Talks

So You Have To Work With Humans…

The stereotype for software developers is that we’re bad communicators. That we’re all introverts. That we’d rather spend our time interfacing with computers than working with flesh-and-blood humans. Code is logical and predictable. People, by contrast, can feel absolutely chaotic. We’re complex, complicated, emotional.

But software development is an activity performed by people and for people. We have to communicate with humans in myriad ways every day. Improving our communication skills can have a substantial effect on our job performance and satisfaction.

We’ll talk about the importance of good listening and how to get better at it, how to identify and defuse conflict scenarios, and how to level up our influence and persuasiveness.

The Evergreen Developer: Timeless Skills for a Long Career

Our favorite platforms, languages, and even design paradigms will inevitably become obsolete, some on shorter timelines, some longer. We know when we sign up as developers that we’ll have to constantly sharpen the saw technically, our entire careers. But there are plenty of non-technical skills we can invest in that will pay dividends in the long term, regardless of the technologies we’re working with. This session is about a few of those sorts of things.

We’ll talk about understanding our clients and coworkers and improving our communication with them, some ways to enhance our personal productivity, and some ways we can improve our learning skills so that when we do need to learn new technologies, we’re well-equipped.

MVC 4, Web API, and Knockout.js

A lap around ASP.NET MVC 4, the new .NET Web API, and knockout.js. We’ll look at what’s new in MVC 4; we’ll get an overview of this newfangled “Web API” thing and discuss why and when you might want to use it; we’ll take a look at the knockout.js library and discuss the Model-View-ViewModel pattern; and finally, because I hate presentations that make new technologies sound like they’re gonna solve all your problems, we’ll discuss challenges my team has encountered using these technologies.