2014

Philly ETE # 41 – The Impact of Agile Quantified: A De-Mystery Thriller – Larry Maccherone

From the abstract: Ironically, much of the Agile process is based on intuition. Folklore. Anecdotes. Tradition. Faith. Now, for the first time in Agile history, there is solid research backed by the hard numbers of 10,000 teams. And not surprisingly, that disturbs some existing foundations, rebuilding them with facts, evidence, and insights. This talk builds … Read More

Philly ETE # 40 – Stroop, Whorf, And Elixir – Dave Thomas

From the abstract: The philosopher Wittgenstein believed that reality is bounded by our ability to express it: “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Many others think along similar lines. I believe it is true when it comes to being able to express ourselves effectively. In this talk I dig into … Read More

Philly ETE # 38 – Reactive Javascript at Netflix – Jafar Husain & Matthew Podwysocki

From the abstract: What’s does a mouse drag event have in common with an Array of numbers? The answer to this question may surprise you: they are both collections. This key insight holds the key to dramatically simplifying asynchronous programming in Javascript. In this talk you will learn how you can use the familiar Javascript … Read More

Philly ETE # 37 – Not-So-Big Data After All: Managing Reference Data with Sirius – Jon Moore

From the abstract: Many interesting “reference datasets” now fit in a single commodity server’s RAM, with more on the way as main memory sizes continue to grow. The open source Sirius library allows developers access to this data in native datastructures while managing the distributed systems heavy lifting of replication and persistence. In this talk, … Read More

Philly ETE #36 – Why Spark Is the Next Top (Compute) Model – Dean Wampler

From the abstract: Spark is an open-source computation platform for Big Data. Leaders in the Hadoop community, such as Cloudera, have embraced Spark as a replacement for MapReduce, the venerable standard for writing Hadoop jobs. This talk explores why this change is needed. Spark provides two important benefits compared to MapReduce. First, its performance is … Read More

Philly ETE #35 – Life In The Data Mines – Cliff Moon

From the abstract: Boundary was founded on a relatively simple idea: what if we were to use modern distributed data processing techniques to tackle a moribund industry; IT Monitoring? Further, we figured that if we could tackle the piece of the stack that outputs the most data, the network, then we could take on any … Read More

Philly ETE #34 – How to Build a Recommender: Best Practices with Apache Mahout and Solr – Ellen Friedman

From the abstract- As machine learning emerges from research to find its place in practical applications, it’s useful to know some tips for how to build a simple but powerful recommendation engine. This talk explores how to choose effective data, how to use Apache Mahout to discover the “right kind” of co-occurrence and an innovative … Read More

Philly ETE #34 – High Performance Reactive Applications with Vert.x – Tim Fox

From the abstract: Vert.x is a lightweight, high performance, reactive application platform for the JVM that’s designed for modern mobile, web, and enterprise applications. In this talk you will learn about the design principles and motivation behind Vert.x and why we are heading for a reactive future. You will also hear an overview including demonstrations … Read More

Philly ETE #33 – Generalists Are Special – Chris Merrick

From the abstract: Software is easier to write today than ever before. With little understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes, a marketer can stream an API firehose into a distributed system to perform a data analysis in just a few lines of code. The proliferation of open source projects and sites like GitHub … Read More