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MinneBarSessions

Page history last edited by Tim Erickson 15 years, 10 months ago

Sessions Schedule (please see the session listings below for descriptions)

 

We can accommodate a ton of sessions at MinneBar. Please feel free to add a session for anything you are interested in so like-minded folks can get together and discuss the topic(s). At minnebar sessions need not be big productions, though that's fine too. They can range from lightly structured discussions to coding jam sessions to full fledged, ready to take on the road presentations.

 

There will even be open spaces at the event for spontaneous topics and sessions just find an open s spot and some friends and start talking.

 

Use the existing sessions below as templates. Note the anchor tag that will allow you to link directly to the description

 

 

Session Schedule has been posted below.

 

Session Descriptions

 

Lightning Talks: 5 minute demos/presentations
Various presenters (you?)
Got something you want to show off, but don't want to do a full-fledged session on it? We will have at least one session for 5 minute long "Lightning Talks". Please email look@recursion.org to sign up.

 

Refresh TwinCities
Thomas Knoll (dydimustk.com)
"Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards." Find out how you can participate in the Refresh TwinCities community.

 

Why Drupal?
Allie Micka Advantage Labs
Each year, more award-winning, (high-profile sites are 'going Drupal'. It functions as a content management tool, a community platform, and an application framework. Is it trying to do too much? Can it be both powerful and economical? Will it work well for you? (hint: the short answers are No, Yes, and Probably ) Learn the technical and business reasons for choosing Drupal, and find out how to get the resources you need to get going.

 

GTD for Startups
Doreen Hartzell and Eric Hedberg (Enleiten)
Using David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system in an agile development environment. If you're using it, share your favorite tips. If you're curious, come find out the basic principles of the system and how it might work for you.

 

7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing
Curt Prins (WWW)
Many startups fail to succeed due to their ineffective marketing efforts--especially technology companies. These failures are often caused by committing one or more of the 7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing. If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to understand each of these sins before you spend your first marketing $1.

 

Scaling with Software
Austin Smith (Observer Media Group) and Eric Tremper (ArcStone Technologies)
An overview of several software-driven solutions to scaling high traffic web sites, including Memcache, Squid, and Varnish, several framework-specific techniques, and the beautiful basics of HTTP which enable some of these technologies. Come and discuss monitoring, tuning, and the subtle pain of caching.

 

Screw You LAMP. Plus Virtualization
Dan Grigsby (blog)
Consider the screw. Hammers, saws, levels and planes date back to pre-history. Screws are a relatively recent innovation, only finding their way into common use in the 18th century, only becoming mass produced in the 19th century, and only becoming standardized in the 20th century.

The history of the screw, particularly standardizing on the phillips head, is a parable of the future of IT. The technically inferior philips head screw won that generation of standards war, and in so doing, ushered in the era of mass produceable mechanical consumer goods.

LAMP is the philips head screw of our profession.

Don't buy it? I'll prove it using Wordpress, ActiveDirectory, the Facebook Platform and others to point to a near-future where serious web applications built by non-programmers from loosely coupled server-side components -- oh for a better term than "enterprise mashups" -- and where sys-admin joins blacksmith as a profession left behind by progress.

And that's just a setup for the next-next thing, loosely coupled zero administration virtualized applications...

 

Immersive Environments:More Than a Game
John A. Grozik (BIO)
"Grozik Associates has been exploring immersive environments for real and virtual worlds for more than 20 years. This session will discuss Gartner Inc.'s prediction that by 2011, 80% of all internet access will be in a 3D browser. The "WOW" factor has turned corporate. SecondLife, Qwaq, Wonderland, Multiverse 3D, Areae, Metaplace, Vivaty, There, Club Penguin, Active Worlds, Forterra Systems, Gaia, Habbo Hotel, Neopets, Whyville, Kaneva. 3B and others are now competing for your avatar's eyes. Have a favorite space? Bring it on and join this immersive environments smack down.

 

Blogging for Benjamins:How To Turn Your Topical Blog Into Cash
Jeramey Jannene (A blog making cash)
This session will explore everyone's burning desire to turn babbling about their passions into a side income stream. This session is intended for those currently making money blogging, those struggling to, and those wanting to to discuss best practices and share experiences. Jeramey Jannene will start the discussion with sharing his experiences covering the Milwaukee Bucks and downtown Milwaukee.

 

Communication For Geeks:How to Influence Your Boss, Your Customers, And Your Team
Brian 'Bex' Huff (Bezzotech)
"Ask any employer: the single most important secondary skill for computer geeks is the ability to communicate. Unfortunately, very few of us practice this vital skill. As a result, the *majority* of enterprise software initiatives fail, and usually because of poor communication. This talk will present powerful new ways of thinking and communicating, so you can better connect with the needs of others, and influence decision making on all levels."

 

Small Teams, Big Results
Ben Edwards (Refactr)
"These days you don't need a huge team to develop great software. Come to this session if you want to share the lessons learned and hear about the experiences and 'secrets' of small teams getting more things done with less. I'll moderate the discussion and provide several starter topics."

 

Design Coding Panel Discussion
Ben Edwards (Refactr), Norm Orstad (Slantwise), Mike Bollinger (Livefront), Margaret Andrews (Vita.mn), Darrell Austin (Darrel Austin Designs)
"XTHML & CSS are tools that are just as (more so?) important as Photoshop for today's web designer. Are you a designer looking to improve your marketability? Many of the hottest jobs out there have titles like: 'client-side coder', 'creative tech' and 'AJAX developer'. Come and discuss what designers should incorporate into their bag of tricks, and perhaps what is best left out. "

 

Intro to iPhone Development
Jesse O'Neill-Oine (Refactr)
Basic introduction to developing for the iPhone SDK in Objective-C.

 

Metaprogramming in Groovy
Scott Vlaminck (Refactr)
Metaprogramming is writing a program that manipulates programs, including itself. Groovy makes metaprogramming easy and provides a number of techniques for doing so. We'll discuss what metaprogramming is and walk through some examples of using Groovy's different metaprogramming techniques with discussion about when and why you might want to use them - as well as when and why you might not want to use them.

 

Social Search in the Corporate Enviroment
Rich Hoeg (Project Report from my Blog)
Discuss and show examples of social search and networking inside the corporation. I will be happy to demonstrate Connectbeam which is a social search tool which resides inside our firewall, yet accesses external Google and our internal search engine to deliver work focused tags, user profiles, and bookmarks ... as well as one's normal search results.

 

From Programming to Profit: Skills To Pay The Bills
Derrick Shields (WebproLeads)
CANCELLED - Due to lack of time to put a quality session together. I'm always open to discussing monitization strategies - get in touch with me at the conference for anyone who's interested.

 

Storing and re-using files for the long term: A Think Tanky, Panel-ish Conversation
Matt Zumwalt (MediaShelf)
Storing and retrieving digital files seems like a simple task until you start preserving those files for the long term. More and more projects find themselves versioning files, tracking metadata & associations, setting up access controls, asserting license restrictions, exposing search interfaces, and sharing files between multiple applications. Content Repositories help you to handle these needs.
MediaShelf and a bunch of Minneapolis developers are bringing RAD to Content Repositories. We want to hear people weigh in about how to do it right.

 

Merb 1.0: Ruby on Rails that Scales
Kyle Drake and Kyle Wilson (Net Brew Design - Best Metal Band Video Ever)
Merb is an up-and-coming web application framework for Ruby that is very similar to Rails, but provides a complete re-write of the internal codebase. Aside from being thread-safe, Merb is a clean, fast framework that is easy to understand, and gives developers a choice in which components will be used. Combined with the powerful JRuby interpreter, Merb 1.0 will resolve many of the downfalls of Rails, without sacrificing the smart development practices that have made it so popular (and given us our lives back).

We will introduce Merb, what technical problems it is attempting to resolve, how it compares to Rails, and why so many Rails developers are expressing interest in switching. We will finish with a code walkthrough of a bad ass local music site we are working on, which is being developed on top of bleeding edge Merb code.

 

CSS frameworks when and why to use them
Norm Orstad (Slantwise Design)
So you've heard of CSS frameworks, want to find out what the fuss is about? I will show reasons for and against using CSS frameworks like Blueprint CSS  or Yahoo! User Interface. This session will be geared towards anyone that really really likes web sites! .

 

PHP Security 101: Securing Your PHP Applications
Mike Willbanks (Mike Willbanks Blog)
Security has been all the rage in recent years definitely in the PHP area where the tools exist to properly secure an application. This will be a presentation focused on security techniques, features to utilize and also serve as a question and answer after the presentation for questions people may have.

 

DJ Edna and Django: Software For The Rockstar's Geek Friend
Thomas Bohmbach, Jr. (djedna.org)
DJ Edna is an open-source digital distribution platform that aims to be to independent digital music distribution what Wordpress is to blogging. This presentation will discuss the Music2.0 business philosophy behind the project as well as delving into one technical aspect of the project, Django reusable applications.

 

Why Should I Care About Grails?
Mike Calvo (Citronella)
Whether you are a Java developer, Rails developer, or (gasp) a .NET developer, you should care about the Grails framework. We'll have a discussion about why and what to do about it.

 

Set up a Continuous Integration Server in 10 minutes
Brian Westrich (McWest Corp.)
Suspect you need a development build server but aren't sure? Need to set up a new test environment for your QA folks? Or may you've drunk the agile Kool-Aid, but just don't have time to set up a build server? If so, come see how quickly you can use Hudson to set up a Continuous Integration Server.

 

How a Continuous Integration Server changes your team
Brian Westrich (McWest Corp.)
Once your team has a CI server, how your team works together will fundamentally change. Beyond the simple changes of more efficient deployments and known state of software, there will be more significant changes (new roles, responsibilities, and oppoortunities). If you're interested in hearing some experiences from teams that have used a Continuous Integration server, or sharing some of your own experiences, please attend.

 

The Mathematical Foundations of Music
Paul Cantrell (In the Hands)
Music is abstract and intangible — yet our minds experience it as powerfully and directly as a concrete object. There is perhaps no shorter path from math to emotion. The emotional side of that path is hard to verbalize, but there's a lot we can say about the math! This talk is a brief introduction to the patterns that emerge in music, and how they arise out of the physics of sound and our perception of it. No musical training and no advanced math skills required! You'll be fine so long as some basic algebra won't freak you out. The talk will feature musical examples from a wide variety of genres, including some of my own recordings.

 

Put information in the rear-view mirror - ride with knowledge
Joe Roushar (K-Netica Corp.)
Knowledge ontologies can enable seekers to find the right needle in any number of haystacks. In the beginning, there was no data - punched cards held the code, and the data was an inconvenient but necessary afterthought, so it was inserted in the code. Once knowledge rules, code will be a convenient embedded adjunct to knowledge. Primary and foreign keys are great for making data points more meaningful, but to take action, you need knowledge.

 

XMPP on the Web: Soashable (soashable.com)
Harlan Iverson (blog)
Soashable is a web based, Open Source, multi-protocol instant messenger based on XMPP(Jabber) using BOSH (XEP-0124 and 0206); it is similar to Meebo. XMPP is anything from an IM protocol to a poor-man's middleware solution. Subject matter will range from technical details of XMPP and Soashable, to high level discussion of Jabber and standardization, to direction of the Soashable project.

 

Enterprise Information Mashups: Web 2.0 + SOA +Data Visulization
Jamshid A. Vayghan (blog, bio)
“Data is an asset”. This statement is an unquestionable principle in every large enterprise. Like any other asset, an enterprise wants to increase the value extraction from data and use it to distinguish itself from competition and meet its strategic goals. Enterprise Information mashups play an important role in achieving this goal by showing how Web 2.0 helps to increase Return on Information (ROI) and solve real business problems. Web 2.0 has become the face of SOA!

 

Ill with a keyboard. Sick with a mouse.
John Mindiola III ([http://coroflot.com/mindiola])
Rock the mouse in Adobe Illustrator. Techniques everyone can learn and use every day. Exploit the Pathfinder panel for all it's worth.

 

Rough Spots with Agile Development
Robert Fischer (Smokejumper Consulting), Andy Tinkham (GovDelivery), Gretchen Enger, Paul Julius Stelligent, Inc., Scott Vlaminck (Refactr), Ross Niemi (Thoughtworks)
Writing stories, tests, and code is just the start of Agile development, but it's where most of the books drop off. This panel discussion will explore what happens when the ideas of Agile development hit the real world.

 

The spectrum of user experience design and testing: From Full Scale to Quick and Cheap:
Kevin Farner (Gomoll Research + Design)
"This talk is targeted at both developers and designers. The topic will be how to improve your design by actively watching people use your products or site. We'll discuss the range of user experience design you can employ, from getting the user involved iteratively, to the quick hallway usability test, and how all are useful.

 

Twin Cities Open Circuit & Free Geek
Amanda Luker, Thomas Saunders, Alan Palazzolo (Twin Cities Open Circuit)
Learn about Open Circuit, a new Twin Cities technology knowledge-sharing network to improve the common good and chapter of Free Geek. How can OC help you? What's Free Geek? How can you get involved? How can use your tech skills to give back to the community?

 

Distributed Teamwork: How to succeed with a team you never see
Nick Bauman, Dave Borillo (DoApp), Barry Hess (Harvest), Jeff Lin (Bust Out Solutions)
Dealing with managing a small distributed team or a large offshored technology group? Looking to hire the best talent from across the world or open your own job search wide? Come discuss everything from tools to team-building with this diverse panel.

 

Wordpress as a Content Management System
Toby Cryns (The Mighty Mo! Design Co.)
Have you tried to use Drupal or Joomla, but found yourself confused and frustrated by their complicated interfaces and feature implementation procedures? Want to use a content management system (CMS) that is intuitive and easy to use? In this session, I will walk you through the basics of how to turn your static website into a dynamic experience using Wordpress's user-friendly environment. Presentation link

 

Consulting for fun and profit
Jonathan Dahl (Slantwise Design, Tumblon)
''What is life like as a contract developer? How do you set prices, get projects, build a team, and enjoy your work, without running out of money? This talk is for employees interested in freelancing, freelancers interested in building a consulting company, and companies looking to grow. It will be based on my experience building Slantwise Design, a small shop that specializes in web design and Ruby development. But we'll also talk about your experiences too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farmsourcing Rails: or How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Enterprise
Matt Bauer (Mosquito Mole Multiworks)
Think you're hip and cool because you know Rails and your job is safe from being outsourced? You're wrong. Know why I know? Because for the last six months I've been sending your job to India. I also know why it doesn't work and what will. Come hear why Ruby on Rails and the midwest can save the enterprise.

 

Power WordPress plus MinneWordCamp Discussion
Jamie Thingelstad (thingelstad.com - slashthing.com)
Do you have a WordPress blog? Or 2 or 3? Come to have a discussion about some power plug-ins for WordPress than can save you a ton of time. Plus some discussion of SEO techniques for your WordPress blog. We'll also have a short discussion about getting MinneWordCamp, a Minneapolis WordCamp, together in the fall!

 

Android: Google's Software Stack for Mobile Devices
Jan Poehland (Comparatio) and Jennifer Sly (YouthAssets) (www.comparatio.com - www.youthassets.org)

Chris Mitra and Cyrus Master (Motorola, Android products team)

Jan and Jennifer will start the session with a demo of an Android application, developed as a partnership of Comparatio, a for-profit organization, and YouthAssets, a non-profit organization, for young people in southern Africa. Come join us for a discussion of Android, the Android Developer Challenge, and what it is like to use the Android SDK.

Chris and Cyrus are Minneapolis-based engineers building an Android device. They will give a high-level overview of Android's software architecture, field Q&A, and engage the audience in discussion about what features third party developers would like to see in Android phones.

 

Really Simple CMS with CakePHP
George Walker (Electric Pulp)
CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

I'll explain how to build an extremely simple and practical CMS using the CakePHP framework, and you'll learn some of the basics on how to set up CakePHP applications.

 

Reputationland
Charles Gimon (www.gimonca.com)
This will be an unstructured discussion on the state of reputations today, whether traditional or online, managed or emergent, throwaway or permanent. Are old identity structures being replaced by new ones, or are traditional identities necessary for the survival of newly defined communities? What sorts of identity are suitable for what situations? How are old and new identities being expressed in software (or even hardware), how are they being worked into projects you might be working on today? In the unconference spirit, bring your own opinions, experiences and shibboleths and watch them contend with everyone else's.

 

Memcached and MySQL Sitting in a Tree
Chris Barber (CB1, INC.)
Memcached is the 5th wonder of the LAMP stack. Typically you pull data from a database, then cache it in memcached. Thanks to a bunch of user-defined functions written in C, MySQL can natively interact with a memcached cluster saving the trip of routing data through the application server. With the help of triggers, you can automate storing data in cache. I'll give a little deeper talk about what it is, why you want it, and how to install and use it.

 

 

 

Rapid Application Development in Action, Minnesota Daily Finals Edition
Tom Bishop, Kyle Cunningham, Son Huynh, Zach Valentiner, Ryan Bailey (Minnesota Daily)
Every semester at the Minnesota Daily (The University of Minnesota's Campus Newspaper), we construct a parody website for the finals edition (the edition of the paper for finals week) of our website. In the past we have done things such as Windows XP, Facebook, and the ipod. This semester we will doing a live coding demonstration/presentation and creating the entire finals edition site during MinneBar. We invite everyone to come work with us on finals edition and to see what it takes to make a fully functional site within a day.

 

 

 

Enterprise Management for the Mac OS
Chip Pearson (JAMF Software)
JAMF Software manufactures the Casper Suite, which is an enterprise toolkit for managing Mac OS X. A brief overview of primary functions of the suite will include zero touch OS X deployments, modular image creation, post fix automation and license compliance. The Casper Suite is used in leading organizations in business, education and government and is developed in the Midwest with headquarters in downtown Minneapolis.

 

This Thing called Twitter
Peter Fleck & Rick Mahn (@pfhyper @rickmahn)
Find out why you should Twitter. Or not. This will be a social web discussion including Twitter, Friendfeed, Seesmic, Brightkite, and of course the ancient ones, FaceBook and MySpace. What the hell is going on out there?

 

Stackless Python Twisted-Style -- There will be blood
Shawn Butler
Twisted is a framework for writing asynchronous, event-driven networked programs in Python -- both clients and servers. Stackless, is an experimental implementation of the Python programming language, so named because it forgoes the C call stack in favor of its own stack. The language supports generators, microthreads, and coroutines. Mixing Stackless Python's threading model and Twisted's asynchronous I/O model would seem like a real bad idea, right? Let's find out.

 

 

Discussion: Tech and Process to Build Kickass Web Dev Teams
Tom O'Neill and Mark Hurlburt (Sierra Bravo)
"This session is about sharing ideas, technology and best practices on how to build a successful development team. We'll talk about team makeup, collaboration technology, training, etc... We'll have some conversation starters ready based on lessons learned over our last 170,000 hrs of development, but the discussion is open to everybody."

 

Presentation and Discussion: E-Democracy - Online Neighborhoods ---- 5:00 in Room 319
Tim Erickson (E-Democracy)
" E-Democracy.Org has begun to organize and support neighborhood "Issues Forums" in St. Paul and Minneapolis (and around the world) we'd like to start by briefly discussing our work - and then open the discussion for others to talk about how they use the internet to share information and connect with the people who live next door, or just down the street. What are the best tools currently available AND what tools are still needed?"

 

Presentation and Discussion: Groupserver ---- 4:00 in Room 319
Tim Erickson (E-Democracy)
"A brief introduction to this open-source collaboration server that supports many-to-many, and one-to-many, interaction in groups and communities via a robust email AND Web interface. E-Democracy.Org has been using Groupserver for over three years to create online public spaces for civic discussion. In this session, we'll show you how we are using Groupserver and then initiate a discussion about alternative uses for this application and the potential for creating a community of local developers interested in improving this as a free and powerful tool for online citizen engagement - and other forms of online collaboration."

 

 

Session Schedule

 

 


Download the schedule PDF format

MinneBar