Symposium theme: "Innovation"
Please join us for an action-packed day, where we will discuss business innovations for 4 hours in the morning and technology innovations for 4 hours in the afternoon. Topics will range from how to rethink or change your business to a myriad of ways you can use cool new technologies to improve your software production.
The event will be held starting at 8:00 on Thursday, January 17, 2008, at the University of Minnesota's McNamara Alumni Center, 200 Oak St. SE. The registration deadline is Friday, January 11. The symposium is presented by the University of Minnesota Software Engineering Center (UMSEC).
Keynote addresses will be given by Mark Striebeck (Google) and Stuart Halloway (CEO of Relevance, Inc.)
Mark Striebeck: "Innovation as a business strategy".
Mark will look into the Google culture that not only encourages innovation, but rewards it. At its core is the recognition that innovation is not a top-down initiative, but comes from the bottom. What is it that encourages Googlers to take risks, think outside of the box and come up with new ideas? And what role does management play in this?
Mark Striebeck is an engineering manager at Google where he is responsible for developer testing infrastructure, tools and adoption. He is a frequent speaker at Agile and other conferences.
Stuart Halloway: "Ending legacy code in our lifetime".
Every so often a new language, tool, or platform comes along that revolutionizes software development. That is great, but inevitably the previous generation of code becomes a legacy burden. Stuart is looking for "next big things" that do not force organizations to throw away the work they have already done. A big part of this is doing the current big thing well. The current big thing is agile development with Ruby on Rails. He will discuss how
Ruby and Rails has helped Relevance (and many others) deliver consistent success. He will present a set of ideas to fight technical debt, and minimize the amount of code that will become legacy when the next big thing arrives.
Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). He is one of the authors of "Rails for Java Developers". Stuart is also the author of "Component Development for the Java Platform".
Speakers and panel discussions
The event will also feature talks and panels with Jamie Thingelstad (CTO and VP of Dow Jones & Company), Jon W. Spence (Fellow and Senior Principal System Architect at Medtronic), Nelson Soken (Senior Engineering Manager at Medtronic), Nate Schutta (Travelers), and David Hussman (DevJam).
In addition to engaging speakers, at the event we will host a continental breakfast starting at 8 a.m., coffee breaks and a closing reception. Cost for the full day is $90 for the general public and $75 for alumni of University of Minnesota's Computer Science and Software Engineering programs.
We hope to see you there!
For more information and a full program visit the Code Freeze website or contact Jenny Dalton at (612) 624-5130 or dalton [at] cs [dot] umn [dot] edu.