Three Speakers from Centric Selected for CodeMash 2015
Three of Centric’s technology leaders, Paul Holway, William Klos and Joseph Ours, will speak at CodeMash 2015, one of Ohio’s most popular developer conferences.
The schedule for these sessions is as follows:
William Klos (Cloud Services)
Modeling Your Applications Based on Airport Operations: Yes, Even the TSA Part. Jan. 8th, 8 a.m. – Room Guava / Tamarind
Micro-location with Beacons: Navigating the way with Mobility, Big Data, and the Cloud. Jan. 9th, 1:30 p.m. – Room Portia / Wisteria (vendor session)
Paul Holway (Centric St. Louis)
Reclaiming Agile Development: Don’t Let the Cat Die. Jan. 9th, 8:30 a.m. – Room Sagewood / Zebrawood
Joseph Ours (Software Quality Assurance and Testing)
Thinking Fast and Slow. Jan. 9th, 4 p.m. – Room Aloeswood / Leopard Wood
Centric is also a sponsor, so be sure to stop by Booth W8 or come see us in the Family Cabana inside the waterpark for family-friendly activities.
CodeMash will take place Jan. 6-9 at Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio. Learn more by visiting www.codemash.org.
About Paul’s Session – Reclaiming Agile Development: Don’t Let the Cat Die
Regardless of how you feel about felines, dead cats stink. What also stinks is what is happening to agile development practices. What started as a movement to increase quality and usefulness of code written has been professionalized into certificates and ceremonies that are only marginally helping the process. Instead of blaming political and organizational forces, this humorous and irreverent talk focuses on what team members can do to overcome these corporate obstacles and to get to the spirit of agile through a focus on architectural innovation and personal improvement. Attendees should expect to laugh, to learn from the experience of implementing dozens of real world enterprise agile teams, and to come out with proven new techniques to try to bring more satisfaction to how they do their work and to bring the focus of agile back to software development.
About Paul Holway
Paul Holway is the Technology Lead for Centric St. Louis. In his current role, Paul leads technology teams toward implementing solutions that drive business value. He also serves as an executive advisor and agile coach for several St. Louis companies. Paul started his adoption of agile as a certified SCRUM Master in 2006. Since that time, he has led the agile transformations of several different organizations.
Through the last eight years of delivery in different corporate cultures, he has developed a balanced pragmatism around tailoring the agile methodology to the specific needs of both the team and the culture. This pragmatic approach allows teams to build technology solutions that are higher in both quality and relevance through a constant feedback cycle with stakeholders and users. Contact Paul to learn more.
About William’s Session – Modeling Your Applications Based on Airport Operations: Yes, Even the TSA Part
If you’ve only spent a small amount of time in an airport, then you may have missed the tight orchestration it takes to get you – and your bags – from Point A to Point B. You seem to go from one line to the next – waiting for your turn to be processed. Getting your boarding pass in one line, x-rayed in another, snacks in another. Each line you stand in is completely unrelated to all the other lines, yet, they each play an important role in the overall process of getting you to your destination. Building scaleable distributed applications has many of those same characteristics. Seemingly disjointed, independent processes that work together to perform a larger function. This talk will focus on the design characteristics of this approach and include some real world examples using Golang, Docker & RabbitMQ – though this technique is tool agnostic. The airport metaphor will be stretched to the limit and there are sure to be some groan-worthy examples.
About William Klos
William Klos is a Senior Architect and Centric’s National Cloud Services Lead. William’s career has spanned many aspects of computing and at times has architected solutions from the perspective of data, networking, enterprise, and security – but is primarily an application architect. Most recent experience has William providing solutions around Mobility, Cloud, and Big Data architectures as well as API design and development.
William Klos has been involved with technology since abandoning his desire to be an architect and stumbling into his first computer science class in 1985. Since then he has typically pushed companies into “what’s next.” Contact William to learn more.
About Joseph’s Session – Thinking Fast and Slow
Joseph will use interactive games to show how the mind can affect one’s ability to investigate, observe, and recall events. He will also discuss some strategies to minimize the brain’s erroneous impacts to those abilities.
Joseph’s session is based on the book Thinking Fast and Slow where Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman introduces two mental systems, one that is fast and the other slow. Together they shape our impressions of the world around us and help us make choices. System 1 is largely unconscious and makes snap judgments based upon memories of similar events and our emotions. System 2 is painfully slow, and is the process by which we consciously check the facts and think carefully and rationally. System 2 is easily distracted. System 1 is wrong quite often. Real-world examples that demonstrate how the two systems work are that pro golfers will more accurately putt for par than they do for birdie regardless of distance and people will buy more cans of soup when there is a sign on the display that says “limit 12 per customer.”
About Joseph Ours
Joseph Ours is the National Service Offering Lead for Software Testing & Quality Assurance Services and a senior manager with Centric Consulting. He has nearly two decades of career experience in Information Technology and Certified Project Management consulting. Joseph offers expertise as a leader in business processes with a successful record of providing project and portfolio management of large technology initiatives. He is chairman of the Columbus Advisory Council for Per Scholas, which aims to break the cycle of poverty by providing technology education, access, training and job placement services for people in underserved communities.
About CodeMash
CodeMash is a four-day, annual event that educates developers on current practices, methodologies, and technology trends in a variety of platforms and development languages.