| STIC: Your Smalltalk Industry Council |
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Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Keynote Announcement Cary, North Carolina, Feb. 9, 2005— Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts. This year's conference will take place June 27-29 in fun-filled Orlando at the Wyndham Orlando Resort. The Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Conference Board is pleased to announce one of this year’s keynote speakers: Niall Ross - The Value of Smalltalk Abstract: "Some languages are better than others", is often said by experienced software engineers. It is as often disbelieved by IT managers who suspect that those technical differences their team gurus talk about don't really impact the business. Managers are not programmers. Managers care about rapid delivery, scalability and the ability to refocus their systems on new opportunities, not about dynamic typing, late binding, a fully-exposed meta-model, few reserved words and classes as first-class objects. Why should language features matter to them? Niall uses detailed examples from real commercial systems to illustrate how certain features of Smalltalk feed directly into business values. His talk is an attempt to bridge a chasm of understanding and (more importantly) to give others the means to do so in their own workplaces. Language choice is a major driver of project success or failure, yet is much neglected and often influenced by irrational considerations. By showing ways in which particular features of Smalltalk impact particular business needs, Niall hopes to help people find the words that can bridge the gap. Bio: Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual interests: computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of how much commercial work was available to relativity and gravitation theorists decided him to do academic research in that field and then seek a commercial job in computing, rather than the other way round. Niall started working commercially in IT in 1985. He was at first assigned to designing and implementing software engineering process improvements and only three years later did he begin significant writing and delivering of commercial software. This experience taught him that intelligent people can nevertheless form foolish ideas about software engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real large commercial projects. Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to manage complex, rapidly-changing telecoms networks. A side effect of this work was that it taught him much about how scale and rate of change affects software. Early in the nineties he discovered Smalltalk. The more he used it, the more he came to recognise its its power in this area. This perception was strengthened when he spent a year delivering a telecoms management system in Java. At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company
to offer consultancy in meta-data system design, in Smalltalk and
in agile methods. He has since worked on a variety of meta-data-driven
systems, mostly in the financial domain. He also leads an open-source
project (http://customrefactor.sourceforge.net).
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