My Open Source Debugging talk that I gave at JavaZone, Oslo, Norway last September is online and can be watched in Flash format or downloaded as an M4V file. If you were not able to catch this talk at either this venue, or any of the many NoFluffJustStuff.com stops that I gave this talk at last year, give it a try and let me know what you think of it.
I had the pleasure of hanging out with about 60 of my local friends at the Denver Java Users Group (DJUG to the locals) on Wednesday night and talking about Encryption on the JVM as well as Hadoop. I had the good fortune of having Andy Sautins of Returnpath.net, who’s an active user of Hadoop, field a few of the questions. I really appreciate the time a few of the folks spent giving me feedback on Speakerrate.com. For your future reference, below are the slides and sample source. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome at matthewm@ambientideas.com
Does your application transmit customer information? Are there fields of sensitive customer data stored in your DB? Can your application be used on insecure networks? If so, you need a working knowledge of encryption and how to leverage Open Source APIs and libraries to make securing your data as easy as possible. Encryption is quickly becoming a developer’s new frontier of responsibility in many data-centric applications.
In today’s data-sensitive and news-sensationalizing world, don’t become the next headline by an inadvertent release of private customer or company data. Secure your persisted, transmitted and in-memory data and learn the terminology you’ll need to navigate the ecosystem of symmetric and public/private key encryption.
Moore’s law has finally hit the wall and CPU speeds have actually decreased in the last few years. The industry is reacting with hardware with an ever-growing number of cores and software that can leverage “grids” of distributed, often commodity, computing resources. But how is a traditional Java developer supposed to easily take advantage of this revolution? The answer is the Apache Hadoop family of projects. Hadoop is a suite of Open Source APIs at the forefront of this grid computing revolution and is considered the absolute gold standard for the divide-and-conquer model of distributed problem crunching. The well-travelled Apache Hadoop framework is currently being leveraged in production by prominent names such as Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, Adobe, AOL, Facebook and Hulu just to name a few.
In this session, you’ll start by learning the vocabulary unique to the distributed computing space. Next, we’ll discover how to shape a problem and processing to fit the Hadoop MapReduce framework. We’ll then examine the incredible auto-replicating, redundant and self-healing HDFS filesystem. Finally, we’ll fire up several Hadoop nodes and watch our calculation process get devoured live by our Hadoop grid. At this talk’s conclusion, you’ll feel equipped to take on any massive data set and processing your employer can throw at you with absolute ease.
I’m very excited to announce I’ve been selected to present at the Great Indian Developers Summit in Bangalore, India in April. I just found out that my NFJS colleagues, Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam will be joining me there as well. It will be great to have familiar faces at this venue and to present to such a distinguished audience.
This is a tidbit of insight about my radically revised techniques for assembling complex compelling presentations this year. I’m certain it will create a widely varied set of comments and feedback.
Earlier this year, Neal Ford, Nate Schutta and I were driving from the Des Moines No Fluff Just Stuff show in the pouring rain. Pouring hard enough to stop a dashboard GPS device from working. Hard enough to stop all outbound flights from the airport. Hard enough to cause us to lightly hydroplane. In short, a normal NFJS weekend.
This fury of nature would not deter us from our technical discussions and the subject of presentations with large quantities of moving parts came up. I said that “for a certain set of presentation demos that contain around 5 or more interwoven components — not JAR dependencies mind you — keeping this operational for the course of a year of presenting was more work than building it in the first place and highly crash prone.” We debated aggressively, but Neal interjected at one point and said “You should just try it.” And thus, I did.
Neal, Nate and I have a project that we’ll be able to tell you more about soon. Related to this project, we’re attempting to give names to these presentation patterns and anti-patterns. For example, Neal dubbed the above discussion’s output the “Lipsync Pattern.“
In terms of tooling, I’ve become very attached to Screenflow 2.0. I previously used iShowU HD, but its capabilities are now far exceeded by Screenflow in terms of seamlessly stitching together multiple pieces of footage in a meaningful way.
Feedback from this technique for my Open Source Debugging talks have been overwhelmingly positive. Some examples are:
“Thanks for giving the great talk on open source debugging tools last night at BJUG. Specifically the part where you “played through” the typing/console. It sort of reminded me of prezi.com, with the way you were able to zoom into sections of slides, seemingly capture keyboard input, etc. Loved it.”
and another really captures the essence of why I feel this is a meaningful way of teaching:
“I liked that you used a recorded version vs. live coding. I felt like you were able to explain things better than other presenters I’ve seen who try and field questions while coding live. Also the spotlighting and highlighting really helped the flow.”
When using this approach, I’ve found, through the feedback of friends like Scott Davis, that it’s best to exaggerate the fact that you are not live coding. Joke about it. And lastly, make it a positive trade by discussing what’s happening in the playback in a dialogue with the audience.
I’m becoming so jaded that I (internal voice, not external) am having a hard time watching some live coding speakers now. It’s often swordplay showmanship on the level of Errol Flynn. It has nothing to do with teaching. And it usually bombs, at least in a minor way, somewhere, and we spend 2 minutes watching the speaker “clean it up.”
I hear that there’s going to be a “Presentation Patterns and Anti-Patterns” book with Neal’s name on it. Based on my positive experience, I can only say, “the sooner the better Neal.”
I’m counting down right along with the TSS staff until October 27th where I’ll have the great opportunity to share my OSS Debugging talk with the developers gathered in Prague, Czech Republic. My Denver acquaintance, Tim Berglund will also be coming along to share the right way to be Agile in your Database with Liquibase. Join us for two days of development insights, tools, techniques and one on one time with the speakers.
Of all the cities I’ve presented in this year for both NFJS, private training, and user groups, two stand out so far as real gems: Minneapolis and Denver. The audiences are highly engaged and ask challenging questions. This is both scary and energizing as a presenter. You are being asked to call on not just your prepared slides, but your experience and catalog of knowledge to come up with a relevant answer. Sometimes, the audience will even help you with the answers, like on the defaults for Objective-C’s @property. It turns out, the answer is: atomic. Thanks Johnny Wey!
Sometimes things just don’t go perfectly in the open source world. There are times where it seems like a dot release cures many things, but then breaks/regresses several important ones as well. Like the XML parsing in the iPhone demo. Turns out, it was a Grails 1.1 issue (which I upgraded to from 1.0.3 to solve another bug) in which optional URL parameters are wrongly required. Grails 1.1.1 fixes it, which I validated at 11pm last night, but it would have been fun to live fix this with the audience. This reinforces the point in my talk though that you should always check your web services, possibly using curl, or SOAPui prior to connecting your iPhone application to them.
It’s amazing to see how many of the presenters and audience members are on Twitter and posting their experiences about the conference. That’s a real change from last year, where hardly anyone was live posting in that fashion. I hope to see you all again in the Fall at the next Denver NFJS, loaded with more difficult questions and an inquiring state of mind.
Be a better presenter. Read these tips.
http://www.pubcon.com/blog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1187123220