Speaker Series
SoftwareGR Presents Emily Richett
Tuesday, February 23
6:00pm-8:00pm
Atomic Object
Emily Richett is a former TV reporter turned publicist and media entrepreneur who coaches businesses big and small to amplify their brands & share their stories with the world (or at least their target audiences).
She owns Richett Media, a boutique PR firm in West Michigan that serves a growing list of local and national clients. She recently launched emilyrichett.com to offer coaching and online trainings for personal brands. She is also a video contributor to Entrepreneur.com and host of The Amplified Entrepreneur podcast.
Software GR Presents Ramsey Nasser - Symbolic Compilers: A New Hope
Date: Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Time: 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Location: Atomic Object
About Ramsey
Ramsey Nasser is a computer scientist, game designer, and educator based in Brooklyn. He researches programming languages by building tools to make computation more expressive and implementing projects that question the basic assumptions we make about code itself. His games playfully push people out of their comfort zones, and are often written in experimental programming languages of his design. A former Eyebeam fellow and a member of Kitchen Table Coders, when he is not reasoning about abstract unintuitive machines, he builds and maintains vintage motorcycles.
Abstract:
Compiler writing has held the status of deepest of dark magics in software engineering community. This has held back the development of programming languages and tools, and kept us indebted to massive codebases from decades ago. Recent developments in the functional programming community have enabled a completely new approach to writing high performance, functional compilers that stand to change the way we generate low level code. We will dive into the Gamma GLSL compiler and MAGIC MSIL compiler libraries, as well as look to the exciting future this approach may unlock.
SoftwareGR Presents Brent Swisher: The grunt.js automation framework
Tuesday, December 8
6:00 pm-8:00 pm
Atomic Object
Abstract
Everybody secretly wants to be an evil genius, right? What do they all have in common? Minions. In this session, you will learn to build your own little development minion with the grunt.js automation framework. Learn the basics of what grunt is, how it works, and how to make it automate the boring programming tasks that waste your time. Be warned, there will be code involved, and perhaps a little world domination.
Bio
Brent Swisher is a Web Developer for Institutional Marketing at Grand Valley State University. Most of his time is spent developing web applications for the university, including a custom mobile-first cms, and the new quickfacts page. He enjoys living and working in West Michigan and can often be found in one of Grand Rapid’s amazing breweries, playing with his dog, or enjoying a good cup of tea. You can follow what he is up to lately at www.brentswisher.com.
Software GR Presents: Realigning a SaaS: How to Do It AND What to Watch Out For
Tuesday, November 17
6:00pm- 8:00pm
Atomic Object
Nick Disabato is a designer and writer from Chicago. He’s probably most-known for writing Cadence & Slang, widely considered one of the better texts about his field. He also runs a solo interaction design consultancy, Draft, and loves thinking about the business of independent work.
Abstract
Your web app is showing its age. You want to improve it, but a wholesale redesign isn’t in the cards right now. Fortunately, there are a lot of things you can do to your existing design to improve it. This talk will cover the best design changes you can make on an existing web app – and I’ll put them into practice on an existing SaaS product.
Software GR Presents: David Nolen: Hello, Om Next!
When: October 27, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St. SE, Grand Rapids, MI
Please RSVP here.
David Nolen will be presenting Om Next!
Om Next unifies the big ideas behind Facebook’s Relay, Netflix’s Falcor, and Cognitect’s Datomic to deliver a radically simplified architecture for building user interfaces. Declarative co-located queries, reified mutations, and deep immutability together eliminate swaths of incidental complexity so that programmers can focus on the part of the problem that actually matters - delivering a great interactive experience to end users.
David Nolen is the lead Clojurescript developer, the author of Om and the popular Clojure core.async and core.logic libraries.
A little more background on David:
You can also follow David on Twitter at @swannodette
We are excited.
SoftwareGR Presents Eric Shull: Communicating Sequential Processes (Video)
The time has come to think concurrently. Traditional software concurrency management leads to non-deterministic race conditions and deadlocks that are hard to reproduce and debug, leading to unreliable software. That means it's time to introduce math. Tony Hoare's paradigm of communicating sequential processes, or CSP, is not only a robust way to manage concurrency, but it's fun too! Join us to learn more about how CSP in the Go programming language allows us to reason more clearly about many things happening at once.
When: Tuesday, September 22, 6:00pm-8:00pm
Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506
Please RSVP if you plan on attending.
Who: Eric Shull, Atomic Object
The time has come to think concurrently. Traditional software concurrency management leads to non-deterministic race conditions and deadlocks that are hard to reproduce and debug, leading to unreliable software. That means it's time to introduce math. Tony Hoare's paradigm of communicating sequential processes, or CSP, is not only a robust way to manage concurrency, but it's fun too! Join us to learn more about how CSP in the Go programming language allows us to reason more clearly about many things happening at once.
About Eric:
Eric Shull is a software consultant and developer at Atomic Object. He enjoys working in Go and ClojureScript, writing, sketchnoting, doing math, creating data visualizations, making experimental programming languages, and much, much more.
SoftwareGR Presents Steve Smith: Git Better (VIDEO)
When: June 23, 2015
Are you a Git user who feels like they're only using a fraction of the functionality? Do you find yourself knowing there's more to it, but are worried about screwing up your repo? In this session we'll dive into a few of the more powerful commands that will make us better, more confident, more organized developers. Come out of the talk understanding more about the way Git stores your data, how to recover from mistakes, and how to dive more deeply into the information stored in your repository.
About Steve: Steve designs and builds things at GitHub. He's been teaching people how to make better software for over a decade. When not creating things online, you'll find him on the golf course, gardening, or tending his chickens.
SoftwareGR Presents Joe Johnston: Design for Sensors, not Screens (VIDEO)
When: May 26, 2015
We've all heard the statement, design mobile first.. maybe it's time to say, design for sensors first. Sensors are going to become more and more incorporated into what we design & develop. From wearable devices to button-sized low powered beacons that transmit signals, we need to think about how we can start capturing these signals to help create that perfect contextual experience for users.
Key Takeaways: - Devices and technologies available. - Pros and cons of designing for wearable and sensor - devices. - Review of sensory design done well and what not to do. - How to strategize for designing your wearables. - Designing for privacy
About Joe: Joe Johnston VP, Experience Innovation, Universal Mind
Over 14 years of digital experience with extensive knowledge of mobile and cross-platform technologies. My skill set focuses on user experience and the creation of experience prototypes to help clients quickly test concepts and ideate new ideas. I’m adept at navigating the rapidly evolving and shifting technological landscape, making intuitive decisions amidst information-abundance, where sparse facts mingle loosely with data-drenched opinions. I’ve completed a wide variety of projects, performing duties that include Experience Advisor/Consultant, Digital Strategy, Experience Design, and senior level development.
As an accomplished author and speaker, I look at myself as a subject matter expert on Experience Design & Innovation.
Experience design is driven by moments of engagement, or touch points, between people and brands, and the ideas, emotions and memories that these moments create. My experience design philosophy is holistic in nature and takes into account all components required to create engaging and emotive experiences.
SoftwareGR Presents Brian Genisio: JavaScript Robotics? Not a bad idea. (VIDEO)
When: April 28, 2015
JavaScript is seeing its renaissance right now. All the cool kids are coding JavaScript everywhere they can. But robotics? Really? Doesn’t that sound like a bad idea? I’d like to show you the opposite: why JavaScript robotics is NOT a bad idea! It turns out that the same things that make JavaScript great for the web also make JavaScript great for robotics. Enter Johnny-Five: a JavaScript robotics platform with beautiful abstractions. We’ll discover the power of Johnny-Five and explore the possibilities of controlling low-cost electronics to manipulate the real world with a much more accessible language than C/C++.
Bio for Brian Genisio
Brian Genisio is a passionate software developer in Ann Arbor, MI and an active member of the Michigan software community including co-organizing the SouthEast Michigan JavaScript Users’ Group. For over 15 years, Brian has worked with countless languages and technologies. Currently, he is focusing on front-end development stacks, mostly JavaScript-based. He also loves to talk about software. He can talk your ear off. Just humor him. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, cycling, building JavaScript-powered robots, and playing with his kids.
SoftwareGR Presents Jonathan Snook: CSS is a Mess (VIDEO)
When: March 24, 2015
Jonathan writes about tips, tricks, and bookmarks on his blog at Snook.ca. He has also written for A List Apart, 24ways, and .net magazine, and has co-authored two books, The Art and Science of CSS and Accelerated DOM Scripting. He has also authored and received world-wide acclaim for the self-published book, Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS, sharing his experience and best practices on CSS architecture. When not writing books and speaking at conferences, Snook works at Shopify.
Abstract:
CSS is easy? CSS is messy! And as a project grows, it only gets messier. You find yourself throwing !important at everything or fighting with long selectors just to get a style to overrule another. This session looks at a few quick tips to help bring things under control.