November 12th, 2010

I had the pleasure of presenting two talks at Øredev this week. For those of you that asked, here are the slides and the code samples:
- Maven 3
- Encryption on the JVM
Comments and feedback in both positive and constructive criticism formats are greatly valued. Drop me a line via email or twitter.
Tags: Encryption, Maven, Presenting
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September 10th, 2010

I had the privilege of presenting three talks at the massive JavaZone in Norway this year. What an amazing conference; and to think it is all run by a Java Users Group (JUG) called JavaBin.
My slides are online for:
The feedback and comments from Sigmund and Morten were wonderful. I loved getting to say hello to folks I met last year, such as Erik Mogensen. It’s like extended family here.
I hope I get invited back next year. Now, I’m off to do a hike with the organizers in the mountains of Norway!
Tags: Encryption, Git, OpenSource, Presenting, Programming
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August 29th, 2010
North Carolina
This week, I made a four day journey to the very forested state of North Carolina. Joey knew a Coloradoan was coming and turned on the statewide AC to bring it down to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit when I landed. The food was great, the people were super, and the technology was awesome.
Relevance
I had an open invitation to come out and visit the team at Relevance, which I’d been waiting to cash in. The Research Triangle NFJS Symposium finally made that visit possible.
I had a great time meeting the entire Relevance team, working with Stu Halloway on automating the Clojure release scripts through some Bash scripting, Git calls and Maven Ant Tasks.
At lunch, I gave a live demo of my workflow with the DevonThink Pro product, including capturing and aggregating multiple RSS streams alongside archived emails and snippets from web pages.
In the afternoon, I had the fun assignment of working with Aaron Bedra on an implementation of JCE symmetric AES encryption on a Clojure project. He followed up a day later on “Relevance Open Source Friday” by beginning to move the implementations over to a standard library for upcoming public consumption.
No Fluff, Just Stuff
I had the pleasure of presenting Encryption, Open Source Debugging on the JVM (over 50 deliveries of that one now), Hadoop, Maven 3 and Git to the engaged audience in Raleigh on Friday and Saturday. The during-presentation questions were spot on, and even when the topics got heady, the students just leaned forward in their chairs and kept on making insightful inquiries. Attendees of that nature are pure candy to a passionate presenter like myself. I especially want to thank Darin Pope, Billy Dupre, David Bloom, David Deininger, Sri Sankaran, Asif Rashid, and Ed Savage for providing much-desired feedback on Twitter.
I know I’ll be back for the NFJS show next year, but I’ll make all efforts to put in a few more visits prior to that. A city with a technology culture of this strength demands that I do. Thanks for having me and perhaps I’ll see some of you at the Rich Web Experience in December on the beaches of sunny Florida.
Resources
For the folks that attended my talks this weekend, here are some constantly updated supplemental materials to resources that are paired with the slides:
Encryption
Open Source Debugging
Hadoop
Maven 3
Git
Tags: Clojure, Encryption, Git, Hadoop, Maven, NFJS, Presenting, Programming
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August 14th, 2010
The Bad News of Data Breaches
The news keeps pouring in day after day and week after week of significant company-damaging data breaches. No wonder; Only 23% of companies surveyed in a recent poll indicated that data encryption was even a priority. We should not be having, reading about and reacting to most of these. Such events are typically quite preventable. The JVM platform has some of the strongest and simplest support for encryption of any programming language. An easy to use Java API for encryption, as well as several high level open source libraries, are at developers’ beck and call. I’ve embarked on a mission this year to educate as many developers as possible about the basic vocabulary of encryption, the history of how these algorithms and techniques came about, and how to effectively implement the right use of encryption for business applications.
The Solution in the form of Education
I first brought this topic of Encryption on the JVM to user groups in my home town of Denver, Colorado, USA. It received a more than warm welcome and deep after-talk discussions. Next, I took this topic on the road with the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium series in the USA. Next, I’m excited to get to share these same concepts with audiences in Sweden at the always-cutting-edge Øredev conference, shortly followed by the equally esteemed Devoxx in Belgium.
Acting on the Need for Encryption
Discard the notion that encryption is too hard to learn. Embrace that encryption is quickly becoming a necessary skill of sought-after developers, the world over. This talk will get you up to speed and send you on your way to making your applications more secure, leverage encryption properly, and protect your valuable customer data from prying eyes. No longer just a notable stretch goal, this is the new responsible level of application engineering. I hope to see you at one of these exciting events!
Tags: Encryption, Java, OpenSource, Programming
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August 9th, 2010
I’m excited to announce that I’m presenting several informative talks in Europe and Scandinavia this Fall.

First up is JavaZone in Oslo, Norway. I can’t believe this classy and large of a show is put on by a user group (in a sports arena). Clearly, it has a great committee and a great director at the helm. This is where I first met the likes of Ola Bini of JRuby and Kohsuke Kawaguchi of Hudson fame. If you are in reach of Norway, this is a must-see developer event with presenters gathered from all over the world.

Next up is the exciting Øredev in Malmö, Sweden. I’ve heard from my colleagues at No Fluff Just Stuff that this is a stellar event. The quality of materials Øredev has sent out to speakers has been amazing thus far, and literally table-discussion worthy for inclusion in our Presentation Patterns book. I’m going to be in every one of Evan Doll’s iOS sessions.

Finally, I’m presenting a nitro-enhanced version of Encryption on the JVM at Devoxx in Antwerpen, Belgium. Another conference (like the awesome Jazoon) in a movieplex? Anytime! No worrying about the size of code samples on the screen, that’s for sure. Is a 30 meter screen big enough for you? I hear that Devoxx is the JavaOne of Europe. The lineup of speakers is phenomenal. I will be in a chair for every session besides mine.

If you are in Europe, or are of a traveling persuasion like I am, any one of these three venues would be a big enhancement to your knowledge and relevancy in the JVM development world in 2011. I hope to meet many of you I’ve only spoken with digitally before. I’ve already received dozens of “see you there messages.” Add your name to that list.
Tags: Encryption, Maven, Presenting
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January 15th, 2010
Denver JUG January Meeting
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
Encryption Bootcamp on the JVM
Abstract
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.
Intro to Hadoop
Abstract
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.
Tags: DJUG, Encryption, Hadoop, Presenting
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