UPDATE: You can get the slides from here: Untangling the social web
We are excited to have Joël Perras at TechTalksTO. Joel is an ex-physicist turned big data geek. In his day-to-day life, he’s the senior architect for a company called Unata. Unata builds predictive models of consumer behaviour using machine learning to better help retailers understand the needs and desires of their customers.
Joël will present “Graphs, Edges & Nodes: Untangling the Social Web”.
Facebook figures out people that you might already know, LinkedIn tells you how many degrees of separation there are between you and the CEO of Nokia, and LastFM suggests music based on your current listening habits. We’ll take a look at the basic theory behind how some of these features work (no comp. sci. degree required!), and show how you can implement some of these features in your application.
Buy Your Tickets Today!
We’re super excited to introduce the final, seventh, speaker at TechTalksTO: Aaron Quint! Aaron is the creator and maintainer Sammy.js, a tiny javascript framework built on top of jQuery. After freelancing and working as a consultant he’s now very proud to be the CTO of Paperless Post – getting to work with awesome people and pushing cutting edge software.
Aaron will present “The Best Framework is a Myth”:
In the post-github era, developers are prone to jump from one framework to the next proclaiming this week’s Model[ViewController] as the best. This leads to constant re-writes, abandoned projects, and generally a lack of real progress for the web. As the creator and maintainer of one of these frameworks (Sammy.js) I’d like to warn you before you choose any framework for your next project. Sammy, or any other framework, might not be the answer. We’ll see the whats and whys of client side frameworks and Sammy.js. Let’s examine the good and bad of framework-based development and try to refocus on why we wanted frameworks in the first place. Let’s move past Fashion Driven Development and back to defining our work by the products we create, not the tools we use.
TechTalksTO: Underground is a conference for everyone, from Javascript developers to API developers to engineers who work in dev-ops. With just over a week left until the conference, why haven’t you bought tickets yet?
We’re incredibly excited to have Ben Vinegar, a FershBooks alumni, speak on third-party scripting at TechTalksTO: Underground.
Ben Vinegar is a Software Engineer at Disqus, a third-party commenting platform served on over 500,000 blogs, online publications, and other web properties. Before joining Disqus in San Francisco, Ben enjoyed many a wintery day in Toronto, where he worked with the talented FreshBooks team.
Ben will cover what third-party scripting entails, how it can find a home in your development projects, how new technology is making it more accessible, and some techniques to use at home.
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If you’re a system administrator, or a software developer interested in DevOps, then you shouldn’t miss this talk.
We’re proud to present Aaron Peterson, a seasoned engineer and Technical evangelist from OpsCode, the creators of Chef. Aaron has wielded real-time command-line kung fu to tens of thousands of servers at once and automated global production infrastructure at Amazon.com and now he’s coming to Toronto to speak on Chef.
Chef is an open source systems configuration that helps developers take care of the muck so they can focus on writing great applications and gives system administrators the flexibility to integrate all aspects of their infrastructure such as monitoring and trending tools with applications. Aaron will cover the operations and development methodology that inspired the tool, introduce Chef at a high level, and show the steps to stand up a fully automated n-tier Web stack using some of Chef’s powerful features.
With just over two weeks left, you should buy your tickets today.
That’s right folks, Toronto’s own Morgan Tocker is speaking at TechTalksTO: Underground, bringing our total line up to seven speakers!
Morgan a MySQL Expert, having previously worked for companies such as MySQL, Sun Microsystems and Percona, will present “Why does everyone get performance wrong?”:
Understanding what you are measuring is key for successful optimization. Cache hit ratios, requests per second, load average… these are all half measures when it comes to performance analysis. What is more important is:
- How long a task takes to complete (response time).
- How many tasks are you completing per unit of time (throughput).
- What is the maximum number of tasks you can complete (capacity).
Learn what to measure, when and how.
With seven speakers:
and tickets costing only $150 how can you miss this conference? Buy your tickets now!
Rick Olson (also known as @technoweenie) is a ruby and javascript coder at GitHub. If you’re interested in REST and building great APIs, then this is the talk for you.
Rick will present “Rebuilding the GitHub API”: Earlier this year, GitHub launched API v3, marking a drastic change to the API both externally, and internally. Learn how GitHub embrace REST even more than previously, and how the changing culture of the company influenced the design of the code.
As always you can buy tickets online.
Timothy is the second of our six speakers. For those interested in improving their deployment process, you can’t miss this talk!
Known for bringing the practice of Continuous Deployment to the attention of the software development community, Timothy is known most for his Continuous Deployment post. Previously, a Technical Lead at IMVU Inc he is now the the CTO of Canvas Networks. He was one of the many regular volunteers that helps run SuperHappyDevHouse, a party in Silicon Valley for hackers and thinkers, and is working to spread the hacker ethos to his new home in New York City.
Timothy’s talk will cover the theory behind why shipping more frequently will make deployment dramatically better while enabling an entirely new level of agility at your organization. As well as the practical tactics developed by the numerous organizations practicing Continuous Deployment.
Buy your tickets today!
We have six amazing speakers lined up for TechTalksTO: Undeground on August 13.
We proudly present Mathias Meyer. Hailing from Berlin, Germany, Mathias is a Developer Advocate with Basho Technologies, the creators of Riak. He has worked in cloud infrastructure and automation, with distributed databases and systems, experiencing the joy of both success and failure with all of them. His interest in learning more has lead him to write the NoSQL Handbook.
Mathias will present “A Tale of Databases”:
Databases are the unsung heroes of our time, shouldering not only insane amounts of data, but also giving you inexplicably fast access to it. It’s time to give them the attention they deserve, especially given the recent surge in the NoSQL space.
It’s getting harder and harder to find your way around, and to figure out what all these new databases are actually good for. To remedy that we’ll look at a fine selection of databases, their basic ingredients, and what they’re used for in production.
We hope to see you there!
TechTalksTO is going UNDERGROUND.
After selling out each instalment of our series of talks at the Gladstone Hotel we decided it was time to think bigger.
We’ve been working on this for a while, and have mentioned it at the last couple of Gladstone events, but this right here, this is the official, hands-down, no-take-backs announcement.
The next TechTalksTO will be an all-day conference at the Toronto Underground Cinema on Spadina Avenue. on Saturday, August 13th
- Six Amazing Speakers
- Six Amazing Talks
- One Amazing Day
- One Amazing After-Party
Speaker Lineup:
We’ll have full bios and synopses of their talks up online in the next couple of days.
After Party
One of the best parts about our previous TechTalksTO events were the unofficial gatherings afterward. They were always a great opportunity to network and have some great conversations. We enjoy it so much, we figured for this event, we’d make it an official part of the day so your ticket will include admission, food, and drinks at the exclusive after-party Saturday evening to be held at a nearby establishment.
Tickets
Tickets are available NOW!. Alas, due to the size and scope of this undertaking, we have to charge actual money for tickets for this one but we think you’ll totally get your money’s worth. Tickets will be priced at $150, including admission to the after-party, which will also get you a couple of drinks and some food. We also plan to have some food and drinks available throughout the day at the conference venue.
Sponsorship
As always, TechTalksTO continues to be sponsored by FreshBooks, who generously put up all of the money needed to get these things off of the ground. We totally couldn’t do it without them.
Interested in Sponsoring?
If you want to help out and attach your name to this event, get in touch. We’re still looking for ways to make the event even more awesome, so if you want to buy everyone lunch, give out some swag to attendees, or otherwise help us out, definitely get in touch.
