Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas Andy Hunt is an avid woodworker and musician, but curiously he's more in demand as a consultant. He's worked in telecommunications, banking, financial services and utilities, as well as more exotic fields such as medical imaging, graphic arts, and Internet services. Andy specializes in blending tried-and-true techniques with leading-edge technologies, creating novel -- but practical -- solutions. Andy is an independent consultant based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Dave Thomas likes to fly single-engine airplanes, and pays for his habit by finding elegant solutions to difficult problems, consulting in areas as diverse as aerospace, banking, financial services, telecommunications, travel & transport, and the Internet. Before moving to the United States in 1994, Dave founded an ISO9001 certified English software company that delivered sophisticated, custom software projects throughout the world. Dave is now an independent consultant based in Dallas, Texas. Presentation: On Being Pragmatic --- It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it The core process of software development takes a requirement and produces working, maintainable code that should delight its users, not frustrate them. Despite advances in technology, methodology, and language development, this process is still error prone, and failures remain common. Many practitioners attempt to address these problems either at a high level, with processes and methods, or at a low level, with specific languages and tools. But it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it: a pragmatic approach to any software development project is more important than the particular technologies or methodologies in use. We'll discuss how to position yourself or your team to make pragmatic choices---and enjoy a successful project---based on material from our book "The Pragmatic Programmer." Tuesday 14:00-15:00 Tutorial: Introduction to Ruby Ruby is a high-level, object-oriented programming language, combining aspects of both Smalltalk and Perl. In Japan, where it originated, it now has more users than Python. But Ruby isn't just for writing scripts. It's a fully fledged, serious language. We'll give a brief introduction to the language, and then look at how some common patterns may be represented clearly and concisely. Tuesday 11:00 - 12:00