Sessions at GOTO Amsterdam 2011 on Friday 14th October

• Welcome
• General Information
• Presentation of today's program
• Updates

The Lively Kernel showed that one could build a self-supporting development environment using only JavaScript and browser graphics. This kernel can be stored simply as a web page, and can come to life in any browser with no installation or plugins.

Recent progress in the Lively Kernel platform enables drag-and-drop composition of active content from shared cloud-based repositories, empowering web developers and end-users alike. The talk will be given live in the system, and will include links to all the tools shown.

Keywords: JavaScript, Kernel, End-User Programming, Authoring, Live, Active Web Content, Visualization, IDE, Metacircular, Self-supporting, Kit, Components

Target Audience: This talk should be of interest to web developers, end-users, teachers, students, and anyone who enjoys live and open-ended manipulation of active web content.

We're seeing too many pitiful implementations of Scrum. Cases where Scrum is viewed as a set of simple practices, which are imposed on the development team. Without any connection to the business and no urge to serve customers early and continuously through valuable software. By playing a game 'live on stage' and explaining how to use Lean's pull system, we're making a point to use Scrum with more guts, more fun, more impact and more results! When time allows we'll show a very successful large scale Scrum implementation in the Netherlands.

Keywords: Scrum, Lean, Fun, Game, Agile, Results
Target audience: All Managers, their managers and everyone reporting to managers.

The Apache Software Foundation is one of the largest open-source foundations - home to more than 90 independent projects, as well as almost 60 "incubating" projects.

One of the key goals of incubation is to learn about and adapt to "The Apache Way", a social and community-oriented set of structures and norms that help to characterize a successful Apache project.

This talk will take you on a journey along the Apache Way. We'll go from the history of the Foundation and the way it was set up, past the licensing philosophy at Apache, all the way to business models common around Apache projects. And of course, we'll look at how individuals can contribute in many different ways to an Apache project

Although it is built on many years of participation at the Apache Software Foundation, The Apache Way is a journey, and there are many paths. There will be plenty of time for discussion and questions, of course!

So you've written an app. Congratulations! There's no feeling like the feeling of seeing the results of so much hard work and sacrifice appear, eternally bright and shining, on virtual shelves. There is no satisfaction like the satisfaction of having people invest their time and money to become a user of your product. There is no praise like the praise of a stranger who thanks you and your product for making their life better. But it only follows then that there is no despair like the despair of having someone shout out in the great assembled crowd that is the Internet, "this app sucks."

Legendary product engineer Mike Lee - drawing from 8 years of experience working on such hits as Delicious Library, Tap Tap Revenge, Obama '08, and Apple's Mobile Store - will show you how to squeeze the suck from your app. You'll explore common types of suck and their remedies, then dive deep on the underlying causes of suck to help you become the type of developer who makes apps that don't suck.

Mike Lee considers that a software engineer makes great applications not because he follows good rules but because he has a better way of looking at the world and he learns from experience.

Keywords: Product Engineering, Apps, Appsterdam
Target Audience: General

In this talk I will explain why it is that I spent the past year building Hadoop clusters for several clients in several markets. I will outline what the Apache Hadoop framework is from a technical point of view and I will explain why it could be as relevant as its popularity suggest, also from a technical and application perspective. There will be examples of what you can and cannot do with it and when it makes sense to use such a technology. And, last but not least, there will be cool things that you can try at home (or at your office, given time), because you should build a Hadoop cluster too! Code will be involved...

Keywords: Hadoop, Big Data, scalable processing, NoSQL, Cloud, Java

Target Audience: Developers and architects who agree that data is an asset which should be used to extract valuable information.

Business wants to "get things done", while IT struggles with maintenance, integration, scalability, security, and lack of resources. Learn how a visual language can help IT become more responsive and support this tremendous demand for change. But a cool language is only a starting point. You also need an integrated environment that supports the full life-cycle of application development - it’s not just about fast coding, it’s about changing and delivering at the speed of business.

Keywords: Visual Language, knowledge transfer, integrated development environment, application life-cycle, productivity, enterprise

Target audience: developers and IT managers looking for enterprise development tools and languages, business users who like Access and Excel

Apache Solr serves search requests at the enterprises and the largest companies around the world. Built on top of the top-notch Apache Lucene library, Solr makes indexing and searching integration into your applications straightforward. Solr provides faceted navigation, spell checking, highlighting, clustering, grouping, and other search features. Solr also scales query volume with replication and collection size with distributed capabilities. Solr can index rich documents such as PDF, Word, HTML, and other file types.

Come learn how you can get your content into Solr and integrate it into your applications!

Learn which new iOS technologies can set your apps apart and/or jump start your development for iPhone and iPad. Become familiar with disruptive features such as iCloud, or accelerate your app development cycles with the new storyboarding and UI customization APIs.

Keywords: apps, ios, iphone, ipad
Target Audience: Mobile developers, architects and product managers

Graph databases like Neo4j are an esoteric and powerful member of the NOSQL family. For highly connected data, graph databases can be thousands of times faster than relational databases, making Neo4j popular for managing complex data across many domains from finance to social, and telecoms to geospatial. This talk will provide a rapid, code-focussed introduction to Neo4j covering graph modelling, core APIs, query languages all supported by an interesting data set mined from the "Doctor Who" universe.

We present our experience applying Test-Driven Development (TDD) at all levels of the development process. TDD at the class level is now well understood (if not always well practiced). We find that the benefits we get from writing tests first and using them to drive design apply at the system level too. That's why we try to address integration and system testing as early as possible. The sooner the system is in a deployable state, the better equipped we are to react to changing business needs by delivering new features.

Our experience is that putting testing at the front of our development process, and paying attention to what we learn from them, flushes out architectural issues such as concurrency and distribution. The result is systems that are easier both to maintain and to support. We can also avoid some of common testing pitfalls, such as unreliability, slow execution, and brittleness.

HBase has seen some interesting deploys of late whether its Yahoo! hosting a copy of the Bing crawl (on a thousand node cluster) or Facebook real-time analytics' taking millions of hits a second. In this talk we will review notable cases of HBase in production and give an update on the current state of "Realtime" Hadoop.

Keywords: hbase, hadoop, apache, big data
Target Audience: Folks interested in big data deploys. This is not a deep technical talk.

With growing communities and on-line activity, applications need to cope with problems related to concurrency and scalability. Two years ago, CQRS –the result of combining several proven best practices- emerged as an architectural pattern to address these problems.

In this talk, Allard will explain how CQRS based architectures address not only concurrency and scalability problems, but also how this pattern supports the developers’ everlasting battle against complexity. The outcome of the session will result in insight in both the opportunities and threats in applying CQRS, based on very practical and down-to-earth scenarios.

Target Audience: Developers, Architects and Technical Managers, or anyone interested in a practical view on CQRS.

Apache Lucene is used for large variety of usecases from Mobile Phonesto massive scale applications like Twitter. Within the last decadeLucene has grown to the most widely used OpenSource Search Library andstill growing. This session introduces Apache Lucene and itseco-system from a technical point of view. I will introduce the mainimprovements in the upcoming release, the main building blocks used tobuild flexible & large scale search components and explain how theLucene Community maintains its high-quality, stability andperformance.

Keywods: Java, Lucene, Enterprise Search, Framework, Testing, Information Retrieval
Target Audience: This talk should be of interest to engineersinterested in open-source search technology, frameworks and testing.

How a small IPTV team at BBC iPlayer used Lean principles and elements of Kanban for their rapid and successful response to a fast paced, very demanding live release schedule for the v2 device customisation programme.

Keywords: Agile, Lean, Kanban, BBC, Workflow Visualisation, Continuous Improvement, Process, Delivery, Team Transformation, Empowerment
Target Audience: This experience report would suit those interested in how others in large organisations have handled software delivery improvement in difficult situations - such as project managers, delivery managers, scrum masters, product managers, and tech leads who are involved in and/or responsible for workflow efficiency/effectiveness.

You've all heard about Hadoop, SOLR, Cassandra, CouchDB, HBase, NoSQL and friends, and now you're ready to start building your own solution on top of one of those! What you might not realise is that you may end up reinventing some bits of the wheel whilst building your system..

In this talk we'll take a whistle-stop tour through a number of the projects from the Apache Software Foundation that aren't ""big data"" projects, but which could prove very helpful to you in building your big data solution. We'll see that Apache is more than just the webserver, Hadoop and Lucene, and with any luck point you at projects that'll save you time!

Building a high performance financial exchange is tough, especially when you're flying in the face on conventional wisdom. In this case it is widely assumed that it's not possible to build a high throughput near real-time system in Java. Over the past 4 years our experience of building LMAX, the world's first multi-asset financial exchange, we've learnt that much of what the industry believes about computer performance is based on folklore.

Using evidence and experience from solving real world problems, this talk aims to dispel some these performance myths. We will cover a number of areas of software development including distributed systems, concurrency and parallelism, I/O, algorithms, garbage collection, and memory efficiency.

We need to reintroduce the science into computer science and stop depending on mythology, technology is changing and mythology is not keeping up.

How to use the powerful faceting engine of Solr to visualize large data collections to help in the discovery and exploration of information.

The principles of Lean and Agile software are short, clear and straightforward. Increasingly both small high performance organizations and large enterprises frustrated by the lack of impact transitioning to Agile. Too often euphoric Lean and Agile aspirations quickly turn into a few standardized practices/tools enshrined across the organization with more dogma than some of the BigM methods they were intended to replace. The recent negative reaction to Kanban and relative ignorance of Cumulative Flow Diagrams illustrates the failure of many Agilists to embrace even simple change. In other cases managers maintain waterfall and Agile “accounting” rather than think through how to properly report progress to their organization.

In this talk we step back and look at a few of key management principles Embrace Change, Sustainable Pace, and Visualize Flow which are essential for a lean and agile software organization. We discuss examples of how successful managers employ these ideas to realize systemic continuous improvement yielding mire flexible, transparent and productive organizations.

Storing ever growing amounts of data is getting cheaper each year. Building great applications requires data driven application design: Starting with clear guidelines on which data to gather, building new features based on usage data up to discovering deficiencies based on implicit user feedback.

Several projects at the ASF make it possible to jump start your data driven applications with existing projects for data analysis, search, storage and data mining. This talk shows how to combine the various tools, helps with understanding what pigs, elephants and mahouts can do for you.

Keywords: data mining, machine learning, data analysis, hadoop, mahout, lucene
Target Audience: should be somewhat knowledgeable in hadoop, can be beginner in data mining/analytics

Data mining, the problem of finding patterns in big datasets is both computational, storage and communicational intensive. And so it would seem to be an ideal candidate for moving to the cloud, right? In this talk we look at a case study where the Azure platform was chosen and on-site market basket analysis solution ported to .NET. We look at the families of solutions and point to their respective strengths and weaknesses. After the talk you should be better armed to choose between different tradeoffs in cloud solutions.

Keywords: Cloud, Distributed computing, Scaling, Apriori, data mining, Market Basket Analysis, FP-Growth, Azure, .NET.
Target audience: This talk is targeted at developers and other professionals who need to make solution decisions for cloud based applications. If you think that Data Mining is cool, you are invited too.

At Twitter we serve more than 1.5 billion queries per day from Lucene indexes, while appending more than 200 million tweets per day in realtime. Additionally we recently launched image, video and relevance search on the same engine.
This talk will outline Twitter's search architecture and explain the modifications we made to Lucene to support realtime search.

Keywords: lucene, realtime search, twitter
Target Audience: advanced, technical

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. On the other hand, not everything that is cool and fun is necessarily useful and practical. Programmers and other technical types often enjoy playing with ideas, often for the sheer fun or challenge of it, not because an idea is directly useful or likely to provide meaningful business value to some stakeholder. This talk looks at and celebrates code and other geekish manifestations of things that are cool and useless.

'Meet the Speakers' is hosted by Marktplaats and will take place in St. John's Room at the Krasnapolsky.