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.

When: Tuesday, June 28th, 6pm – 8pm

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, 49506

Please RSVP if you plan on attending

Carl and Mike will be talking about the use of burn-up charts as a vital element of data-driven project management. Atomic has been using this simple technique for more than five years.

Burn-up charts are a lightweight method of tracking a team’s progress toward completing a project. Burn-up charts do this by visualizing overall project scope and the rate of task completion over time. These highly visible charts help facilitate predictable (in time and money) delivery and increased customer/team alignment.

During this hands-on presentation, Carl and Mike will break down how Atomic creates and uses burn-up charts to manage projects. Participants will learn about complexity points, relative estimation, burn-up chart creation/management and pitfalls associated with using burn-up charts.

About the presenters

Carl Erickson received his MS and PhD in computer engineering in 1991 from Michigan State University, and a BS in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1985. As a faculty member at Grand Valley State University from 1991 to 2000, he taught computer science courses in networking, operating systems, architecture, and object technology. During this time, Carl was principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants for developing operating systems and architecture laboratories.

In early 2000, seeking an opportunity to apply his teachings, Carl took a position as Vice President of Technology Development for Deltamode, a startup company based in Austin, Texas. Twelve months later, Deltamode was shuttered due to insufficient working capital, providing Carl with two life-changing lessons: (1) write software for the REAL needs of REAL people, and (2) agile practices can change the software world. Partnering with Bill Bereza, Atomic Object was born in the summer of 2001.

Michael Marsiglia began working with the founders of Atomic Object in the summer of 2000 after his freshman year in college. After completing the computer science degree at Grand Valley State University in 2003, Michael made the transition from intern to full time employee. Over the next few years Michael played a vital role in helping to establish the identity and best practices of the small company.

In 2005, Michael took a life opportunity when he decided to take a job on the east coast with X-Rite Inc. While at X-Rite, he helped to bring an agile atmosphere and culture to his team. By showing others his excitement for pair programming and testing, he helped raise both the morale and productivity of the team. During his time at X-Rite, Michael also had the opportunity to interact with a wide range of people from different departments. He engaged in international business development including facilitating sales while traveling in Japan. Living on the east coast and working for X-Rite was a very positive and educational experience for him.

In the summer of 2008, Michael moved back to Grand Rapids. He was delighted to find a welcome home at Atomic Object. He looks forward to helping Atomic Object sustain its impeccable reputation for first class software, and extend its business offering.

When: May 18th, 6pm – 8pm NOTE: This is not on our regular schedule. This event is on Wednesday the 18th.

Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, 49506

Please RSVP here if you plan on attending

Interested in doing a startup? Thinking about joining one? Just want to know how Silicon Valley works? Former Grand Rapidian and current San Francisco startup CTO William Pietri answers your questions on the startup lifecycle.

This dynamic talk will be primarily audience-driven. Submit questions now.

About William Pietri

William, the son of a systems analyst and a serial entrepreneur, started earning his lunch money with a computer at the age of 13. He got involved with web community pioneer bianca.com in 1994, and with the Agile movement in 2000. Currently he’s the CTO and co-founder of a venture-backed startup that helps people use their social networks to make better purchasing decisions. He is strong advocate of Lean Startup methods.

When: April 26th, 6pm – 8pm

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

Please RSVP here if you plan on attending

J.R. Jenks is proud to say that he grew up with the computer industry. He first learned to program as a child when programming meant linking to an HP2000 mainframe using a Teletype and a 100 bps modem. He recalls that his family owned one of the first models of a personal computer, the KIM-1, which they built from a kit.

That sense of curiosity and experimentation has carried J.R. forward and he has remained at the leading edge of computer technology and design for almost 20 years. He wrote the software for the first public OLE for Process Control (OPC) demonstration at National Manufacturing Week 1998. He also wrote one of the first automated test harnesses for the Win32 platform, bringing the Extreme Programming practice of “Relentless Testing” to COM and Windows development. J.R. was an early practitioner and advocate of XP in his capacity as Technology Architect at Geneer Corporation.

J.R. is AgileTek’s Chief Technology Officer. He brings to the job his hands-on experience and proficiency with a vast array of technologies, including XML, Enterprise Java, Open Source Software, .NET and Automated Testing.

His industry background includes applications and design done for nuclear power plants, aerospace, insurance and a wide variety of manufacturers.

The Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference is coming soon! Early bird registration ends on March 27th so reserve your slot now. The full program and information is available now on GLSEC.org

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

When: March 22nd, 6pm to 8pm

Please RSVP here if you plan on attending

Walter Bright graduated from Caltech in 1979 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked for Boeing for 3 years on the development of the 757 stabilizer trim system. He then switched to writing software, in particular compilers, and has been writing them ever since.

Walter’s latest work has been on the D programming language: “D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability.”