2014

Philly ETE 2014 – Dean Wampler – Why Spark Is the Next Top (Compute) Model

Spark provides two important benefits compared to MapReduce. First, its performance is significantly better than MapReduce. We’ll discuss why. Second, because Spark is implemented in Scala and rooted in the world of functional programming, it provides better, more composable primitives that make it easier for developers to create a wide variety of high-performance applications. We’ll discuss these primitives and look at some example applications.

Philly ETE 2014 – Gil Tene – Understanding Latency: Pitfalls, Lessons & Tools

In this talk, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) will demonstrate and discusses some common pitfalls, false assumptions and problematic measurement techniques that lead to dramatically incorrect reporting results, and will explain how these false measurements naturally occur using the most common measurement methods and tools in use today.

Philly ETE 2014 – Ben Scheirman – Tips & Tricks of Effective iOS Developers

Learn tips & tricks that I have picked up in my continued journey as an iOS developer. I’ll cover quick tips that can save you time (like mastering the keyboard), software design practices such as identifying code smells, as well as refactoring & debugging techniques. No matter what your skill level, you’ll likely pick up something new you can use to be more effective as an iOS developer.

Philly ETE 2014 – Linda Rising – The Power of an Agile Mindset

Research has identified what I like to call “an agile mindset,” an attitude that equates failure and problems with opportunities for learning, a belief that we can all improve over time, that our abilities are not fixed but evolve with effort. What’s surprising about this research is the impact of an agile mindset on creativity and innovation, estimation, and collaboration in and out of the workplace. I’ll relate what’s known about this mindset and share some practical suggestions that can help all of us become even more agile.

Philly ETE 2014 – David Nolen – The Functional Final Frontier

Learn how a new library for ClojureScript called Om, a simple
 functional layer over Facebook’s React, makes some traditional hard 
problems in MVC based UIs simple without abandoning the abtractions OO
 programmers find useful. These concepts are easily portable to other 
systems provided the presence of persistent data structures.

Philly ETE 2014 – Filip Maj – Testing Mobile with Appium

Are you testing your mobile apps? Why not? Appium (appium.io) allows for UI testing in browsers, hybrid and native apps. Appium is open source, built on top of WebDriver for test compatibility and supports iOS, Android, and FirefoxOS. Fil shows how you can use Appium to test your apps across a variety of platforms, simulators, and even real devices.

Philly ETE 2014 – Jafar Husain – Reactive Javascript at Netflix

In this talk we’ll be exploring the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library which allows us to treat events as collections. You’ll learn about how Netflix uses Rx on the client and the server, allowing us to build end-to-end reactive systems. We’ll also contrast Rx with Promises, another popular approach to building asynchronous programs in Javascript.

Philly ETE 2014 – Jan Machacek – Reactive APIs With Spray

Learn the components of Spray, how they build on each other to offer convenient abstractions, and how you can easily combine the different abstraction levels in your code. Jan will show how Spray makes the implementation of even complex APIs easy and understandable.