Channel 9 - Entries tagged with YOW! 2011

YOW 2012 Keynotes and Session Videos Now Available

Charles — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:50:04 GMT

You met some of the YOW 2012 speakers recently on C9. Their presentations are now starting to appear.

Start with Simon's and Damian's keynotes.

Kudos to Eventer for supplying the media.

YOW 2012 Speakers: http://yowaustralia.com.au/general/speakers.html

YOW! 2011: Nigel Dalton - On Being Agile, Lonely Planet, and Lean Development

Charles — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:44:51 GMT

In early 2000, having survived Y2K in the role of Software Development Manager at AXA Australia, Nigel Dalton fled to the USA to be CTO and COO of an Australian dot com startup in San Francisco - which later moved to New York, then finally Minnesota. The 4th Winter at -40C finally drove him and his family back down under, re-igniting his career in behavioral economics in New Zealand, eventually returning to Melbourne to work as General Manager IT at Lonely Planet in early 2007.

This is not a technical conversation like all of the other YOW! interviews you've seen. Instead, Nigel takes us through how he thinks about agility (lean product development, agile methodologies, etc...) and the application of agile practices to building products and running businesses that can succeed for extended periods of time (did you know that most companies that existed in 1950 no longer exist?).

So, what does agile really mean, anyway? Talk to us, Nigel. Explain.

Thanks for joining us on C9, Nigel! Fascinating conversation.

Nigel's YOW! speaker page

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

YOW! 2011: Bjorn Freeman-Benson - Software Psychology

Charles — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:51:13 GMT

Bjorn Freeman-Benson is the Vice President of Engineering at New Relic - which produces cross-platform application and server performance monitoring software as a service (SaaS). He's been an engineer for many years and has focused on building tools.

Here, we talk about client and cloud monitoring tools, Bjorn (of course!) and more. Bjorn describes himself as a Software Psychologist - he listens to software and makes it better after understanding it's deepest needs and problems. I like the sound of that! Another thing I like about Bjorn's optimistic outlook on software complexity is the notion of "drinking our own champagne" versus "eating our own dog food" when it comes to using the software you build - in a real world context, daily - before you unleash it on the world.

Thanks for joining us on C9, Bjorn! Keep on listening to software's deep issues and help correct them (hopefully without the need of powerful "medication")!

Bjorn's YOW! speaker page

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

YOW! 2011: Aslak Hellesøy - Web Sockets and Webbit

Charles — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:31:39 GMT

Aslak Hellesøy is a Senior Software Engineer at DRW Trading in London and the creator of Cucumber. Aslak is also a contributor to Webbit, a Java event based WebSocket and HTTP server (and the subject of his YOW! session).

Here, we talk about Webbit and Web Sockets and learn a little about Aslak, of course. Thanks for joining us on C9, Aslak!

Aslak's YOW! speaker page

YOW! 2011: Tony Morris - Functional Programming and Functional Thinking

Charles — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:00:00 GMT

Tony Morris is a developer who has deployed functional programming techniques in industry for over 10 years. He's also a teacher and key player in Australia's increasingly vibrant functional programming community. Tony actively programs in Scala and Haskell so he possesses a well-rounded view of the functional world (from hybrid to pure functional).

Here, we talk about functional programming—when to go functional and why—and Tony addresses some of the problems that face developers who want or need to go functional but possess only an imperative way of thinking when it comes to designing and writing software. It's the functional way of thinking that most newcomers to functional programming find most difficult. Of course, there's no conversation about functional programming without talking about monads, so we talk about monadic design (and definition).

Thanks for joining us on C9 Tony!

Tony's YOW! speaker page

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff—Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others—for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

YOW! 2011: Dave Thomas on YOW!, Technoculture, Modern Programming, and More

Charles — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:34:58 GMT

Dave Thomas is the godfather of YOW!, a platform-agnostic developer conference that spans three cities in Australia once a year (Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney(workshops only)). Australia is home to a very vibrant and talent-rich developer community. It was great to have the chance to spend time at YOW! and attend several excellent sessions (you've met some of the speakers here on C9). Dave is well known for his work in object oriented and dynamic programming language design (SmallTalk) as well as virtual machines. He's a compiler guy. Dave is currently the CEO of Bedarra Research Labs.

Let's see what the godfather has to say about YOW!, JavaScript, HTML5, concurrency, modern development methodologies, technoculture and more. It's always a pleasure to get the chance to talk to Dave and we hope he'll make many more appearances on C9. Thanks again for inviting C9 to YOW!, godfather!

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff—Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others—for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

YOW! 2011: Martin Thompson - On Concurrent Programming and Concurrency Folklore

Charles — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:41:13 GMT

Martin Thompson is the creator of Disruptor, a concurrent programming framework. He's passionate about solving hard problems - like writing scalable concurrent software systems. His session at YOW! - Tackling the Folklore Surrounding High Performance Computing - was excellent. You'll be able to see it online in the near future, so look for it on the YOW! site.

Martin is a Java and C++ developer and employs an analog design methodology to his digital development efforts. He thinks through the conceptual design and paints a detailed picture of the solution, then he writes code. Many developers do this, of course, but sometimes we don't think through the problem thoroughly enough before we start writing code. This is especially true when it comes to solving hard problems of a concurrent computing nature.

To Martin, the concurrency problem is as much a developer methodology, educational and behavioral problem as it is a pure technological one. We talk about this, of course. His perspectives on the subject are refreshing.

Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.

Thanks for joining us on C9, Martin. Keep pushing the envelope.

http://yowaustralia.com.au/YOW2011/general/details.html?speakerId=2336

Simon Peyton-Jones and John Hughes - It's Raining Haskell

Charles — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 16:00:00 GMT

Ever wonder what would happen if you happened upon Simon Peyton-Jones, author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and a key contributor to the Haskell functional programming language, and John Hughes, fellow Haskellite, computer scientist, creator of QuickCheck, and author of the landmark paper, "Why Functional Programming Matters," sitting on a park bench, in the rain, right next to Sydney's iconic opera house? Well, let's find out, shall we?

Simon and John have been friends for many years and studied mathematics together at Trinity College Cambridge. What were they like as young men? As students? What was Simon's issue with wearing shoes, anyway? It's always wonderful to learn about the humans behind the software, the science. This is classic C9. Yes, it's raining on us as we converse, but the view is spectacular with Sydney's Opera House behind us. It's funny how wet we were by the end of this interview, but the rain was refreshing—just like the conversation.

Thank you, Simon and John, for the great conversation, for being so comfortable in the rain, and for taking the random questions in stride. You're true gentlemen. Keep pushing the envelope!

Happy holidays from Channel 9 wherever you are and whatever, if anything, you're celebrating!

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff—Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others—for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

YOW! 2011: Steve Vinoski - Riak Core, Erlang and Frisbee Freestyle

Charles — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:08:44 GMT

Steve Vinoski is an architect at Basho Technologies in Cambridge, MA, USA. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. Steve is regarded as an expert in the areas of middleware and distributed computing systems, topics for which he has authored or co-authored over 80 articles, papers, and a book. He currently writes The Functional Web column for IEEE Internet Computing (IC) magazine, and prior to that, from 2002-2008, he wrote the Toward Integration column for IC as well.

Steve's session at YOW! 2011 focused on Riak Core, the distributed systems foundation for the Riak distributed database and the Riak Search full-text indexing system. It's implemented in Erlang, Steve's favorite language.

Besides being an expert in the domain of distributed systems and Erlang, Steve has been ranked among the top 100 Frisbee Freestyle players in the world. We talk about this, too, of course!

Steve's YOW! speaker page

PS: Sorry about the relatively low lighting (the LED light that sits atop my travel camera is not sufficiently suited to solve the low ambient light problem unless it blinds the interviewee... Travelling with larger lights might have to happen...). This sometimes happens in the dynamic on-location interviewing process (where dynamic implies the shoot locations change and depend upon what location is available at the time - in this case, we talked in the YOW! speakers room in Brisbane). The audio's great, though, as is the conversation, most importantly.

Thanks for joining us on C9, Steve! Keep on Erlangin' and Frisbee Freestylin'.

YOW! 2011: Kevin O'Neill - Mobile App Development, PlayUp, Objective-C, Windows Phone

Charles — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:21:43 GMT

Kevin O'Neill is the technologist at large for the social sports network PlayUp where he's working to build the ultimate social network for live sport on mobile devices. Kevin's fingerprints can also be found on the mobile products from Lonely Planet to realestate.com.au. As a speaker Kevin regularly shares his thoughts on technology, delivery processes, user interaction and creating great product teams.

Kevin's a big fan of Objective-C. We talk about this, of course. Not sure we can agree on the "beauty" of ObjC, but who cares... Kevin and team are kickin' butt and takin' names using the technology and building powerful tooling around it to support their in-house mobile development efforts. Kevin's the first ObjC developer I've interviewed, so we spend some time geeking out on it.

It turns out that Kevin is a big fan of Windows Phone and looks forward to bringing PlayUp's mobile apps to Microsoft's new mobile platform - one which guarantees a consistent experience for both developers and consumers across varied WP7 devices. This is one of Windows Phone's best features for developers and consumers who use apps: a platform that guarantees consistent user experiences across several different WP devices. This consistency is great for developers and app users alike. I look forward to seeing PlayUp on WP7!

Thanks for joining us on C9, Kevin! Keep pushing the mobile app envelope, playing guitar and howling at the moon.

Kevin's YOW! speaker page

YOW! 2011: Joe Albahari - LINQ, LINQPad, and .NET Async (and a little Rx, too)

Charles — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:47:53 GMT

Joe Albahari is the creator of LINQPad, an application that many of you use in your daily development of .NET applications/services, especially those that employ LINQ in some fashion. It's just a fantastic developer tool for C#; one that C9 celebrity genius and avid LINQPad user Brian Beckman calls "the app I wish I wrote". Erik Meijer, the creator of LINQ, uses LINQPad daily. If you haven't played around with LINQPad, then you need to! [End advertisement for LINQPad Hey, great work deserves praise, don't you think?]

Joe's also the author of a few C# books (targeting both pro developers and novices) and two books covering WPF. Joe lives in Perth, Australia and works for himself (right on!). Great to meet you, Joe.

Thanks again for creating and continuing to evolve LINQPad, Joe!!

Joe's YOW! speaker page

YOW! 2011: Allen Wirfs-Brock and Rob Manson - Ambient Computing, Augmented Reality, and JavaScript

Charles — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:42:49 GMT

Allen Wirfs-Brock is a Research Fellow at Mozilla working on the next version of JavaScript (EcmaScript, to be precise), codenamed "Harmony." Allen is the chief editor of the EcmaScript specification. He's also legendary for his work on SmallTalk. It's always fun to chat with Allen. His talk—"The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology" (also the topic of a blog post of his)—was all about how the future is HTML5 and JavaScript (what's the need for an OS when you have a browser that runs HTML5?). Of course, we talk about and debate this idea.

Rob Manson is a pioneer in the field of Augmented Reality as it's related to the future of computing experience—it's the medium Rob believes will define personal computing in the age of pervasive computing, as he calls it (his talk at YOW! is "Augmented Reality Is the UI for Pervasive Computing"). Rob is also a big fan of HTML5 and sees a natural union of the web and augmented reality.

Putting Allen and Rob together to geek out on JavaScript, HTML5, augmented reality, and ambient or pervasive computing made great sense (Allen's idea!). The future of personal computing is a fascinating topic and Allen and Rob are great folks to talk to about it! Thanks, gentlemen, for the great conversation.

Key questions: What makes HTML5 the "right" programming model for driving personal computing forward into the future? What's the relationship between augmented reality, ambient computing, and HTML5? Allen and Rob answer these questions.

What do you think?

Tune in. Enjoy.

Allen's YOW! speaker page

Rob's YOW! speaker page

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff—Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others—for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

YOW! 2011: Damian Conway - Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming Made Easy

Charles — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Damian Conway is widely-known for his event speaking and software development training skills—areas in which he's among the world's best. He's also contributed important modules to Perl and is an important member of the Perl community. He is the CEO of Thoughtstream, a training company for engineers.

Damian's keynote at YOW! 2011 was superb. His goal was simple: take developers in the audience outside of their comfort zones by wrapping programming ideas and techniques in quantum mechanical clothing—a truly brilliant idea delivered to perfection (I was engaged for the entire keynote, which isn't always the case, especially first thing in the morning!).

His keynote was titled "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces...Made Easy!" You'll be able to watch this as soon as the YOW! session videos are released to the web.

Here we learn what Damian wanted to achieve with his excellent and creative technical keynote. We also get Damian's thoughts on the state of modern development and how developers can maximize their capabilities (learn and use multiple languages—it's one of the best things you can do). And more. Thanks for taking the time to chat, Damian. I look forward to seeing your next talk!

Tune in. Enjoy.

Damian's YOW! speaker page

[00:24] the reason behind Damian's talk

[02:15] comments on the positronic variable and multiverses simulation in Perl

[03:15] bad habits & 2 diff types of programmers

[06:50] language specialization issue

[08:50] analogy with natural languages

[10:45] current state of PERL

[14:00] question on the push towards the "The general purpose language"

[16:20] programming languages design tradeoffs

[17:20] comments about Damian's keynote address and developers feedback to it

[18:50] programming == manipulating reality with language == kind of same what physicists do

[21:10] math as a language and analogy as a means for communicating it

YOW! 2011: Mike Lee - The Road to Appsterdam

Charles — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Mike Lee is an exceptional developer and an even better person. His life's story is fascinating and the work he does benefits developers around the world, especially those who build mobile apps. Mike's a visionary guy and he has taken his vision of protecting and serving developers and built something real—a community-driven developer "safe-house" or, better yet, a global cultural center for app developers, a place to get training and support, help and guidance, build skills and get help when patent trolls attack. This place is called Appsterdam. In Mike's words "for app makers and product engineers, we have one API: What do you need?".

What is Appsterdam?

Here, Mike shares with us the story of how he got into computing and product engineering and how his path has led him to Appsterdam (and to Amsterdam, Netherlands). He explains the purpose and goals of Appsterdam, which are noble indeed. Mike's a visionary. He's able to follow his convictions and explain them with intelligence and passion. Heck, after the interview I felt like packing up and moving to Amsterdam! I'm glad Microsoft is involved with Appsterdam. It's great to see such devotion to developers and to the craft, business, culture and humanity of product engineering. I've not met anybody quite like Mike before. It was great listening to Mike's story and his passion is inspirational.

(Stay tuned for his YOW! session - it will be available soon. We'll provide a link to it and all other YOW! sessions).

Mike's YOW! speaker page

Tune in. Enjoy. Meet Mike Lee.

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

YOW! 2011: Simon Peyton-Jones - Closer to Nirvana

Charles — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:52:04 GMT

I caught up with Simon Peyton-Jones, author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and a key contributor to the Haskell functional programming language, at YOW! 2011. Simon is a pure functional guy. That said, he's OK with side effects as long as you can control them (so, monads are great!).

Simon works at Microsoft as a research scientist in MSR. Simon's work on Haskell is legendary and the language has seen an increase in usage over the years and a steady evolution toward being not only a general purpose, strongly-typed functional programming language, but also a practical one. No longer is Haskell suited only for academic experimentation (though this continues to be an important aspect of the language—in fact, it's one of the very effective ways the language is pushed forward). As Simon says, Haskell is like a laboratory in which to test new functional ideas and novel language constructs.

One of the very interesting aspects of Haskell is how the surface language (so, the syntax you write) is boiled down to a very small intermediate language, System F. Simon spends a nice chunk of time in this conversation explaining this. It's a rather excellent approach. We only touch on C--, but I have a feeling I'll be interviewing Simon again in the future.

How has the language evolved over the years? What's Simon working on these days (besides evolving Haskell, he's helping to make general purpose computing education for the masses much better!)? What's next? What are the big problems he and others are tackling with respect to moving Haskell forward? As always, it's a real pleasure to converse with and learn from Simon. His passion, enthusiasm, and intelligence are infectious (well, maybe not the intelligence part—you're born with the smarts you have. So, I didn't get smarter by talking with Simon, but I sure learned a lot!). Very few people are able to explain complex concepts in ways mere mortals can understand and assimilate. Simon is one of these people.

(Here's the video referenced at the beginning of this conversation.)

Simon's YOW! speaker page

Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!