Good News!  I will be speaking at Edmonton Code Camp 2009 on Saturday September 19th, 2009 at the Grant MacEwan Community College.

Check out the Edmonton Code Camp 2009 site.  Also check out the Speaker Schedule, as well as the Speaker Bios.

My session is titled “Web Applications and Startups: Considerations in Programming Languages and Integration”.  Long title, I know.

I thought it would be interesting to take a pre-coding look at success when it comes to web applications, and web based startups from my experiences over the past 10 years.

From the website, the description of the session:

Web 2.0 and Software as a Service is all the rage. With the abundance of tech talent in Edmonton, it’s no surprise to see more and more startups demoing at events around town. At the same time, developers are seeing a continuing trend of applications being delivered from a universal interface – the web, instead of through desktop based software. The browser is something that has rapidly come of age in the past few years.

When a decision has been made to create a web application, be it a startup, or the next internal company app, the single most critical decision that can be made for it is the language(s) it is built in. Pick the right tools and life is much easier. Try to make do, and every update will be painful.

This session explores solutions and strategies to a problem that each web application faces. The more time spent on browser compatibility, standards, syntax, integrating between languages, adding libraries, the more a project’s quality suffers. Ajax? CSS? HTML? Java? Flex? Silverlight? All at once?

Why does it often end up that developers end up spending so much time unproductively dealing with getting the tools to work together and solving the problem suffers?

How can we minimize the time we spend with the tools, and focus on creating? We will examine the languages any of us prefer to use and seeing if they are there for us in web apps as we are for them. Are they the best fit? Why is over and under-engineering deadly? We will explore experiences, theories, examples, code (of course), and hopefully some good discussion that will get all the .NET/Java/Flex/Air world looking at the fundamental question of, how do we get things done better, faster and quicker?

My thanks go out to the hard working organizer of Edmonton Code Camp, David Woods.  Planning, organizing and running events is a lot of work, he has been very welcoming and supportive of the topic I had chosen.  He is also involved heavily with the Edmonton .NET User Group who hold monthly meetings.  Check them out!  I’ll be doing my best to get out to one of their meetings.  Please feel free to send me any thoughts or input on what you’d like to see covered in the session!