From the Dev Summit – Wednesday March 19, 2008
Wednesday morning started with a talk from Alan Cooper, this years keynote speaker. The “Father of Visual Basic” delivered an insightful presentation titled Post Industrial Management. The talk compared past management strategies of the atom based industrial age to management strategies of today’s knowledge based era. He delved into a structured approach to managing developers by segregating them into three focused job descriptors which he labeled Interaction Designer, Design Engineer and Production Engineer.
During the talk Cooper threw out many shrewd nuggets of wisdom as well as humorous and accurate observations, such as “Building software is like walking through a minefield. If you don’t hit a mine it’s really quick”. His knack for pairing key concepts and ideas with aptly chosen metaphors made for a lighthearted and instructive presentation. All in all it was a very interesting talk that inspired a great deal of discussion throughout the day.
We aren’t allowed to distribute the actual presentation, but many of the concepts are covered in a similar article on Cooper’s site titled Design Engineering: The Next Step
In the afternoon, Forrest Jones and Brent Pierce gave the Implementing Enterprise Applications with the Geodatabase session.
This session was designed to take an enterprise centric view on common APIs that enterprise developers regularly need to work with. The session also explored many different tips and tricks to improve overall application performance:
It finished on a practical note with a group of slides covering database tuning and tracing of the complete enterprise Geodatabase stack.
