When: May 29th, 6 – 8 pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending.

Connascence (noun) is defined as (1) the common birth of two or more at the same tome; production of two or more together, (2) That which is born or produced with another, or (3) the act of growing together.

In software, connascence is a rough measurement of the amount of coupling amount the components of a software system. Components that are “born” together will often need to change together over time. Excessive connascence in our software means that the system is hard to change and hard to maintain.

At least that’s the theory. How well does connascence hold up as a measurement tool in evaluating real software? In this talk, we will examine real software examples to illustrate the various aspects of connascence in your code base.

About Jim Weirich

Jim Weirich first learned about computers when his college adviser suggested he take a computer science course: “It will be useful, and you might enjoy it.” With those prophetic words, Jim has been developing now for over 25 years, working with everything from crunching rocket launch data on supercomputers to wiring up servos and LEDs on micro-controllers. Currently he loves working in Ruby and Rails as the Chief Scientist at EdgeCase, but you can also find him strumming on his ukulele as time permits.

When: April 24th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending.

In our information architecture work at The Understanding Group we typically conclude the discovery phase of a project with an “alignment session.” The objective of this meeting is to develop understanding and consensus within the core client team on key matters of business and experience strategy. Early in our formation we took on a client with profound alignment challenges, and as we scrambled to adapt our nascent process to the situation at hand, we borrowed the idea of “performance continuums” from Richard Saul Wurman’s work in the 1970s and ended up with a repeatable methodology that’s now a formal part of TUG’s discovery process. In 45 action-packed minutes of presentation I’ll share the case study from whence TUG’s adaptation of this tool emerged, the historical context Mr. Wurman birthed it in, and guidelines for using it in your projects.

About the presenter

Dan Klyn is an information architect and co-founder of The Understanding Group. A native son of West Michigan, Dan’s time is spent across TUG offices in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids and across the country in service of clients including Herman Miller, Thomson Reuters, Macy’s and Travelocity. Dan is currently serving on the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute and he teaches information architecture at the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

When: March 27th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending

We received notice that unfortunately our originally scheduled speaker is out sick and will be unable to speak. Taking up the torch on very short notice (Thanks Zach!) is Grand Rapids local, entrepreneur, and author Zach Dennis.

Our originally scheduled speakerfor March, Lisamarie Babik, has had to cancel due to illness, so Lisamarie will not be joining us. Instead, Grand Rapids local, entrepreneur, author, and engineer Zach Dennis will be presenting “Sand Piles and Software”:

This talk applies a concept from the realm of complex systems to software development using the Bak-­Tang-­Wiesenfeld sand pile model as the vehicle for exploration. The sand pile model, which can be use to show how a complex system is attracted to living on the edge of chaos, will be used as a both a powerful metaphor and analogy for the process of building software. Software, it turns out, has its own natural attractions to its chaos. In this talk, we’ll look at what this means and its implications.

The speaker’s hypothesis is that is that by better understanding how complex systems work we can gain insights to better understand and improve the act of building software. This thought­provoking perspective will leave you with new ways to think about software development as well as new ways to question it.

About the speaker

Zach is a software craftsman and partner at Mutually Human and with over ten years of experience in professional software development. He believes strongly in taking a pragmatic and practical approach to both software development and testing processes, and is a published contributor to The RSpec Book. He can be found at Continuous Thinking and on Twitter at @zachdennis.

When: March 27th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending

If you’ve ever been on a job interview, there’s one question you knew you were going to be asked. You may have even practiced your response.

Finally they asked, “Are you a team player?”

Did you tell the truth?

Experience shows that there is a wide chasm between SAYING you are a team player during an interview and actually BEING a team player in the workplace. Now that the interview is over, how do you help yourself – or others – close the gap?

It starts with the hard work of building TRUST and SELF-CONFIDENCE in your team, of eliminating the FEAR of MAKING MISTAKES.

And practice. Lots and lots of practice.

This session is based on hard-learned lessons from our embarrassingly long careers in the software industry. Come. Benefit from our mistakes. Learn how to make your own team better and maybe, just maybe, you can look your interviewer in the eye next time you answer, “Yes.”

About the speakers

Lisamarie Babik has traveled the USA, Canada, Panama, and Mexico speaking about Agile and its relationship with formal project management. Her presentation style has been described as “wise, honest, humorous, passionate, and knowledgeable,” all of which she consider important factors to a successful presentation. She has been working full-time with Agile teams for about a decade and has worked in the software industry for twenty-*cough*-four years. She holds the Project Management Professional (PMP) credential from the Project Management Institute and is active in several PMI chapters and special interest groups.

Ted Layher is currently a senior software developer at Menlo Innovations with 7 years experience in agile projects. His professional career started in the middle of the dot com bubble and has survived despite several company’s best efforts. Ted’s career began as a unix systems administrator working for a large automotive corporation and small local companies . He has enjoyed evolving into a software developer. Ted brings an interesting mix of operational, systems knowledge and Test Driven Development skills to the team. He influences the team through excellent coaching skills. Ted has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Eastern Michigan University.

]]> http://softwaregr.org/2012/03/15/lisamarie-babik-ted-layher-are-you-a-team-player/feed/ 0 http://softwaregr.org/2012/02/20/andy-keller-when-should-you-build-vs-buy/ http://softwaregr.org/2012/02/20/andy-keller-when-should-you-build-vs-buy/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:19:12 +0000 swietonm http://softwaregr.org/?p=474 When: February 28th, 6pm – 8pm Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids, 49506 Please RSVP if you plan on attending. When creating software, whether it be a small website or a large custom platform, you repeatedly face the build vs buy dilemma. Should you use raw sockets or a web framework that [...]]]>

When: February 28th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending.

When creating software, whether it be a small website or a large custom platform, you repeatedly face the build vs buy dilemma. Should you use raw sockets or a web framework that already speaks HTTP? Should you write javascript directly against the DOM or use a library like jQuery? Should you write a graphing library or find one on the web? Sometimes the answer seems obvious, but making the wrong decision can increase cost, time, complexity, maintenance and support.

In this talk I will start by framing the problem and will provide guidance for making the right decision while avoiding simple cliches like “don’t reinvent the wheel”. I will then go through specific examples from my experience working on a large mature codebase for a product that evolved considerably over more than 15 years. You’ll be surprised by some of our decisions and what we learned from them.

About the Presenter

Andy Keller is the Director of Engineering for Traction Software and principal developer of the Traction TeamPage collaboration and knowledge sharing application.

In his 13 years with Traction, Andy has grown the product from a proof-of-concept to an award-winning platform used by hundreds of organizations globally in a variety of industries, including consulting, industrial manufacturing, pharmaceutical, education, military, law enforcement, and many state and federal government agencies.

Andy holds a patent for his contributions to the collaboration space and was involved in developing blogs and wikis as early as 1998, long before mainstream popularity.

Andy graduated with honors from Brown University with a degree in Math-Computer Science specializing in artificial intelligence.

When: Tuesday, January 31st

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St. SE, Grand Rapids, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending.

“The cloud” is an area of rapid transformation – major vendors release new functionality every month … what does it all mean? How can you take advantage of it? As a developer, why would you tend to gravitate toward alternatives from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Rackspace, VMWare, Heroku, or others? Patrick Foley, ISV Architect Evangelist with Microsoft, provides an overview of the cloud, discusses the competitive landscape, and illustrates the key variations of Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) as well as public and private cloud options.

About Patrick Foley

Patrick Foley is an ISV Architect Evangelist with Microsoft, which means he helps other software companies succeed building on the Microsoft platform. In addition to working with hundreds of partners, large and small, Patrick cohosts the Startup Success Podcast with Bob Walsh and produces Smart Bear Live with Jason Cohen.

When: November 29th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St. SE, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending.

iOS development has become increasingly popular in the past four years since the introduction of the first iPhone. That popularity has created a vibrant developer community that has introduced a number of great third-party libraries. It has pushed Apple to innovate and improve iOS and its development environment.

During this presentation I will give tour of new features in iOS 5 and explore popular third-party libraries. Participants will be given concrete technical examples and the opportunity to follow along and ask questions.

About Justin DeWind

Justin has been with Atomic Object since 2005 and holds a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from GVSU. He is one of the developers responsible for the widely-used ArtPrize iPhone application.

When: October 11th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending

Most non-trivial software systems suffer from severe technical and structural debt. This burden acts like an ever increasing tax on every code change or new feature to be added. The cost of change is growing significantly faster than the code base. Although this is more and more a known fact, very little is done to address this problem in a meaningful way. Shouldn’t one assume that project managers and stake holders would do everything in their power to fight structural and technical debt to keep the system maintainable and the cost of change manageable?

The session elaborates why this problem is so difficult to solve and identifies potential solutions with a high return on investment. As the title indicates, software architecture has a very important influence on the overall maintainability and technical quality of a software system. During a recent informal poll at the New England Java User Group 80% of the attendees agreed, that architecture is the most important long term success factor for a software system, while only 1% had a process in place to monitor and maintain architectural quality rules.

About Alexander von Zitzewitz

Alexander v. Zitzewitz is founder and managing director of hello2morrow and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field of software architecture and development best practices. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a masters degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.

When:Tuesday, September 13th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending

Lean Startup is new and, it’s sometimes easy to forget, mostly unproven. But it builds on older ideas that have more evidence going for them: Lean Thinking, Agile, user research and many others. These give Lean Startup a solid foundation of values and principles, but the practices of lean startup are still very much an open question. Do we really understand how to conduct customer development? How is MVP software development different? When is something “validated”? When and how should your practices change?

I approach these issues from the perspective of a longtime agile software developer turned startup employee, turned UX enthusiast, turned co-founder of my own startup. My talk will be interactive, and I hope to engage an audience coming from many perspectives–including development, UX and business–who will bring their own insights to the discussion.

About Moses Hohman

Moses Hohman is co-founder of Human Practice, a web-based service that helps patients find doctors and doctors find patients through people they trust. Previously he was VP of Development at Collaborative Drug Discovery, a bay-area cheminformatics startup. He has been learning, practicing and teaching agile software development since 2000. He has a PhD in physics from what now almost seems like a former life, and he lives with his family in Chicago.

If you were unlucky enough to miss our closing meeting this past June, you missed a great talk! However, there is a silver lining. The talk is available online here.