Cube Antics

In case you missed it, here’s all of the audio I took from the Stack Overflow DevDays Austin conference. Just click on the presenter’s name and you’ll be taken to a page with the audio for their respective talks as well as any supporting material they provided me.

This presentation could actually be split into two different talks. Unfortunately, Eric only had fifty minutes to cover both Python and NumPy.

The Python part of Eric’s talk dealt with a very elegantly written spell check example written by Peter Norvig (copied below).

This Python code not only finds spelling errors in a given input file, it also guesses what you intended to type and suggests correctly spelled words to replace the erroneous word.

Here is the code that was discussed in Eric’s…

Jonathan gave a very nice introductory presentation on developing applications for the iPhone. The live code example was a great deomonstration on how to get a new app up and running quickly. It seems that Apple really did their homework when creating the iPhone development tools.

One disheartening part of Jonathan’s talk dealt with the current state of the iPhone App Store. As most of you probably know, the App Store has been built on this $0.99 eco-system where it’s really hard…

In this presentation, Pete gives an interesting talk on the ASP .NET MVC architecture. This talk offers a fresh alternative to anyone currently working on ASP web forms. Also, the point of entry for developing ASP .NET MVC applications is much smaller for developers currently working in MVC frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Palm Mojo, or even Django.

The Model View Controller (MVC) framework allows for the separation of the presentation and business logic and allows developers to change one…

Jonathan Sharp of Outwest Media gave a very informative and interesting talk on jQuery at DevDays Austin. Jonathan’s presentation includes an introduction to jQuery, an overview of jQuery’s 5 core concepts, a quick look at the jQuery API, and jQuery initiaves. Jonathan also includes a live code demo which showed us how to build a jQuery plugin in 6 simple steps.

This is a great talk to listen to if you want to know more about jQuery, or if you’ve started looking at it…

CouchDB is a robust document-oriented and schema-free database server. CouchDB was written in Erlang which was designed for the Telecom industry. This means that CouchDB has excellent concurrency, message handling, and reliability.

The most exciting thing about CouchDB actually stems from their motto, “Relax”. As a programmer, you can relax knowing that in the event of a database server crash, not only is your data preserved – because data is never overwitten in CouchDB, new files are created – but the CouchDB server (being…

One of the benefits of putting on your own conference is that you get to plug your company’s products to the perfect group of potential users. Fortunately, for us in attendance, we were treated to a demo of a very awesome piece of software that is sure to increase the overall productivity of your group; Fogbugz.

Fogbugz provides its users with bug tracking, project planning, evidence-based scheduling, customer support, and even a Wiki. Plus Fogbugz 7 supports a wide range of…

Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software literally wrote the book on giving modern code reviews. He provides great insight into the current state of code reviews and how to do them better.

Personally, I think the most valuable part of this presentation deals with how to not waste time when doing code reviews. Code reviews can be super costly if you aren’t careful and Jason outlines some great ways to avoid being wasteful with the time and effort of your team.

Jason provides…

Stack Overflow DevDays Austin 2009 was an absolute blast, I got to hang out with some really smart programmers and spend the entire day learning great stuff from some of the industry’s best.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to get on the internet at all during the conference (they kept the schedule pretty full) so I couldn’t blog live from the event. Also, there wasn’t a convenient spot to take video so I ended up settling for audio, which I will…

Today I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Dr. Theodore W. Manikas over VLSI and Nanotechnology Circuit Design for Mixed-Signal Sensor Systems. It was a pretty interesting talk over the need to create extremely small circuits to read data in confined spaces. This project is still in the works and looks very promising for the future. Here’s the video and you can read more about the topic and Dr. Manikas below. Let me know what you think.