San Diego Java User's Group

Speaker: Mark Fortner

Title: Sr Software Engineer

Abstract: Why Grails Sucks Less Than Your Framework
Over the past few years we've had a number of speakers who’ve talked about various web frameworks and JEE improvements, guaranteed to make your life less hectic. However, to a man, their frameworks have all been clunky, still required lots of configuration work, and created annotation-laden frankencode. In this talk, I plan on showing you how you can get more done with less code (and a shorter learning curve) using Grails.

Bio:At his day job, Mark Fortner is a Sr. Software Engineer for a super-secret startup company. Over the course of his career he has written applications that govern everything from how the New York City subway functions, to how drugs and drug targets are selected. In his spare time he writes blogs on Java/Swing/Groovy/Grails [jroller.com/phidias] and informatics/cancer [aspenbio.wordpress.com], and tweets [@phidias51] (usually about recent developments in cancer and the pharmaceutical industry).

Speaker: Llewellyn Falco

Abstract: Why I Love Java.

As a consultant and teacher, I routinely find myself looking at other languages. Java is still my favorite. In this talk I’m going to build a small application that will take you through a bunch of different things that contribute to Why I love Java. Some of the things we’ll look at are:
Eclipse, Ant, Classpath, Servlets, Unit Tests, Lambdas, Rack, Velocity, ApprovalTests, JavaC, java.io, ORM testing, enums

Bio: Llewellyn learned to jump horses in the 7th grade while living in France. Back in states, while studying drafting in high school, he started fire eating, sleight of hand magic, and once rode a unicycle 6 miles. After learning to juggle torches, he joined a acrobatics group in college where he specialized on the trampoline and walking a slack rope. He can calculate the cube root of any perfect cube under 1,000,000 in his head, as well as pick a standard lock. He can rollerblade down a flight of stairs, backwards. Later, he has learned to play the doumbek (a type of drum), to accompaniment a belly dancing girlfriend. Llewellyn studied Tai Chi for 2 years, can throw a knife at 20 feet, and a playing card at 50. He has taught swing dancing, and loves to salsa. He is also an accomplished speed chess player. In the last year, he has been scuba diving over 20 times, become a guitar hero, and broke his personal record of paddle balling over 200 times. Llewellyn attributes his success to the large amount of caffeine he has consumed, and enjoys computer programming in his spare time. He is also a Developmentor Instructor, Agile2010, and TechEd Africa