New England Regional Developers - Programming

Intro to Ruby

emily — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 17:22:56 +0000

Ruby is one of those fast growing programming languages. And there is a pretty large demand for Ruby coders. During this session we'll cover through an introduction that will involve the following concepts:

Installation
Simple Hello world
Using Ruby like a calculator
About Numbers
Fun with Operations and precedence
Hacking with Strings
Scope
Designing Ruby methods/functions
Comparing Strings
Ruby blocks
Arrays and associative hashes (primer to data structures)
Writing command line programs
Regular expressions
Object Oriented programming (basics)
Where to find more information and how to learn more about Ruby?

This session should be about an hour and 30 minutes.

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Emily Karungi is a software developer specializing in Python and Ruby. She lives in Kampala, Uganda. As a technologist and a woman, Emily is an influential member of her community. She is involved in the Girl Geek Kampala project and was most recently a Google Developer Group team at her university. She is also the founder of Coder in 90, a one on one mentorship and apprenticeship program for developers. She loves to tinker with hardware components (she's a hardware nerd too)

Introduction to Ruby on Rails

emily — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 17:09:12 +0000

Since its release in 2004, Ruby on Rails has grown to be the leading framework for developing web applications in Ruby. Rails is many things:

Open source
Rails promotes best practices - out of the box Rails encourages best practices like TDD, BDD, and clean separation of concerns. The consistent project structure means developers know (generally speaking) right where to go to find whatever they need.
Made for the web - The framework really solves the common problems you're going to face when building for the web. We can get the initial repeatable setup steps out of the way quickly and get to the true business development tasks quickly.
Rails fits a hack culture - As a Rails developer, you kind of have to stay up on what's going on with the web and how technology is evolving. The framework moves so quickly that folks can't really bank on what they knew 3 months ago being applicable today.

During the session you will also see a simple site developed, from project skeleton to running web application. The session should be about two hours long

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Emily Karungi is a software developer specializing in Python and Ruby. She lives in Kampala, Uganda. As a technologist and a woman, Emilly is an influential member of her community. She is involved in the Girl Geek Kampala project and was most recently a Google Developer Group team at her university. She is also the founder of Coder in 90, a one on one mentorship and apprenticeship program for developers. She loves to tinker with hardware components (she's a hardware nerd too)

Terminal Basics for Everyone

sanguis — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 16:30:52 +0000

Learn about the basics of the terminal. This is a relatively short intro to terminal basics. This will include:

Learning to create folders
Creating files
Using Vim (basics)
Deleting files
Deleting folders
Using system variables and intro to the bash profile
Powering up your terminal: Using Zshel
Prettyfing your terminal with themes and colors
Any other stuff to do with a terminal

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2014 - 9:00am-Sep 12 2014 - 9:50am

Room:

178

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Requested Session:

Beginner training: Terminal Basics

Creating Nice Web APIs with Flask

miclovich — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 16:18:00 +0000

Learn to build web APIs using Flask. This session introduces developers to the art of design robust APIs using an easy to use platform. Many might then be able to transfer the principles they learn here to other projects or frameworks. An API is a crucial component to many businesses these days. Exposing data to 3rd party developers is a very important business strategy that enables scaling of a service to more than just one technology channel.

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Victor is a tech lead and partner at Imaginarium, a company based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has previously worked with organizations such as UNICEF, FAO, MIT (EPROM), Ushahidi/SwiftRiver, among others. Victor also founded the Girl Geek Kampala together with colleagues in 2012, and loves to mentor software developers globally through a New York based company called Thinkful, he also occasionally consults with and invests in tech startups too.

Structured Content in Drupal and WordPress

jeckman — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 13:59:47 +0000

This talk examines how Drupal (7.x) and WordPress (3.9/4.0) handle custom content types, and use that to explore how the philosophies of the two platforms/communities differ.

Drupal had CCK going back to 5.x, and moved much of CCK into core in Drupal 7. WordPress had PODS in 2008, and introduced custom post types in 3.0 - but the two frameworks take very different approaches to creating custom content types.

Drupal's core implementation is much more robust in terms of the power offered to administrative users without writing code, whereas WordPress relies on code (plugins or themes) to create custom post types.

I'll also cover Blocks/Widgets, Taxonomies, and metadata, and how each can be added via code or managed via the admin interface.

Although I will use some code samples, the talk is more focused on how each platform/community deals with this question: what it exposes to end users, how users change the behavior, how other functional modules/plugins interact with content types, etc. Is there anything each can learn from the other?

It's not meant as a "this one gets it right; this one gets it wrong" but an even-handed exploration of what each does well and more importantly what each approach reveals about the underlying philosophy and community, and the impact that has on developers, site owners, content editors, and other stakeholders.

Slides:

NERD Summit - Custom Content.pdf

Experience level:

Intermediate

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 13 2014 - 11:00am-Sep 13 2014 - 11:50am

Room:

165-69

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Currently CEO at 10up, a WordPress focused design and development agency. Long time Drupal and WordPress developer, open source advocate, Content Management System consultant.

Architecting distributed, high-performance systems

acoburn — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 19:40:32 +0000

Running a simple web application on a single server is easy. But what if you really need to scale? What if you need fault tolerance? How can you eliminate single points of failure? And how can you do this while retaining your own sanity?

This talk will discuss high availability, concurrency, fault tolerance and other necessary components of "web scale" applications. There will be a big emphasis on loosely coupled systems and asynchronous communication between components, along with the software that makes this easier for both the developer and sysadmin.

This talk will discuss web server architecture (spdy, nginx, apache mpm_worker, mpm_prefork, mod_fcgid), development languages designed for high concurrency (node.js, scala, erlang), high performance database systems from de-normalizing and sharding mysql to using fully distributed databases such as MongoDB or Riak. And finally, there will be a tour through application messaging architectures and some of the tools from the simple (resque) to the more full-featured (ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Camel).

Some understanding of networking protocols (especially HTTP) would be helpful, as would some background in the functional programming paradigm (especially the Map-Reduce model). This talk will also discuss how some of these techniques can be applied to existing applications, such as WordPress or Drupal.

Experience level:

Advanced

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 13 2014 - 11:00am-Sep 13 2014 - 11:50am

Room:

162-75

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Aaron Coburn is a SysAdmin / Programmer at Amherst College. He is particularly fond of cloud computing and distributed, high-performance systems. He is an active committer to a cloud computing system from the Apache Software Foundation and involved in a number of library-related linked data initiatives.

Choosing a CMS, Installing and Configuring, Themes, Modules and Hosting

freescholar — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 17:41:20 +0000

A Content Management System (CMS) makes it possible for you and others to add and edit content on your web site any time from a variety of devices.

We will look at a few different options you have to start using a CMS, including using a hosted service or installing it yourself, and we will highlight the basic differences of the top Free Software CMS contenders. This session is an overview of content management system concepts and in particular WordPress and Drupal.

Beyond how to do day-to-day administration, this session will include a walk-through of both the WordPress and Drupal 7 installation processes, basic configuration, and selection and configuration of some community-contributed plugins (for WordPress) and modules (for Drupal). We will spend relatively more time on Drupal because it is the more complex and powerful option, best suited for a web site requiring significant user or community interaction and the potential to grow with new functionality.

What we will do:
Introduction to CMS concepts, basic configurations, modules and themes

Discussion - Installing Drupal, WordPress or a hosted solution like DrupalGardens.com or WordPress.com

How to do a basic installation of a CMS, WordPress and Drupal

Download Wordpress
Create Database
Installation
Choosing a Theme -- Install - Enable - Configure
Choose Plugins – Install – Enable - Basic Configuration

Slides in this session will be based on a Drupal 7x Installation.

Download Drupal
Server Configuration
Create Database
Installation – settings.php
Choosing a Theme -- Install - Enable - Configure
Choose Modules – Install – Enable - Basic Configuration
Admin Configuration – Permissions – Roles
Navigating the Admin Screens
Adding Content (Nodes,Taxonomy etc.)
How Drupal and MySQL Work Together
Hosting Requirements - 3 things are necessary to run a Drupal installation

Caveats:

I am not a Database Administrator.
I am not a System Administrator
This is not an in-depth study of Drupal or Wordpress Administration
This is not an in-depth study of Drupal 7 Configurations

Join the Drupal or Wordpress community – Give Help, Get Help. Happy Hacking - Do not hack core.

Experience level:

Beginner

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Micky is a member of Agaric, a growing cooperative of Drupal Developers. Bringing new members to the community is her favorite thing to do. She also loves building sites that can be useful to Drupal developers and beginners.

She usually spends time ---

Consulting on various Drupal Projects
Learning about new Drupal modules and updates
Attending Drupal Events
Presenting at Drupal events
Teaching beginners how to get started with Drupal
Creating Webinars and tutorials on Drupal installation, VoipDrupal
Training people to update and maintain their Drupal Websites
Acting as a Drupal evangelist.

Micky's Drupal.org User Profile: https://www.drupal.org/user/69463

Benjamin Melancon:

Benjamin lives and works to connect people, ideas, and resources so more awesome things happen.

A programmer and web applications developer focusing on Drupal, his work with Agaric clients has included Harvard University, GenArts, and Studio Daniel Libeskind.

Benjamin tries to aid struggles for justice and liberty, and has a corresponding passion for authentic news. He is an organizer of the only People Who Give a Damn recognized as an incorporated entity by the IRS and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts charities division. He has also supported several artistic and philanthropic ventures and was a founding, elected director to the Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham, Massachusetts.

He led 34 authors in writing the 1,100 page Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, but he is probably still best known in the Drupal community for posting things he finds to data.agaric.com where developers running into the same challenges at least find that they are not alone.

Ben's Drupal.org User Profile: https://www.drupal.org/user/69463

Requested Session:

Beginner training: CMS installs, Module/Plugins/Theme installs, Basic Config

How to be a Six Figure Developer

gaines — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 20:52:46 +0000

Software and website developers are in extremely high demand and rates continue to climb, but many developers have not yet realized their potential. In this talk we lay out some simple and proven ways to measure your accomplishments, establish a personal brand, and increase your value to employers.

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Gaines Kergosien is a senior solutions architect with Vanick Digital and serves as a board member for the Nashville .NET User Group, the INETA Mentor for TN and speaks at software development conferences throughout the United States. With over 12 years in solutions development using Microsoft technologies, his work includes consulting for such companies as Deloitte, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), American General (AIG), Lexis Nexis, Gibson Guitars, and Cardinal Healthcare.

Managing Asynchronous Control Flow With Promises

mikeharty — Wed, 21 May 2014 20:31:19 +0000

As web applications increasingly move to thick-client JavaScript apps (or node.js backends), web developers are faced with increasing control flow complexity, especially around asynchronous functionality (callback hell). Nested callbacks are difficult to read and write, and maintaining scope within can present a challenge. Promises allow this complexity to be managed in a more readable and intuitive way.

In this talk I'll cover the terminology around Promises and demonstrate the implementation of Promises using several of the most popular libraries:

jQuery Deferred (a slightly different approach)

Experience level:

Intermediate

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Mike Harty is a Senior Consultant at NorthPoint Digital. He has been building websites and web applications for nearly 20 years, and is passionate about delivering clear, concise, and extensible solutions. He has worked with clients including Time Inc, LinkedIn, thePlatform, and NBC Universal.

Introduction to Python/Django for Experienced Web Developers

Paul Bissex — Thu, 01 May 2014 19:30:08 +0000

Since its release in 2005, Django (https://www.djangoproject.com/) has grown to be the leading framework for developing web applications in Python. It is used by major sites such as Pinterest, Instagram, and the Washington Post.

This introduction to web programming with Python and Django presumes experience with basic server-side web development principles in any language. The goal is to show how Django delivers solutions to many common problems and needs faced by web developers. It includes a polished, powerful back-end administration application that can be adapted to any project.

(Some developers call Python "executable pseudocode," meaning that it is relatively easy to read even if you haven't written it before. So if you lack Python experience, don't fear.)

During the session you will also see a simple site developed, from project skeleton to running web application.

Two hours.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Session Time Slot(s):

Time:

Sep 12 2014 - 2:00pm-Sep 12 2014 - 3:50pm

Room:

178

Allowed Types:

Session

Session Track:

Session Tracks (NERDSummit 2014)

Programming

Sessions Topics:

Development

Speaker Bio(s):

Paul Bissex is a software developer specializing in Python and Django. He lives in Greenfield.

As a technology journalist and commentator, Paul wrote for publications such as Wired, Salon.com, and the Chicago Tribune. Paul is co-author of Python Web Development with Django, a popular book on the leading Python web framework.

Paul was previously Director of Software Development at Hallmark Institute of Photography, building both internal web applications and public websites. During that time he also taught web design and marketing skills to approximately 1000 budding professional photographers.

Paul works as a software developer for Cox Media Group, on the web/mobile publishing system used by all of CMG's television/radio/newspaper properties around the country.