Next TALK Public Event: Jan. 24th at 5:30 PM on “Pair Programming”

Date: Jan. 24th, 2017; Time: 5:30 Networking; 6 PM Speaker Start; Main Event Session (1 Hr.): “Pair Programming: Agile Software Development Works; Main Event Speaker: Ryder Timberlake, Sr. Engineer, Salesforce in Indianapolis
Location: Frost, Brown & Todd Conference Room, 400 W Market St #3200, Louisville, KY 40202 Event Cost: No Fee; Soda & Appetizers Will Be Served
Register: Send email to: dawny@talklou.com or via Eventbrite

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About Ryder Timberlake: Ryder Timberlake is an Iron Yard alumnus and engineer at Salesforce, where he writes tests on the mobile push notification app and is a contributor to the automated testing framework used across the Marketing Cloud. He is an outspoken advocate of sound implementations of pair programming, which he believes to holistically aid all manner of technical and human endeavors in software — from writing maintainable code and fostering good user experiences to encouraging effective communication and diversity in the workplace.

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Key Topic: Pair Programming Know-How from A Salesforce Coder
Tech is a fickle and pendular thing. The pace of new JavaScript frameworks is simply dizzying. As developers, we ought to be insulated from this pace at work by sensible leadership that possess a broad and deep understanding of our field. Our leaders should have sufficient understanding to know that most of the hardest and most intractable problems in our industry are people problems, not technical ones, and that there is no magic remedy that will instantaneously fix them for us. But even if we have the good fortune to work at a company where this is true, we cannot rely on leadership — we have to be able to band together as engineers to communicate our concerns constructively to management or to our customers when the ball is inevitably dropped.

How many of us as developers have worked on a Frankensteinian spaghetti monster that is part Knockout, part Backbone, part Angular, and part React — the many tangled strata of incomplete conversions? How many of us have been at a company where we commit to breaking everything into microservices, only to get halfway through and decide it’s a bad fit? Or been where we tried and failed on multiple occasions to implement automated testing, with leadership having no understanding of why it didn’t take or how to fix it?

Do you think we might see better outcomes if baked into our culture was a constructive and collaborative form of dialogue? Our speaker says YES!

Mini 15-Minute Opener: “Build Your Resume & Linked In: Why Use a Volunteer Application to Log Your Hours” Fast Cycle Speaker: Ben Reno Weber, Partner, MobileServe

About Ben Reno-Weber: Ben Reno-Weber is a social entrepreneur whose career has been dedicated to creating opportunities for all people to reach their full potential. He grew up in Kentucky, but a fascination with the nature of leadership, sparked by the YMCA’s civic engagement programs, led him to work and study in Washington DC, the Dominican Republic, Bosnia, Russia, Boston, and New York. He is currently the Chief Storyteller for a tech start up called MobileServe that is focused on building a culture of service in organizations and communities by tracking and communicating social good. He also moonlights as the Project Director of the Greater Louisville Project donor-funded think that is dedicated to using data to catalyze social change.

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