My Favorite Tech Gurus at App Dev Trends 2014: Intersimone, Skerrett, Matsumura, Balbes and More!
There's nothing like seeing the final agenda go up on a Web site to drive home the reality that you're chairing your first technology conference.
Gulp…
Fortunately for me, that agenda -- the one for our first ever App Dev Trends conference coming in December in Las Vegas -- is filled with workshops and sessions led by some of my favorite enterprise software experts, industry mavens, market watchers and serious codederos. I might be as nervous as a nerd at the prom about stepping onstage in my chairing duties (man, that simile brought up some bad memories), but I couldn't be more relaxed about our kick-ass presenter lineup.
I'm very excited, for example, to have David Intersimone (better known as "David I.") speaking at the show. Intersimone is vice president of developer relations and chief evangelist for toolmaker Embarcadero Technologies, and he's a programmer's programmer. He worked for more than two decades at Borland, the company that invented the IDE, then at CodeGear, the company that emerged from Borland's decision to shed its tools business. David will be presenting two sessions: "Integrating Devices and Gadgets into Your Enterprise" and "Clouds: The Final Frontier – Integrating BaaS into your Enterprise Apps."
We also have one of my all-time favorite conference keynoters, Miko Matsumura, leading a session. He's now vice president of developer relations at Hazelcast, the open source in-memory data grid company, but I first saw Miko when he served as chief Java evangelist at Sun Microsystems in the late '90s. (Back when he had shoulder-length hair!) He was one of the most visible spokespeople for Java back then, and a member of the team that popularized the Java platform among developers. In his session, "Elastic Application Performance Market View," Miko will examine the dizzying array of options available today for architecting scalability into applications from Day 1.
When Dr. James McCaffrey, a popular veteran of 1105 Media's Visual Studio Live! conferences and Visual Studio Magazine columnist, responded to my e-mail pestering by saying that he might have a totally new tool to present at our show, and that this tool was designed for developers interested in neural networks, I swallowed my gum! You've probably heard about Microsoft's new cloud-based machine-learning tool, Machine Learning Studio, the beta of which was unveiled in July. His presentation is titled: "Understanding Neural Networks Using Python." McCaffrey, who works at Microsoft Research, promises that attendees will come away from his session with an in-depth understanding of neural networks -- and to include one of the first public demos of the new Machine Learning Studio.
I am also very excited about Ian Skerrett's session, "Introducing Eclipse IoT: Accelerating IoT Development." Over the past two years, the Eclipse Foundation has been developing a community of open source projects for Internet of Things developers. That community now comprises 15 different projects, and includes implementations of popular IoT standards, such as CoAP, MQTT, and Lightweight M2M. Ian is the man who has been leading the effort to build that community. He will be talking about the project itself and how to use the technologies it encompasses to get started building IoT solutions.
One of my favorite tech industry watchers, Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke inc., is also presenting at our show. Her official bio says that she's widely recognized as "a strategic thinker and influencer in the application life cycle, virtualization, cloud computing, and convergence markets." I usually hate to use PR-speak, but that line is right on the money. Cool tidbit from that bio: She worked on the original JBuilder IDE. I've interviewed Theresa many times, and I'm looking forward to both of her sessions: "Extreme Automation: Software Quality for the Next-Generation Enterprise," and "Software Quality in the Sound Bite Era."
And our own Agile Architect, Dr. Mark Balbes, will be among the speakers kicking off the show with his session, "The State of Agile." Mark will be talking about the evolution of Agile -- what works, what doesn't and where the Agile movement might be heading in the future. He'll also be there to wrap things up with our closing panel, "Agile Techniques and Best Practices," which will feature Mark, Matt Philip and Jason Tice, the Three Agilistos from our popular summer webcast. I'll be moderating this panel, so it'll be worth attending for my embarrassing gaffes alone.
It's no exaggeration to say that this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is our first-ever ADT-branded event, and we went all out to put together what I believe is a killer agenda with sessions focused on the enterprise developer. App Dev Trends 2014 runs Dec. 8-11 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Hope to see you there!
Posted by John K. Waters on August 20, 2014