Current Talks and Presentations

These are talks or more formal presentations that I give in-house at companies or at conferences, user groups and such. The duration of a talk is about 60-90 minute long, depending on the subject.

In some case I don't charge for giving these talks. However, I ask you to cover for my travel expenses.

If you are interested in bringing one or more of these talks in your organization, please just contact me.

Systemic Software Development for Agile Teams

Tags: People, TeamWork, Organizational Systemic

We know that the success of a software development project (delivered on time, on budget, with the most valuable features for the users and without major defects), plus the short-term and long term-quality of the technical artifacts, are hardly just a technical matter. Instead, it’s the way all the people involved in the project – inside and outside the team – are able to communicate and collaborate that makes the difference. After all, software is created by people for the people.

In a systemic approach, all the individuals inside and outside the team are interconnected by a web of relations and are part of the same system, that has its own history, structure, dynamics and rules for being healthy. Understanding how the system works as a whole and how individuals interact according to those rules is therefore essential to build effective and efficient teams.

In this session we’ll consider organizations and teams from a systemic perspective; we’ll talk about leadership and guidance as a fundamental cohesive force, about how guidance may become dysfunctional, about what happens when it does and which countermeasures can be taken; we’ll proceed with discussing the systemic characteristics of most popular Agile and Lean methods, and with applying this understanding to choose the method that may better suit a given team and/or project.

In brief, we’ll learn how incorporating organizational systemic, guidance, collaboration and communication in an industrial software development process may turn out to be a critical success factor.

Attendees will get new insights into the nature and the dynamics of an organization or of a team, that may be applied to improve the efficiency of a software development team and the quality of the workplace.

Social Networking and the New Internet Cultural Trends

Tags: Internet, Teamwork

In the last few years the Internet has been transforming itself from a publishing platform into a technological platform that allows for user-generated content, user participation and social networking. This transformation (sometimes referred to as “Web 2.0”) is still on its way and its boundaries are constantly shifting – hence the confusion about new terms and the general use of buzzwords.

Underpinning these changes we find the technological convergence of a few enabling technologies, the large-scale adoption of Web standards and a network infrastructure that allows for larger bandwidth. However, none of these (AJAX, Blogs, Wikis, folksonomies, syndication and such) taken alone defines what the Internet is transforming into.

In this talk, after the inevitable – but short – technical introduction, we’ll discuss the social forces that drive these changes and we’ll see how they act as the glue that keeps together all the pieces in the new Internet jigsaw. We won’t forget business, of course, and we’ll analyze the model of a few service providers, trying to figure out what we can expect from the Internet in the next few years.

Seeing Aspects in Web Application Architectures

Tags: Architecture, WebDev, Java

AOP is a way to deal with cross-cutting concerns in an application. Complex Web applications are a domain in which we find many cross-cutting concerns, spanning from presentation to content, from business logic to user agent and many more.

However, it's not always possible to use an AOP framework for the development of your Web application.

In this presentation we'll see how keeping a few AOP concepts in mind can lead to a better design even if you don't use an AOP framework. We'll also see how we can apply a few common Java programming techniques to effectively simulate aspects on a non-AOP platform.