Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves coding, presenting, and working with people. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, build systems, and how software architecture should resemble an ant colony.
His firm, the August Technology Group, helps clients with product development, technology consulting, and technology upgrade projects on the JVM. The August Group’s technology preferences reflect the generalist sensibilities of its founder, and its development practices are always lightweight, self-improving, and humanizing by design.
Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the open-source Groovy Liquibase DSL, co-author of the DZone Clojure RefCard, co-presenter of the best-selling O’Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, and a member of the O’Reilly Expert Network.
He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.
Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you’re going to have to look at code.
In this talk, we’ll examine three important contenders in the NoSQL space: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We’ll review their data models, scaling paradigms, and query idioms. Most importantly, we’ll work through the exercise of modeling a real-world problem with each database, and look at the code and queries we’d use to implement real product features. Come to this session for a thorough and thoroughly practical smackdown between three important NoSQL products.
Per request, the presentation slides won’t be made available.
Want to go deep on a popular NoSQL database? Cassandra is a scalable, highly available, column-oriented data store in use at Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Rackspace, and other web-scale operations. It offers a compelling combination of a rich data model, a robust deployment track record, and a sound architecture, making it a good choice of NoSQL databases to study first.
In this session, we’ll talk about Cassandra’s data model, look at its query idioms, talk about how to deploy it, and look at use cases in which it is an appropriate data storage solution. We’ll study its origins in the Amazon Dynamo project and Google’s BigTable, and learn how its architecture helps us achieve the gold standard of scalability: horizontal scalability on commodity hardware. You’ll leave prepared to begin experimenting with Cassandra immediately and planning its adoption in your next project.
Per request, the presentation slides won’t be made available.
Many development shops have made the leap from RCS, Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, CVS, BitKeeper or SourceSafe to the modern Subversion (SVN) version control system. But why not take the next massive stride in productivity and get on board with Git, a distributed version control system (DVCS). Jump ahead of the masses staying on Subversion, and increase your team’s productivity, debugging effectiveness, flexibility in cutting releases, and repository redundancy at $0 cost. Understand how distributed version control systems are game-changers and pick up the lingo that will become standard in the next few years.
In this talk, we discuss the team changes that liberate you from the central server, but still conform to the corporate expectation that there’s a central master repository. You’ll get a cheat sheet for Git, and a trail-map from someone who’s actually experienced the Subversion to Git transition.
Per request, the presentation slides won’t be made available.
