Kings of Code

Joe Stump

Joe Stump spent 2.5 years in the trenches at Digg.com as the site grew from 12m unique visits to 37m unique visits and from 7 developers to over 20 developers. Dealing with such growth effects architecture, code, development practices and hiring decisions.

Joe will be sharing lessons learned, war stories, and other tips to help others cope with scaling both their sites and their teams.

Amy Hoy & Thomas Fuchs

Amy Hoy hates writing about herself in the third person, but she's game if you are. Amy's got a mission, and has dedicated the past several years to a crusade for imaginative & uncommon interactions... including the teaching of Ruby and JavaScript. When she's not dancing around trying to pull on her supersuit, she writes, wireframes, designs, speaks, trains, and generally does tricks, all under the slash7 moniker.

Rich and Snappy Apps, No Scaling Required
Is there anything more annoying than a slow web application? Great interfaces are nice. Functionality is great. But if a web app doesn't perform fast enough, it's going down the intertubes. Your Rails app might be driving your customers slowly mad, even before you need to scale. Learn about Holistic Performance for rich web apps, how to find out if you've got a problem, and how to fix it. Performance is so much more than "scaling."

Francisco Tolmasky & Jorn van Dijk

Francisco Tolmasky and Jorn van Dijk will both give a brief introduction to the Cappuccino web framework and show how you can use it to build desktop class application for the web. We will display how to use Apple's Interface Builder to quickly design beautiful interfaces for the web without any code. We will also be covering the revolutionary new open source UI that 280 North has been co-developing with Amsterdam-based design firm Sofa, and how you can use it in your own applications to provide a more consistent user experience.

Francisco Tolmasky is the creator of the open-source Cappuccino web framework and the Objective-J programming language. Before that he was an early member of the iPhone development team at Apple, working on Mobile Safari and Maps, as well as creating most of the Web SDK.

Jorn van Dijk is an Interaction & Visual Interface Designer at Sofa. He's working closely with 280 North on Aristo, a design guideline for web applications that ships with Cappuccino.

Steven Pemberton

Steven Pemberton is a researcher at CWI and Chair of the W3C XHTML2 Working Group.

At the end of the 80's he designed and built a browser with extensible markup, stylesheets, vector graphics, and client-side scripting. He has been involved with the Web from the beginning, organising two workshops at the first Web conference in 1994, and chairing the first W3C Style Sheets Workshop in 1995. He is co-author of amongst others HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, RDFa and XML Events.

Steven Pemberton will share his vision on "The Future of Code".

In the two decades since the Web began, computers have become maybe 10,000 times more powerful, and yet the poor programmer is barely more productive. Isn't there some way we could put that extra computer power to better use, and take some of the weight off the programmer's shoulders?

This talk will discuss some possible futures for code over the Web.

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is an Apache CouchDB committer and co-author of the forthcoming O'Reilly book "Relax With CouchDB". He is a director of couch.io, offering commercial hosting, support, consulting, and custom development. He is also designing and evangelizing the CouchApp JavaScript framework for standalone CouchDB applications which are replicated just like any other data. Chris is obsessed with bending the physics of the web.

CouchDB is an HTTP-based, distributed, fault-tolerant, schema-free database server written in the Erlang programming language. It works with common web technologies like JSON, Map Reduce, and REST. Peer based replication makes distributing data among nodes transparent to applications. CouchDB is capable of serving rich dynamic web content rendered using Ajax as well as server-side JavaScript templates, and runs in a low memory profile, so it is suitable for use on the client as well as the server.

Geoffrey Grosenbach

Geoffrey Grosenbach is the founder of PeepCode, a screencasting website providing video tutorials on web development technologies. He's a Ruby on Rails contributor and hosts the official Ruby on Rails Podcast. At Kings of Code he will give a talk about "The Straight Truth About Ruby on Rails".

If you work on the web, the name "Ruby on Rails" has been almost inescapable over the last few years. Yet news about it has been accompanied by a lot of confusion about what Rails really is and where it's different.

In this presentation you'll hear from a Rails advocate who isn't afraid to criticize the framework when needed. We'll cut through common misconceptions about Rails and address its strengths and weaknesses.

You'll learn how to use the best ideas of Rails in your own applications, whether you use it or another framework in your language of choice. You'll learn about some of its core values of code organization, test-driven development, and sensible defaults. We'll also touch on deployment strategies available today and powerful tools that help you code faster and happier.

Aral Balkan

Aral Balkan is a developer, professional speaker, consultant, entrepreneur and performer. In 2008 Aral created and staged the world's first fully-virtual web conference, <head>.

As a developer, Aral has been programming for over twenty years, has a love for learning new programming languages, a passion for simplicity, and an enduring fondness for both visual and experience design. Unabashedly an alpha geek, he is currently hacking Objective-C on the iPhone, Python and Django on Google App Engine, and, of course, what he is most well-known for, Flash, Flex, and ActionScript on the Flash Platform.

Aral's keynote is titled "Remember The Magic". In this talk, you'll join a Renaissance Geek with a passion for interaction design as he takes you on a Tarantinoesque journey through the simulacra in search of substance; a journey that explores both the real and virtual worlds to discover artistry, story, and delight; a journey to remind you of the joy, fun, and passion — the magic — behind why we do what we do.

Nikolai Onken

Nikolai Onken is committer and community evangelist of the Dojo Toolkit. He is co-founder of DojoCampus.org and the regular Dojo.cast() podcast. Being the lead frontend architect at uxebu, Nikolai is involved in mobile development and is pushing the use of the Dojo Toolkit and other standard web techniques in mobile devices forward. You also might find him at one of the many dojo.beer() events which he is helping to organize in Europe

Developing applications both for standard browsers and mobile devices can be challenging. In this talk I will show you how you can use the Dojo Toolkit to write applications which run on both mobile devices (W3C widgets and platforms such as Phonegap) and in classic browsers. You will see how you can maintain incredible flexibility through usage of "the cloud", templates, a reusable plugin architecture and more advanced features of the Dojo Toolkit.

This session is part of the side-event Fronteers seminar.

Andy Smith

Andy is the lead developer of Jaiku.com and the related open source project at Google. He also does some OAuth stuff. He's currently based in San Francisco and enjoys burritos, beer, bikes and travel. His posse rides with Vim.

Andy ported Jaiku to the Google App Engine using Python and Django, and released the social microblogging platform as an open source project named JaikuEngine.

At Kings of Code he will share his experience with Django running on the Google App Engine together with Mike Malone.

Mike Malone

Mike Malone is a Web Developer from San Francisco. Mike worked at Pownce, a micro-blogging site powered by Django, where he spent a lot of time learning the intricacies of Django's internals in order to scale the site. Following Pownce's acquisition by Six Apart in November 2008, Mike began working there to develop large scale social applications using Django. In his spare time Mike enjoys working with new technologies, and has developed several iPhone applications. When he's not on the computer, Mike enjoys hanging out with his girlfriend, Katie, and their friends at a good bar.

Mike will give a talk about Django and the Google App Engine together with Andy Smith.

Chris Wanstrath

Chris Wanstrath is a co-founder of GitHub and an Isaac Asimov fan. He lives in San Francisco, never has enough time to work on his own open source projects, and tweets at http://twitter.com/defunkt.

Source control has been a neglected piece of the continuous integration puzzle for far too long. Monolithic systems such as Perforce, CVS, and Subversion force an antiquated, centralized workflow at the expense of productivity. As is often the case, many don't realize a better way exists.

This talk will examine distributed source control with Git from a high level. Learn how projects and companies can benefit from Git by seeing the different workflows it introduces in action. We'll discuss how GitHub changes everything when it comes to tracking and managing open source, as well as your own team's source. Code libraries for working with Git, alternative uses of Git, and integration points (such as the Eclipse, TextMate, Emacs, and Vim plugins) will also be touched upon.

Expect to leave this talk with a working knowledge of the concepts behind distributed source control and excited about the distributed future.

Chris Chabot

Chris Chabot is a Developer Advocate at Google, who's interested in Open Source, OpenSocial, and trying to do the impossible. Most recently he's been the driving force behind PHP Shindig, the reference OpenSocial server implementation, Partuza a popular open-source example social network site that shows how to use OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial, and the OpenSocial PHP client libraries.

The Web is going Social, and the Social Web is going open. Come and learn about what the Social Web means, how you can use it to get your web app in front of millions of users using OpenSocial, and what's next for the Social Web.

Anne van Kesteren

I work on defining part of the technical architecture of the Web. (HTML5, CSS3, XMLHttpRequest2, etc.) Opera Software ASA pays me money for this; works out great. :-)

This talk will cover how future applications will be written and what of the new technology found in HTML5 and related standards you can use today. Effectively, how the Web will be the next computing platform.

Leah Culver

Leah Culver was a co-founder and the lead developer of the social network and micro-blogging website Pownce, which was acquired by blog juggernaut Six Apart. Now a software engineer at Six Apart, Leah uses her experience with Pownce to develop large scale social applications for future Six Apart projects.

She co-authored both the OAuth and OEmbed open API specifications and now maintains the popular Python OAuth library. Leah promotes open source, APIs, and the Django web framework on her blog at leahculver.com. In her free time she likes to play around with new technology and try new restaurants near her home in San Francisco

Leah will host Kings of Code together with Robert Gaal.

Robert Gaal

Robert Gaal is one of the co-founders of Wakoopa, a social network for software users, based in Amsterdam. He started out there as the chief Ruby programmer, but gradually went from interface designer to front-end developer to marketing manager to CEO. He also doubles as the lunch lady sometimes.

This year, Robert will again host Kings of Code, this time together with Leah Culver.