Austin Bound for SXSW

We have a posse of Carbon Five folk leaving tomorrow for SXSW.  If you’re going, check out our sessions:

Play at Work: Agile Games for Productive Teams

Friday 3:30

Get together with other conference attendees and play games in this unique participatory interaction. If you are curious about Agile development and want an insider view of the activities Agile teams do every day, this session is for you. A special emphasis will be placed on experiential learning through Agile games and exercises, such as “Story Writing” and “Planning Poker,” in this hands-on, interactive session. Learn first-hand how games and other Agile tools and techniques can be successfully adopted by project teams, resulting in rapid delivery and improved teamwork. Participants will be strongly encouraged to share their own experiences and learn from each other in this session.

Embracing NoSQL: Your First Cassandra Project

Sunday 3:30: Workshop

What is Cassandra? What is NoSQL? Why are sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Digg all using these new technologies? And what does that mean to me? The popularity of the NoSQL movement has exploded in the last year or two, as a number of these non-traditional data storage systems have gone from experimental curiosities to powerful production-ready engines that power the largest real-time social networking sites on the Web. Born out of Facebook, Cassandra is one of super-hot players in this new movement. We recently had an opportunity to build a new social networking site using it for the first time, and we want to share what we learned. In this presentation:

• You will discover the NoSQL movement and the big players who lead it.
• You will learn both *how* and *why* you should build your site using Cassandra.
• You will understand what Cassandra offers, and how it differs from traditional databases as well as other NoSQL competitors like CouchDB and MongoDB.
• You will walk through real code examples that can help you bootstrap your own Cassandra project.
• You will see where we stumbled along the way, so you can avoid making the same mistakes. Code samples are in Ruby on Rails.

Look for the Carbon Five logo… See you there!