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April 18: Essential Skills for the Agile Developer – Alan Shalloway

Many developers have been suddenly thrown into developing code in stages whereas they used to be able to do bigger designs up front. Many people tell them to do test-driven development and emergent design while ignoring the fact that their work with legacy systems may prevent such actions. In any event, new methods require new skills – skills they don’t have time to get. At first it may appear that the required developer skill set for this new way of writing code is huge and daunting. Fortunately, it isn’t. One of the things we’ve learned at Net Objectives is that there are often a few simple things one can do that make a huge difference. We like to have people start with these trim tabs. We refer to these as trim tabs since they are small things that make a big difference. This talk introduces some trim tabs for the new agile developer.

Outline:

• Programming by Intention
• Separating Use from  Construction
• Define tests Up Front
• Shalloway’s Law
• Encapsulate That

The lessons learned are taken from Net Objectives’ new book Essential Skills for the Agile Developer:

Speaker Bio

Alan Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With over 40 years of experience, Alan is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, Scrum and design patterns. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. Alan has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped his clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility and Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Alan has worked in literally dozens of industries over his career. He is a co-founder and board member for the Lean Software and Systems Consortium.  He has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T. as well as a Masters in Mathematics from Emory University. You can follow Alan on Twitter, @alshalloway

Resources

Video | Slides

February 15th, 2012: Expressing Parallel Patterns in Modern C++ — Rahul V. Patil

Come at 6:30pm for pizza supplied by Amazon Digital.

The Northwest C++ Users Group is pleased to welcome Rahul V. Patil as our speaker this month. Amazon Digital is sponsoring our pizza for the meeting as well. Please join us for this meeting back in our regular room, at our regular time!

Abstract

We’ll do a lap around the most commonly applicable parallel patterns. The goal of the talk is to map each of these parallel patterns to equivalent C++ code, while taking advantage of the modern constructs in the language. We’ll demonstrate this by looking at the Parallel Patterns Library available in Visual Studio and Intel’s TBB. We’ll also look at some tools within Intel’s Parallel Studio and Microsoft’s Visual Studio that help identify, debug and analyze parallel programs.

This talk is for you, if you are looking to learn generally accepted parallel patterns and start using them in your C++ code. The talk will scale between 200 level and 400 level.

Note: The talk will not discuss C++ AMP, which deserves a full hour of its own.

Speaker Bio

Rahul V. Patil is a Lead Program Manager, in Microsoft’s C++ Parallel Computing team. He started at Microsoft 8 years ago and has been a part of the C++ concurrency runtime team since its inception.

About Rahul’s team: Parallel Computing team was founded 5 years ago with the mission of bringing programming models and tools to developers, so they may take advantage of the multi-cores and GPUs on the machine.

• Microsoft MSDN concurrency
• C++ PPL and AMP blog

Video and Slides

Watch the video of Rahul's talk or read the slides.