A song for the lovers

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Alfredo Morresi and Piergiorgio Grossi, two of the other bloggers invited at the Better Software conference, published their schedule of the talks they want to attend to so I thought it’s about time I’d do the same.

Better Software is split in three parallel tracks with a lot of speeches. The name of the tracks are self-explanatory: Auditorium, Workshop, Interactive.

So, here is my schedule:

5th of May

09:00 – Application Store, potenzialità e trappole – Stefano Sanna will talk about the new distribution (and hence business) model introduced by the application stores of the various smartphones vendors.

09:50 – Sviluppare e vendere applicazioni per iPhone – Omar Cafini will give an overview on application development for the iPhone and how to actually sell those apps on the store.

10:25 – Una storia di SW dai protocolli alla startup – Leandro Agrò will retrace the steps of the creation of the company WideTag

11:35 – Playing between the Clouds – Daniele Montagni, Davide Cerbo and Stefano Linguerri will show the crowd how to create a “hybrid” application using technologies like XMPP, Google App Engine, the iPhone and the Android.

12:10 – Startup Web in Italia. Si può fare – Andrea Santagata‘s talk will be focused on his experience as an entrepreneur and manager and how to create a startup business in Italy.

14:00 – Alcune lezioni che ho imparato negli ultimi due anni – Giacomo “Peldi” Guillizzoni will talk about Balsamiq. The company, his experience and his suggestions.

15:55 – Crowdfunding, finanziare un’idea con il Web – Alberto Falossi will give his take about funding an idea with the help of the people on Internet.

16:55 – Web crawling for fun and profit – Federico Feroldi will talk about how cloud computing helps companies retrieving large quantity of data.

17:45 – Sviluppare Applicazioni Mobile Native in HTML e JavaScript – Fabio Franzini will raise the attention on how to develop mobile applications using standard technologies like HTML and JavaScript.

6th of May

09:00 – Agile Lean Development, a war story – Fabio Armani will talk about his experience as an engineer and a manager with Scrum, XP and Lean.

09:50 – Lavorare da remoto, le ragioni di una scelta vincente – Renzo Borgatti will share his experience of working remotely in a distributed team.

10:25 – Agile tricks, keep the moral of your team high – Giovanni Intini will explain how to encourage developers to improve and maintain an high quality standard of the source code using small tricks, continous integration and more.

11:25 – Agile and QA… ma che ciazzecca? – Stefano Fornari will introduce the role of the QA tester in an agile team.

12:15 – Qualità Totale – Jacopo Romei will talk about defects in production software and how to handle them in an agile process.

14:00 – Coaching Worshop – Matteo Vaccari and Simone Casciaroli will explain in their workshop the role of the coach creating a team and sharing responsibility with fellow developers.

15:10 – Alla ricerca della user story perduta – Edoardo Schepis‘s user stories will lead the workshop attendants through and to the creation of a search engine starting from the following single story: “As a user I want to search Internet for the information I need”.

17:20 – WorseSoftware: errori e orrori nel business del software – Luca Mearelli will take us down to the path of software horrors to shed some light upon the worst and best practices of software development.

Lately I’ve been finding myself amazed about the social turn that programming has taken in quite a while.

I started growing as a software developer thanks to the Internet, it and the people on mailing lists/forums/irc have shaped my skills, career and made me discover a lot of great things. I owe the Internet a lot. As Tim Bray says in his After Branding essay:

You are whatever the Net says you are. Deal with it.

It is pointless to start talking about what good open source and version control tools have done to the social side of programming because it’s there to see for everybody. Websites like Sourceforge and Freshmat were everything we talked about in the old days.

Nowadays Distributed version control is taking over and the reasons why are clear: we need to be more and more social and what better way to exchange knowledge than to distribute code?

If I could I’d change name of those tools to “social version control”.

What I love about sites like GitHub and Bitbucket is that they are trying to build real social networks around source code, every developer’s currency. I love it. The what is not new but it’s the how (like how easy it is to contribute) that changes everything.

I look forward to social programming.

ps. on Twitter there is an amazing community of software developers exchanging small tips or links every day. You MUST be on Twitter, really. I am.

I just finished reading Seth Godin‘s “What Matters Now” free ebook and I loved it.

He put together people who think, who have something to say and he made them share something.

Do yourself a favour and download it, it maybe give you some inspiration for a new year’s endeavour.

Tomorrow evening I’m leaving for a trip to London (yes, again!). Just vacation by the way.

I’ll be back on the 6th of May.

PyCon Tre is coming, in fact I’ll be in Florence from the 7th of May to the 10th to attend it. This year I’m going to speak for the first time. I submitted a talk about Erlang and Python but then I pretty soon realized that it should have been about Erlang and the outside world because there’s no direct connection between the two

Anyway, I know that few people of the non-italian community will be there (Guido, Fredrik, Raymond, Anna, and many more) so I’ll see you all in Florence on the 8th!