the anchor tag that will allow you to link directly to the description

 

Session Descriptions

 

Refresh TwinCities
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.

 

Why Drupal?
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.

 

GTD for Startups
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.

 

Scaling with Software
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.

 

Screw You LAMP. Plus Virtualization
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...

 

Functional Programming: It's Not Just for Academics Anymore (Now With Code!)
Robert Fischer (corporate site blog)
Last year's "Functional Programming with Agile Development" was a bigger hit than expected, and the overwhelming reaction was that it was the conversation was good, but people wanted to see some code. So this year, come see how functional programming can be used to solve things more interesting than calculating factorials.

This session is presented in honor of my first contract programming Ocaml.

 

Immersive Environments:More Than a Game
John A. Grozik (BIO)
"Grozik Associates has been exploring immersive environments for real and virtual worlds for more than 20 years. This session will discuss Gartner Inc.'s prediction that by 2011, 80% of all internet access will be in a 3D browser. The "WOW" factor has turned corporate. SecondLife, Qwaq, Wonderworld, Multiverse 3D, Areae, Metaplace, Vivaty, There, Club Penguin, Active Worlds, Forterra Systems, Gaia, Habbo Hotel, Neopets, Whyville, Kaneva. 3B and others are now competing for your avatar's eyes. Have a favorite space? Bring it on and join this immersive environments smack down.

 

Blogging for Benjamins:How To Turn Your Topical Blog Into Cash
Jeramey Jannene (A blog making cash)
This session will explore everyone's burning desire to turn babbling about their passions into a side income stream. This session is intended for those currently making money blogging, those struggling to, and those wanting to to discuss best practices and share experiences. Jeramey Jannene will start the discussion with sharing his experiences covering the Milwaukee Bucks and downtown Milwaukee.

 

Communication For Geeks:How to Influence Your Boss, Your Customers, And Your Team
Brian 'Bex' Huff (Bezzotech)
Ask any employer: the single most important secondary skill for computer geeks is the ability to communicate. Unfortunately, very few of us practice this vital skill. As a result, the *majority* of enterprise software initiatives fail, and usually because of poor communication. This talk will present powerful new ways of thinking and communicating, so you can better connect with the needs of others, and influence decision making on all levels.

 

Small Teams, Big Results
Ben Edwards (Refactr)
"These days you don't need a huge team to develop great software. Come to this session if you want to share the lessons learned and hear about the experiences and 'secrets' of small teams getting more things done with less. I'll moderate the discussion and provide several starter topics."

 

Design Coding
Ben Edwards (Refactr)
"XTHML & CSS are tools that are just as (more so?) important as Photoshop for today's web designer. Are you a designer looking to improve your marketability? Put down the color theory book and learn some JavaScripting. The hottest job descriptions out there now are the 'client-side coder', 'creative tech' and 'AJAX developer'. Don't believe me? Try to hire one of these folks. Let me know how that goes."

 

Intro to iPhone Development
Jesse O'Neill-Oine (Refactr)
Basic introduction to developing for the iPhone SDK in Objective-C.

 

Meta programming in Groovy
Scott Vlaminck (Refactr)
Discuss and show examples of using Meta programming in the Groovy language.

 

Social Search in the Corporate Enviroment
Rich Hoeg (Project Report from my Blog)
Discuss and show examples of social search and networking inside the corporation. I will be happy to demonstrate Connectbeam which is a social search tool which resides inside our firewall, yet accesses external Google and our internal search engine to deliver work focused tags, user profiles, and bookmarks ... as well as one's normal search results.

 

From Programming to Profit: Skills To Pay The Bills
Derrick Shields (WebproLeads)
Talented web developers and designers are often continually spinning their wheels, chasing projects that will never be successful, catch traction, or see the light of day. I'll discuss how to take yourself out of the 'Web 2.0' hype and begin providing services that consumers and businesses actually want and will pay for, including real-life examples of how our business changed after doing just that.

 

Bringing RAD to Content Repositories
Matt Zumwalt (MediaShelf)
Find out how MediaShelf and a bunch of Minneapolis developers are bringing RAD to Content Repositories. Topics include: 1) What is a content repository? 2) What is Fedora Commons? 3) What can content repositories learn from Rails developers? 3) ruby-fedora and activefedora 4) activerepository

 

Merb 1.0: Ruby on Rails that Scales
Kyle Drake and Kyle Wilson (Net Brew Design)
Merb is an up-and-coming web application framework for Ruby that is very similar to Rails, but provides a complete re-write of the internal codebase. Aside from being thread-safe, Merb is a clean, fast framework that is easy to understand, and gives developers a choice in which components will be used. Combined with the powerful JRuby interpreter, Merb 1.0 will resolve many of the (somewhat overblown) problems with Rails, without sacrificing the smart development practices that have made it so popular (and given us our lives back).

We will introduce the latest Merb release, what technical problems it is attempting to resolve, how it compares to Rails, and why so many Rails developers are expressing interest in switching. I have bleeding edge Merb code to show off for a neat site we're working on, which would have been much more difficult to develop using Rails. Other Merbistas are encouraged to join us; it would be metal if you brought a lot of brutal code and extreme opinions to share.

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