Keynote Speakers
Dan Ingalls
Dan Ingalls, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, is best known for his work on the Smalltalk programming environment, which revolutionized computing for both users and developers through human-computer interaction, the object-oriented paradigm, and development in integrated environments. He also revolutionized graphics with BitBlt and its variations with rotation and antialiasing. For his noteworthy contributions, he has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and the ACM Software System Award. His most recent work takes these ideas to the World Wide Web through Sun Lab’s Lively Kernel Project.
The Lively Kernel
"Starting with the koan that JavaScript is the assembly language of the Internet, Dan will show how an entire computing environment can be built from scratch entirely in JavaScript. The result, the Lively Kernel, runs live in a browser with no installation -- it is in fact a web page. Dan will show how JavaScript is naturally reflective, and how it can be made even more so. The Lively Kernel can edit its own graphics and its own programs, and can save new objects and applications as web pages. It delivers the promise that wherever there is the Internet, there can be authoring."
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.
Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks
Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction.
Avi Bryant
Avi Bryant is the co-founder of Dabble DB, a venture-backed startup based in Vancouver, BC. He's also the creator of the Seaside web framework, and has given keynotes at RailsConf, Smalltalk Solutions, and elsewhere about his unusual - some say heretical - approaches to web development.
Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal
Website: avibryant.comLeah Culver
Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to friends. Leah is the lead developer for the site and spends most of her time working on feature development, fixing bugs, scaling the site, and maintaining the API. She's a recent computer science graduate from the University of Minnesota and enjoys the challenge of developing a web application from scratch. Leah will be speaking about the career choices for recent computer science university graduates.
Swiss Army Knives and Duct Tape
The best way to improve your career and your programming skills is to put yourself in difficult positions. Pressure is needed to create diamonds - and great software. Accepting impossible challenges and seeking out new opportunities is critical to creating great products and becoming a rock star programmer. Why be a mediocre coder working a dull job? Why not push yourself to make the next big thing?Website: leahculver.com
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang is a writer, artist and software engineer. An active member of the Ruby community, he founded Ruby-NYC in 2003, helps organize the annual Gotham Ruby Conference, and is currently a software engineer at Diversion Media. His writing on technology and culture has appeared in Spin, Wired, ArtByte, and FEED Magazine. His artwork has received press coverage in Wired News, Art in America, and Liberátion (France).
Blind Men and an Elephant: Thoughts on an amorphous profession
People have been programming computers for less than a century--which might be why we don't know much about what we're doing, and why we keep comparing our field to others. I'll share some thoughts on what the discipline of computer programming can take from other fields such as math, engineering, writing, law, and politics. I'll also discuss the implications of such similarities on how we do our jobs, and how we conceive of our careers.Website: http://fhwang.net/
Giles Bowkett
Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator
Evil genius Giles Bowkett built a robot army to eliminate every DJ and VJ in the world. These fools are doomed. Doomed I say. Doomed! Archaeopteryx is an aleatoric semi-autonomous self-playing instrument powered by probability matrices, a custom OOP paradigm implemented in just a few lines of Ruby, strategy patterns, meta-strategy patterns, and more lambdas than you can shake a stick at. That robot is one funky mother - shut your mouth! Just talking about Archaeopteryx.Website: http://www.gilesbowkett.com/
Corporate Speakers
Jói Sigurðsson (Google)
Jói Sigurðsson is the tech lead for Google Desktop for Windows and has taken on various technical leadership roles on the project over the last four years. Before joining Google, Jói held positions, including CTO and co-founder and project lead, at companies ranging from wireless applications to Windows security software to personalization agents. His experience places him in a unique position to focus on what's in store for the future of the desktop and its role within the cloud computing architecture, for users and developers alike. Jói studied computer engineering at the University of Iceland.
Mass-market Client Software
Software installed by huge numbers of users in a very diverse hardware and software environment exhibits problems that you don't otherwise see, and that you need new approaches to deal with. We'll learn about some of these challenges, how they can be met through automation of testing, gathering diagnostic information from the field, building in the ability to rapidly update installations, and more
Joey deVilla (Microsoft)
Squeezeboxes, Start-Ups and Selling Out: A Tech Evangelist's Story
You'll spend anywhere from a third to half (or more) of your waking life at work, so why not enjoy it? That's the philosophy of Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joey deVilla, who's had fun while paying the rent. He'll talk about his career path, which includes coding in cafes, getting hired through your blog, learning Python at Burning Man, messy office romances, go-go dancing, leading an office coup against his manager, interviewing at a porn company and using his accordion to make a Microsoft Vice President run away in fear. There will be stories, career advice and yes, a rock and roll accordion number or two.
Marty Algire (Radialpoint)
Having your Stock Options and Eating too: How to Start a Career in Tech
Reminiscences and illustrations of an excursion in Canada's hottest software startup in the summer of 1999; with memoranda on the dilemma of innovation and how to evaluate start-up opportunities versus opportunities at larger companies. This talk will demonstrate how the innovator's dilemma will have a bigger impact on new grads careers than other, seemingly more obvious, factors like starting salary or company brand recognition.
Vince Silvestri (Evertz Microsystems)
Academic Speakers
Steve Easterbrook
Steve Easterbrook is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of York (the one in the UK) and a Ph.D. in Computing from Imperial College in London (UK, again). In 1995 he moved to the US to lead the research team at NASA´s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in West Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, the Earth Observation System, and Cassini. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1999. His research interests range from modelling and analysis of complex software software systems to the socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction, including communication, coordination, and shared understanding in large software teams. In 2008, he was a visiting scientist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the Met Office in Exeter, UK.The Role of Software Engineering in Understanding Climate Change
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards founded a software company and developed a specialized database for interbank funds transfer systems, which currently process over a trillion dollars a day. For the crime of building non-standard technology he was sentenced to carry a beeper for twenty years. Having paid his debt to society, he now masquerades as a computer scientist, plotting an escape from the current dead-end of programming technology. His work on the Subtext language has explored the benefits of representing programs with more appropriate data structures than text strings, reviving the old idea of Visual Programming in a new form. He is currently trying to revive Data Flow programming. Like other mad scientists who revive dead things, he plans to take over the world.
Iconoclasm for fun and profit
In the first part of this talk I will present an experiment in non-textual programming: Schematic Tables, a new representation for conditionals. Roughly a cross between decision tables and data flow graphs, they represent computation and decision-making orthogonally. They unify the full range of conditional constructs, from if statements through pattern matching to polymorphic predicate dispatch. Program logic is maintained in a declarative canonical form that enforces completeness and disjointness among choices. Schematic tables can be used either as a code specification/generation tool, or as a self-contained diagrammatic programming language. They give program logic the clarity of truth tables, and support high-level direct manipulation of that logic, avoiding much of the mental computation demanded by conventional conditionals. The second part of the talk will look at the prospects for progress in the theory and practice of programming. Contrary to conventional wisdom, programming is still in its infancy. I will argue that the current blockage cannot persist, and point out some of the cracks in the dam. I conclude with some career advice for smart young programmers who want to change the world.From: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=185
Caitlin Kelleher
Caitlin Kelleher is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with Professor Randy Pausch. Caitlin's research focuses on developing programming environments that will engage and support a broad spectrum of school aged children in learning to program through constructing animated stories and games.The Development of Storytelling Alice
In this talk, I will describe the development of Storytelling Alice, a programming environment that gives middle school girls a positive first experience with computer programming. Our system presents programming as a way to tell stories and make programming more compelling to young girls. Storytelling Alice users spent 42% more time programming than users of Generic Alice and were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time working on their programs. Motivation alone is insufficient for increasing the number of young students learning to program. For many primary school students, formal opportunities to learn computer science simply do not exist. We are working on a new system called Looking Glass which continues motivating through storytelling and focuses on UI support enabling middle school students to easily and effectively teach themselves using programs created by peers. Looking Glass will incorporate tools that enable users to identify sections of peer written programs that interest them and follow automatically generated tutorials to learn how to create the selected sections of those programs in their own context.
Jörg Kienzle
Jörg Kienzle is an associate professor in Computer Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where he is leading the software engineering laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. and engineering diploma from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne. His current research interests include fault tolerance, software development methods, and aspect-orientation.Aspect-Oriented Multi-View Modeling
Multi-view modeling allows a developer to describe a software system from multiple points of view, e.g. structural and behavioral, using different modeling notations. Unfortunately, models of complex applications tend to get very big, to a point where even the individual views are not readable anymore. Recently, aspect-orientation has been proposed by the software engineering research community as a new technique of modularization, leading to better separation of concerns within software engineering artifacts such as source code or models. This talk shows how aspect-oriented ideas can successfully be applied in a multi-view modeling context to reduce the size of individual models. After introducing the ideas of aspect-orientation and reviewing the challenges in multi-view modeling, an overview of the Reusable Aspect Models approach (RAM) is presented. RAM aspect models support the modeling of structure (using UML class diagrams) and behavior (using UML state and sequence diagrams).
Tutorials
James Golick
Storming the Java Bastille: a political introduction to dynamic languages
Working with rigid, static languages is like living in a communist dictatorship. Your freedom is extremely limited, there's a lot of bureaucracy, and it's often painful. Working with dynamic languages, by contrast, is like living under libertarian rule. The government is small and doesn't like to make decisions on your behalf. They provide you a lot of freedom and leave it up to the community to decide how best to do things. But, with great power comes great responsibility. Dynamic languages are like a chainsaw: powerful, but watch out for your extremities. In this code-heavy session, we'll take a look at the pros and cons of both styles, hopefully without losing any limbs.http://jamesgolick.com/
Colin Smillie
Developing for the Facebook Platform
Developing for the Facebook Platform using the Facebook API, FBML, FBJS and FQL. Discussion will focus on Facebook Applications and the Facebook Connection platform with an overview of the Facebook Platform Architecture and Design.http://www.refreshpartners.com/