GitHub Power Tools and Functional Thinking

5:30-6:00: Networking and Food

Food, Soda, Beer and Networking. We are grateful to Cody Powell from TEksystems (http://www.teksystems.com/) for their continued sponsorship of the Food and Soda! Also, thanks to Mike Henninger of BWBacon (http://www.bwbacon.com/) for supplying the beer.

6:00-6:05: Announcements

6:05-7:00: GitHub Power Tools by Tim Berglund

Most developers think of Git (http://git-scm.com) and GitHub (http://github.com) as two sides of the same coin, but all too often our attention is focused on the Git side alone, and not on the capabilities of Planet Earth's most-used Git hosting service. More than two million developers have already joined the site that offers amazing features like pull requests, wikis, project pages, integrated web site hosting, issue tracking, metric visualizations, permission controls, and easy integration with third-party services. Come to this talk to learn how to make better use of GitHub.

About Tim Berglund:

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He is a GitHubber (https://github.com/blog/1216-tim-berglund-is-a-githubber) whose mission is to make it easy for everybody in the world to use Git. He is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff (http://nofluffjuststuff.com/) tour in the United States, who loves to speak on Git, Cassandra, and other topics. He is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group (http://denveropensource.org), co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class (http://bit.ly/ogitvid), co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle (http://www.amazon.com/dp/144930463X), a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network (http://oreilly.com/pub/expert/timberglund), and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network (http://pro.gigaom.com/members/timberglund/profile). He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com (http://timberglund.com/). He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

7:00-7:15: Break

7:15-8:45: Functional Thinking by Neal Ford

Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard. This session helps you transition from a Java writing imperative programmer to a functional programmer, using Java, Clojure and Scala for examples. This session takes common topics from imperative languages and looks at alternative ways of solving those problems in functional languages. As a Java developer, you know how to achieve code-reuse via mechanisms like inheritance and polymorphism. Code reuse is possible in functional languages as well, using high-order functions, composition, and multi-methods. I take a variety of common practices in OOP languages and show the corresponding mechanisms in functional languages. Expect your mind to be bent, but you’ll leave with a much better understanding of both the syntax and semantics of functional languages.

About Neal Ford:

Neal is a Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm.

Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video presentations. He is also the author of 5 books, including the most recent Presentation Patterns. Given his degree, Neal is a bit of a language geek, with affections including but not limited to Ruby, Clojure, Java, Groovy, JavaScript, Scala and C#/.NET. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal is an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 300 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 2000 presentations. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

8:45: Door prizes:

Rocky Mountain Software Symposium (http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/denver/2012/11/home) pass - provided by Jay Zimmerman

Amazon Gift Cards - provided by Lea Holmboe of ECS (http://www.ecsteam.com/)

JetBrains (http://www.jetbrains.com/) IDE License

ZeroTurnaround JRebel (http://zeroturnaround.com/software/jrebel/) License

Gift Certificate for Softpro Books (http://www.softpro.com/)

Heroku (http://www.heroku.com/) T-shirts and server credits - provided by James Ward of Heroku

9:00: Networking at Ice House Tavern. Very special thanks to Katie Green from ReadyTalk (http://www.readytalk.com/) for their sponsorship of food at this location.