| Jason Jones 2005-02-09, 3:57 pm |
| Cary, North Carolina, Feb. 9, 2005- Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum
for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts. This
year's conference will take place June 27-29 in fun-filled Orlando at the
Wyndham Orlando Resort.
The Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Conference Board is pleased to announce one of
this year's keynote speakers:
Niall Ross - The Value of Smalltalk
Abstract: "Some languages are better than others", is often said by
experienced software engineers. It is as often disbelieved by IT managers
who suspect that those technical differences their team gurus talk about
don't really impact the business. Managers are not programmers. Managers
care about rapid delivery, scalability and the ability to refocus their
systems on new opportunities, not about dynamic typing, late binding, a
fully-exposed meta-model, few reserved words and classes as first-class
objects. Why should language features matter to them?
Niall uses detailed examples from real commercial systems to illustrate how
certain features of Smalltalk feed directly into business values. His talk
is an attempt to bridge a chasm of understanding and (more importantly) to
give others the means to do so in their own workplaces. Language choice is a
major driver of project success or failure, yet is much neglected and often
influenced by irrational considerations. By showing ways in which particular
features of Smalltalk impact particular business needs, Niall hopes to help
people find the words that can bridge the gap.
Bio: Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual interests:
computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of how much commercial
work was available to relativity and gravitation theorists decided him to do
academic research in that field and then s a commercial job in computing,
rather than the other way round. Niall started working commercially in IT in
1985. He was at first assigned to designing and implementing software
engineering process improvements and only three years later did he begin
significant writing and delivering of commercial software. This experience
taught him that intelligent people can nevertheless form foolish ideas about
software engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real
large commercial projects.
Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to manage
complex, rapidly-changing telecoms networks. A side effect of this work was
that it taught him much about how scale and rate of change affects software.
Early in the nineties he discovered Smalltalk. The more he used it, the more
he came to recognize its its power in this area. This perception was
strengthened when he spent a year delivering a telecoms management system in
Java.
At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company to offer
consultancy in meta-data system design, in Smalltalk and in agile methods.
He has since worked on a variety of meta-data-driven systems, mostly in the
financial domain. He also leads an open-source project
(http://customrefactor.sourceforge.net).
Niall has made many presentations at IT conferences over the past two
decades. Presentations relevant to his Smalltalk Solutions 2005 talk
include:
* Solving the XP Legacy Problem with (Extreme) Meta-Programming, Niall Ross
and Andrew McQuiggin, Smalltalk Solutions, 22nd-24th April 2002, Cincinnati
* XP-rience: eXtreme Programming Experience, Niall Ross, 10th European
Smalltalk Summer School, Essen, 25th August - 1st September 2001
* The Business Case for Adequate Reflection, Niall Ross, 8th European
Smalltalk Summer School, Ghent, 30th August - 3rd September 1999
--
Jason Jones
Knowledge Systems Corporation
Smalltalk Industry Council
919.789.8549 x.21
www.ksc.com
www.stic.org
www.smalltalksolutions.com
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