Karthik Dinakar presents the case of his team which attempted to be as agile as possible in order to fulfill the short-term goals but missed the long-term ones because some of the Agile best practices were ignored. He tells the story of how his team finally managed to come back on course and which are the practices that he considers as necessary for success.
Jason H. Christensen presents the evolution of mobile devices, how to get around limitations by integrating mobile systems with the cloud and make use of RESTful services, what is a basic mobile architecture and how it can be implemented.
Brian Nicks presents a study case of a healthcare company which inherited many disparate technologies from Java on WebLogic to .Net to RPG on iSeries to CICS on zSeries to COBOL on OpenVMS, deciding that the integration solution was to implement a SOA initiative. The presentation contains the challenges, the successes and the lessons learned throughout the process.
Gerard Holzmann discusses Spin, a design analyzer tool, and Scrub, a code review tool, used by Jet Propulsion Laboratory to analyze and fix the software used for critical solar system exploration missions.
Robert Johnson discusses Facebook’s approach to scalability issues resulting from a large growth of the user base. He talks about: why one needs to prepare for horizontal and not vertical scalability, very short release cycles which are better because they introduce fewer bugs, the need to streamline to deploying process for short release cycles, and making the entire process faster every day.
Mary-Lynn discusses how Fearless Change presented patterns focused on the evangelist and the introduction of new change ideas into an organization. She goes on to note how the sequel, tentatively titled More Fearless Change, adds patterns that focus on gaining the necessary emotional and personal commitment to making change happen. She also talks about Agile and its adoption.
In this interview, Dr. Mercuri defines computer forensics, then discusses how forensics apply to criminal, civil, and intellectual property law. She addressed the challenges that technological advances, (e.g. RAID, cell phones, GPS devices, and Cloud Computing) increase the challenges faced by the forensic computer scientist. She also discusses appropriate actions if you suspect security issues.
Doug Lea talks to InfoQ about the evolution of the Fork/Join Framework, the new features planned for java.util.concurrent in Java 7, and the "Extra 166" package. The interview goes on to explore some of the hardware and language changes that are impacting concurrent programming, and the effect the increasing prevalence of alternative languages in the JVM are having on library design.
Brian and dave discuss what it might mean to be a true craftsman and why the idea of craft has become so popular of late. Other issues discussed include the question of why craft seems to be focused almost exclusively on programming and why everyone does not aspire to be a craftsman? Programming as performance art, programs as literary artifacts, and code "habitability" round out the discussion.
