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.

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.

Design Patterns for Better Teams

Tags: Design, Patterns, TeamWork

Design Patterns are a common topic these days and many experienced programmers are familiar with quite a few of them. However, there is a big difference between programming, which is a solo performance, and software development, which is a teamwork activity whose outcome has to survive for many years.

So this talk is not about which pattern you might want to use to address a specific problem. Instead, this talk is about why and when you should (or shouldn't) use Design Patterns.

We'll see how Design Patterns form a shared vocabulary of high-level concepts, and how they incarnate a few overarching values in software development such as good communication of the programmer's intentions, flexible code and simplicity. In the end, we'll see how the educated use of Design Patterns can become part of the culture of a more effective development team.

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.