On June 26-28, 2008, I'll be speaking at the inagural Agile IT! Experience symposium in Reston, VA. Agile ITX is about consistently delivering better software. It's for development teams and management, working and learning together.

It's a production of the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium series.  Like all NFJS events, attendance is capped, so be sure to register early.

From the announcement email:

The central theme of the Agile ITX conference (www.agileitx.com) is to help your development team/management consistently deliver better software. We'll focus on the entire software development life cycle, from requirements management to test automation to software process. You'll learn how to Develop in Iterations, Collborate with Customers, and Respond to Change. Software is a difficult field with high rates of failure. Our world-class speakers will help you implement best practices, deal with persistent problems, and recognize opportunities to improve your existing practices.

Dates: June 26-28, 2008

Location: Sheraton Reston

Attendance: Developers/ Technical Management

Sessions at Agile ITX will cover topics such as:

• Continuous Integration (CI)
• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Testing Strategies, Team Building
• Agile Architecture
• Dependency Management
• Code Metrics & Analysis
• Acceleration & Automation
• Code Quality

Agile ITX speakers are successful leaders, authors, mentors, and trainers who have helped thousands of developers create better software. You will have the opportunity to hear and interact with:

Jared Richardson - co-author of Ship It!
Michael Nygard - author of Release It!
Johanna Rothman - author of Manage It!
Esther Derby - co-author of Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
Venkat Subramaniam - co-author of Practices of an Agile Developer
David Hussman - Agility Instructor/Mentor
Andrew Glover - co-author of Continuous Integration
J.B. Rainsberger - author of JUnit Recipes
Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks
Kirk Knoernshild - contributor to The Agile Journal
Chris D'Agostino - CEO of Near Infinity
David Bock - Principal Consultant with CodeSherpas
Mark Johnson - Director of Consulting at CGI
Ryan Shriver - Managing Consultant with Dominion Digital
John Carnell - IT Architect at Thrivent Financial
Scott Davis - Testing Expert

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Some of you know my obsession with Lean, Agile, and ToC.  Ideas are everywhere.  Idea is nothing. Execution is everything.

In that vein, one of my No Fluff, Just Stuff talks is called "The 90 Minute Startup".  In it, I build a real, live dotcom site during the session. You can't get a much shorter time-to-market than 90 minutes, and I really like that.

In case you're curious, I do it through the use of Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. 

The app I've used for the past couple of sessions is a quick and dirty GWT app that implements a Net Promoter Score survey about the show itself. It has a little bit of AJAX-y stuff to it, since GWT makes that really, really simple. On the other hand, it's not all that exciting as an application. It certainly doesn't make anyone sit up and go "Wow!"

So, anyone want to offer up a suggestion for a "Wow!" app they'd like to see built and deployed in 90 minutes or less?  Since this is for a talk, it should be about the size of one user story. I doubt I'll be taking live requests from the audience during the show, but I'm happy to take suggestions here in the comments.

(Please note: thanks to the pervasive evil of blog comment spam, I moderate all comments here. If you want to make a suggestion, but don't want it published, just make a note of that in the comment.) 

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O'Reilly has announced an upcoming conference called Velocity.

From the announcement:

Web companies, big and small, face many of the same challenges: sites must be faster, infrastructure needs to scale, and everything must be available to customers at all times, no matter what. Velocity is the place to obtain the crucial skills and knowledge to build successful web sites that are fast, scalable, resilient, and highly available.

Unfortunately, there are few opportunities to learn from peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned.

Velocity is changing that by providing the best information on building and operating web sites that are fast, reliable, and always up. We're bringing together people from around the world who are doing the best performance work, to improve the experience of web users worldwide. Pages will be faster. Sites will have higher up-time. Companies will achieve more with less. The next cool startup will be able to more quickly scale to serve a larger audience, globally. Velocity is the key for crossing over from cool Web 2.0 features to sustainable web sites.

That statement could have been the preface to my book, so I'll be submitting several proposals for talks.

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Has anyone ever been happy to listen to their own voice? Probably not.

The Pragmatic Podcast is up and running on the redesigned Pragmatic Programmers site. In the first episode, Daniel Steinberg interviews me about the book.

Also available on iTunes.

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I've been quiet lately for a couple of reasons.

First, I'm thrilled to say that I'm joining the No Fluff, Just Stuff stable of speakers.  It's an honor and a pleasure to be invited to keep such company.  The flip side is, I'm spending a lot of my free time polishing up my inventory of presentations.  More frankly, I'm rebuilding them all with Keynote.  (Brief aside, I'm coming to love Keynote.  It has some flaws and annoyances, but the result is worth it!)

I'll debut the first of these new presentations at OTUG on May 15th.  I'll be speaking about "Design for Operations".  The talk will be about 70% from the last part of Release It, and about 30% original content.  OTUG will be giving away a couple of copies of my book, but you have to be there to win!

Finally, I'm working on an article about performance and capacity management.  Most capacity planning work is done entirely within Operations, without much involvement from Development.  At the same time, most developers don't have a visceral appreciation for how dramatically the application's efficiency can affect the system's overall profitability.

This article will show the relationship between application response time, system capacity, and financial success.  I'm hoping to include a simulator app for download that you can use to play with different scenarios to see what a dramatic difference 100ms can make. 

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I forgot to mention that I will be speaking at OTUG on April 19th! I will be speaking on "Living With Systems in Production: Avoiding Heartbreak in Long-Term Relationships With Your Code"

From the summary of the talk:

Everything changes after Release 1.0. One batch of consultants leave, key developers jockey to get themselves reassigned, and the free-wheeling development environment is replaced by the painful rigor of operations. Or, at least, it should be. Systems in production require a different kind of care and feeding. If you have to live with a system in production, your quality of life is largely determined by the things you put in place before Release 1.0. This talk covers the topics that will give you God-like powers over your production systems. If you are an architect or developer who has ever put a system in production--or expects to put a system into production--then this talk is for you.

Much of this will be derived from my experiences at Totality and Best Buy. Spending time in operations gave me a great education about building systems to run, instead of building them to pass QA.

Technorati Tags: operations, OTUG, speaking

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