Next year will be the third time Carbon Five visits Austin for SXSW Interactive. We’ve proposed some hands-on, take-away focused sessions that we ourselves would enjoy and think you would too.
For example Embracing NoSQL – Your First Cassandra Project is an extension of the talk Mike gave at the Los Angeles NoSQL meetup a couple of months ago. The ultimate goal of the session is to NOT just “digg” (pardon the pun) into why many real-time social sites have started using Cassandra and other non-traditional storage systems, but to have you walking out with code to bootstrap your own projects with.
Similarly, in Get Your Act Together: Build Better iPhone Apps, Jonah plans on demonstrating the agile iOS development patterns he’s been documenting here on our blog. You’ll learn how you can continue to rapidly deliver (and have Apple approve) builds of your app while meeting the higher quality expectations of the maturing app marketspace.
Finally, Alon is bringing to Austin the quite literally interactive session of Play at Work: Agile Games for Productive Teams, which he presented earlier this year in San Francisco. By having you actually play through games we use every day such as “Planning Poker”, you’ll get a much better sense of how they can be incorporated into your own agile development efforts than any simple presentation could provide.
Of course, we don’t just want to talk about our experiences, but want to hear about yours too, either at the sessions or over a drink later that day! So if you’re interested, please click the links above and vote for our panels, as your voice is an important factor in SXSW’s panel selection process.
And if you see any of us at Austin next year or sooner, don’t hesitate to say “Hi”; we’ll take you up on those drinks!
I’m excited about our panel next Wed at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Blurring the Lines: From Human Centered Design to Customer Driven Development. We’re planning to share real world practices that help multi-disciplinary teams collaborate on creating great products.
We’ve got a good range of perspective and experience to draw from. Maria Giudice from Hot Studio is our user-centered designer, Rob Spiro from Aardvark is our user-centered product entrepreneur, Darren David from Stimulant is our multi-touch and NUI innovator, and I am our Agile software developer.
This event seems to have really caught on to the growing energy in the entrepreneurial community around strategies and techniques for creating products that people really want. Eric Ries is giving the keynote on Tuesday just one year after his first big conference presentation at Web 2.0 2009 and Steve Blank is giving the keynote Thursday. Both of these guys and the growing community around them have been inspiration to me and our work at Carbon Five over the last year for the answers they provide about how software development serves the goal of creating successful businesses and products.
I’ll be speaking next Tuesday evening for SD Forum in Palo Atlo about Spring MVC. It’s mostly an introductory talk, but I’ll weave in some opinions and lessons learned from real projects. I’ll cover many of the MVC features, including those introduced in 3.0, by walking through code for a running application.
Event Page
Networking (and pizza) starts at 6:30 and we’ll get down to business at 7:00. The night starts with a short talk about Agile Java by Bjorn Freeman-Benson, of New Relic fame.
If you’re still doing Java and you’re curious about Spring MVC, come join in the fun.
Next week at EBig Jonah and I are wrapping up our world tour of talking about Javascript testing. March 17th in Oakland: ”Recent evolutions in Javascript testing frameworks now allow creating test suites, test-driving development, and running tests on a continuous integration server. This allows us to support more complex Javascript, have confidence in the implementation, and push more of the logic from the server into the browser, reducing the load on the server.” The focus of the talk is walking through a suite of tests we build for a real-world example.
For those of you who caught it last week at the SDForum, here are the links people requested:
To sign up for next Wednesday, go to the EBig site.
I’m looking forward to participating in a panel Is Canvas the End of Flash? this month at SXSW on the role the new HTML Canvas element is playing in web development and how it compares to Flash. Much of the perspective I have for this panel comes from my long history working with Flash and from our recent work with Canvas for Isilon Systems on InsightIQ.
The panel has been organized by Greg Veen of SmallBatch, Inc., creators of TypeKit and includes Chet Haas from the Adobe Flex team, Nathan Germick from social gaming start up Wonderhill and Ben Galbraith from Palm and Mozilla, also lead of the ambitious Bespin project.
Come check us out if you’re going to be in Austin.
Also check out some of the presentations by friends of Carbon Five at SXSW:
From Dinosaurs to Digital: A Museum Convergence Success Story from Maria Giudice of Hot Studio on her work with Jonathon Denholtz of the California Academy of Sciences.
Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends a panel on social search organized by Brynn Evans that includes CEO Max Ventilla from our recently acquired client Aardvark.
Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms a panel on interactions that go beyond keyboard+mouse includes Nathan Moody of Stimulant, masters of the multitouch Microsoft Surface and NUI design.
