Topic: Software Development
Tim O'Reilly and Nathan Torkington speak about cool things happening in tech world. Commoditisation
of software and selling software as a service is changing the tech industry. They speak about products that threaten to
change the way the web works and influence the everyday lives of ordinary people.
[O'Reilly Open Source Convention audio from IT Conversations]
Are your organization's data and processes locked into isolated silos? Do you have a need to bridge the gaps between different enterprise software application and home-grown solutions? Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one part of the toolkit that can help enterprises overcome these difficulties, and yet in a study done by InfoWorld and BEA, only 28% of respondents have a current SOA project, while more than 50% have no current SOA plans. BEA Systems Chief Technology Office Mark Carges discusses the results of this study and the needs for an SOA infrastructure in this keynote from InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum. [InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum audio from IT Conversations]
Gary Cornell decided to ditch academia and become a technical book publisher in 1998, just in time to face a huge downturn in tech book publishing as the dot com bubble burst. Today, Cornell's Apress is proof of life after the bubble in a competitive market, producing bestsellers from authors such as Joel Spolsky and Dan Appleman. Scott Mace spoke with Gary, the CEO/publisher/co-founder of Apress, about topics ranging from outsourcing to Wikipedia. [Opening Move audio from IT Conversations]
How is the IT Budget of companies going to be spent? What's hot and what's not right now among IT companies? Are there too many IT vendors? How many of them will survive for the next five years? How is opensource software affecting IT vendors? The pundit panel with experts from some of the top market research organisations answer these questions and take a look at where the IT industry is heading in the next few years. [Software 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
What's the difference between an okay programmer and a great one? Would you believe it's their writing skills? According to often-controversial Joel Spolsky, most technical writing is abysmal and there is a clear correlation between well-written documentation and successful programs. Joel talks with Phil Windley about examples of great writing and how anyone can learn to write better. [Phil Windley's Technometria audio from IT Conversations]
Just how do you go about ensuring that future colonists on Mars can get hold of the books they've
ordered online? After all, when space research makes a break-through and space colonization becomes a
reality, Amazon.com would like to be the preferred way to order retail products anywhere in the
universe. Amazon.com's CTO Werner Vogels takes this lighthearted problem of interplanetary distribution
as the starting point for his talk on the issues facing the builders of scalable and robust distributed
systems. [ETech 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
Andrew Morton described the Linux kernel development process, how the Linux kernel actually comes to be, how features are chosen, and how the development, test and release cycle is managed. He explains how
commercial Linux distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE fit into this process. Andrew also explains the motivations of kernel developers and why the Linux kernel development process (and open source development model in general) are better than most commercial software development processes. [SDForum Distinguhsed Speaker Series audio from IT Conversations]
In this keynote presentation entitled "In Search of Intelligence," Scott Kriens, Chairman and CEO of Juniper Networks, talks about the challenges and opportunities surrounding networking today. How can we improve the user experience by optimizing the infrastructure between applications and users? Can we reduce the latency and increase the throughput of the network while ensuring high availability? Scott argues that the network should act as a resource and a source of intelligence to optimize the behavior and the performance of applications. [Software 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
Most IT buyers would agree that software vendor behavior has improved over the past few years. Since the recession when businesses dramatically slashed IT budgets, software companies have had little choice but to improve customer relations and product quality in order to remain competitive. But this panel of CIOs says there is still much room for improvement in areas such as consolidation, pricing, quality and security. [Software 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
Building a system that is capable of handling one billion transactions a
day is easier than it sounds. That is Adam Bosworth's view and he
should know because he works for a company that has managed to achieve this
level of scale. Adam covers a lot of ground in this presentation that focuses on the success of the web, the scalability of simplicity and the emergence of the information server. [MySQL Users Conference audio from IT Conversations]
