The following are abstracts of talks that I can give at your conference or user group, if you’d like me to present any of these talks then please contact me at gary@garyshort.org.
What’s the ROI of Wearing Trousers?
Calculating esoteric things like what’s the ROI of wearing trousers, or what’s the ROI of a hug has always been near impossible. Thankfully, until now, we’ve never had to do it. With the boom in social networking things have changed; now we have to calculate the ROI on our new media marketing initiatives. Why? Two reasons: firstly, if you are an online company or if the majority of your sales are made through your online channel, then you live or die by your online brand and so you must manage it carefully and you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Secondly, new media marketing – like mainstream media marketing – costs money and in this day and age no company has money to burn, so you need to know that your new media initiatives are providing good value for money. In this presentation we will look at a number of key performance indicators that you can use to instrument your social network and provide hard data that you can use to make value judgements on the ROI of your new media marketing.
Credit Crunch Code – Time to Pay Back the Technical Debt.
Technical debt is the cost of putting off good development practices. This debt, must be paid back to avoid the “interest payments” becoming crippling. This presentation will focus on a number of common developer (and project) anti-patterns that can lead to the build up of technical debt in a project and, having identified these bahaviours, we’ll look at techniquies to firstly quantify and then to mitigate against them.
Refactoring – Everything you Wanted to Know but were Afraid to Ask?
Refactoring is a skill all modern developers need. We will take a deep dive into refactoring; starting with defining “technical debt” and how that problem is solved by refactoring, before going on to look at common refactoring tasks. We’ll finish by looking at how tooling can help us with these tasks and examining some more advanced “refactoring to patterns” topics.
My Favourite Design Patterns
To achieve the best solution to a design problem requires expert knowledge. Expert knowledge takes time, collaboration and dedication to acquire.
This session will enable you to leave having gleaned some of that expert knowledge from the speaker’s 18 years in the software industry. We will define the term ‘design pattern’, explore its method of application, and we will work through some real-world and pan-industry examples that you can expect to encounter during the software development process.
