Dave Aronson

Yes, that's right, geneTic, not geneRic. Genetic algorithms are a way to "evolve" solutions to a problem, similar to real-world biological evolution. This often reveals great solutions that humans probably would never have thought of, such as the twisty NASA ST5 spacecraft antenna, developed by a genetic algorithm in 2006!

This talk will explain the concept and its terms, and then walk you through some examples.

Genaver is my JavaScript-based system to GENerate A VERsion of an HTML file. It is mainly meant for presentations but it can be used for other things, such as customizing a children's story with your child's name. This talk is the story of how it came to be, how to use it, and how it works.

Many developers keep using the term "Object Oriented Programmer", but the guy who actually coined it doesn't think it means what they think it means. This talk recaps both sides, compares and contrasts them, and makes recommendations for each based on circumstances.

Do the examples in your documentation get out of date? Are the examples in your tests hard to understand? Do you wish you could combine them? In some languages, you can! This talk is about doctests, as used in languages such as Python and Elixir, using documents with real tests embedded.

You might know the game of ping-pong, aka table tennis. You might know pair programming. But have you ever thought of putting them together? No, we don't pass the keyboard by smacking it with a paddle. It's much less violent and more useful than that, as a technique to combine pairing and test-driven development (not really ping-pong) in a fun way.

This talk will demonstrate Ping-Pong Pair Programming, on a problem chosen by the audience, in a language chosen by the audience. If time allows, we will also demonstrate "Smart@$$" Ping-Pong Pair Programming, in which each dev tries to force the other into doing the actual hard work.

Like it says on the tin, this is about the history and making of mead, the wine-like fermented-honey drink that most people associate with the Vikings, though they were far from the first, let alone only, culture to drink it. That's why the full title is "Drink Like a Chinese Egyptian Eritrian/Ethiopian Filipino Finnish Greek Indian Lithuanian Mayan Nepalese Polish Welsh Xhosa Viking: the History and Making of MEAD!"

The current version is about 40 minutes, I have a five-minute "lightning talk" version, and I could probably stretch it out to an hour pretty easily.

Sorry, no samples! ;-)