I am very blessed with the opportunity to be speaking at this years GOTO Chicago 2017 conference. I will be dusting off the old Rockstar Programmers talk and refreshing it up with some new interviews. Ahead of the conference I want to share my conference picks.

Monday — Conference Day One

  • 09:15 Zurich Ballroom Software Design in the 21st Century

    Martin Fowler is one of the enduring luminaries in our very quick changing field. To stay as consistently influential as he has, for as long as he has is a great indicator that he is the real deal. His abstract is sufficiently high level that he could pretty much go anywhere with it, so I'm curious to see the specific under the general.

  • 10:35 Zurich EFG Patterns of Effective Teams

    My talk is on the people track and I've long been a fan of Dan North. In fact, I quoted heavily, with attribution, from his The Browser is Dead talk in some of my own talks. Dan will be covering so character attributes of effective teams. That's right up my alley.

  • 11:40 Zurich AFG Give and Take: Handling Constructive Criticism and Creative Conflict Like A Pro

    I'm so glad to see this topic being addressed. While the notion of "failing fast" is now seen as a good thing, I find at the individual level people still have a hard time with the particular manifestation of failure known as constructive criticism. Jennifer Peepas has a very diverse background full of things not commonly seen at IT conferences. This should be great.

  • 13:30 Zurich ABCD Troubleshooting Tiered Tragedy: A Peek Into Failure

    Say what you will about monoliths, at least your logs are all in one place and there is no need for complex aggregation systems. Massively distributed systems are now much more widespread, so it's a good idea to understand how to not give up the failure fidelity at the same time. Jeff Smith will literally break it down for us.

  • My session is in this slot, 14:35 in Zurich EFG. I am reprising my Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers talk based on the book for which this website was built. If I wasn't giving the talk, I'd probably be at Brian Ray's Cognitive from the Engineering perspective. Deloitte is a global consulting powerhouse, so I want to see what they are doing with all this machine learning stuff.

  • 16:45 Vevey 12 Javaloution! (How I learned to stop worrying and play Jenga! with the entire software industry. What could possibly go wrong?”)

    Naturally I need to check out my colleague Georges Saab's session about the experience of bringing Jigsaw to the world. I've seen from the inside how hard it is to evolve a developer platform in my work on JSF. Doing it with all of Java is much more complicated.

Tuesday — Conference Day Two