SFRails: Improving Productivity + Hotel Tonight on Scaling + Lessons on Ed-Tech

Agenda:

7:00 Pizza/Beer/Networking
7:30 Intros/Host/Every Day Carry
7:40 Talk 1: Key Ways to Improve Developer Productivity (Paul Biggar @ CircleCI)
8:10 Lightening Talk: How to Engineer Products for Students and Teachers – Winning in Ed-Tech
8:25 Talk 2: Russell Taga, Hotel Tonight
9:00 End

Talk1: Key Ways to Improve Developer Productivity

Paul Biggar from CircleCI will talk about key ways to accelerate developer productivity. [More to follow]

About the Speaker

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Paul Biggar is the founder of CircleCI which provides hosted continuous integration. He's a true developer at heart doing deep into programming languages (especially scripting languages), compilers, static analysis, optimization, sorting, algorithm analysis, caches, branch predictors. Follow him at @paulbiggar.

Talk2: Russell Taga, Vice President, Engineering at Hotel Tonight

Internationalization and localization with Rails - What we learned during our initial push into Europe.

About the Speaker

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/4/b/1/6/event_209719222.jpegRussell Taga is the VP of Engineering at Hotel Tonight, a provider of easy mobile booking of same-day unsold hotel inventory. Russell is a developer, an architect, and an engineering manager and prides himself on developing and leading top-notch engineering teams that build solid things very fast.

Lightening Talk: How to Engineer Products for Students and Teachers — Winning in Ed-Tech

Jeff Scheur will give a lightning talk on what he's learned developing an educational site that teaches students grammar/writing skills. He'll share insights on how to avoid pitfalls in ed-tech that get the better of many engineers and discuss what technological advances make him hopeful for the future of education.

About the Speaker

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/a/6/6/event_192782662.jpegJeff Scheur founded NoRedInk.com, which helps students improve their grammar/writing skills using adaptive learning and personalization. He won NBC's $75,000 Innovation Challenge in September, and his company is funded by top-tier investors. In a former life, he taught high school English for 8 years, and after grading 15,000 English essays himself, he began leveraging technology to help students eliminate "red ink" from their papers.

Hosts/Sponsors

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The Climate Corporation helps people and businesses manage and adapt to climate change. The company’s unique technology platform enables the real-time pricing and purchasing of customizable weather risk management products using proprietary global weather simulation modeling and local weather monitoring systems.