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Archive for the ‘Talks’ Category

Slides and code from NDDNUG Connect with your Kinect

07 Jun

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking about the Kinect for the fifth time, this time at the North Dallas .NET User Group. NDDNUG is a great group. Even with it pouring outside, we had a decent turnout.

This was the first time since the 1.0 release I’ve presented on it.  What I didn’t expect was how much shorter my presentation was due to how much work has gone into simplifying the .NET Kinect development experience.  Bit twiddling on depth, MTA’s, DMOs, and much more are just gone from the experience.  The team deserves some serious kudos for this.

A couple people asked me about slides and code. Code is available on bitbucket. 

 
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Posted in Kinect, Talks

 

Speaking on Kinect and Kinect SDK 1.5 released!

22 May

I’m happy to announce I’ll be speaking at NDDNUG (The North Dallas .NET User Group) on Kinect development on June 6th next month. The timing is auspicious. Microsoft hinted that that the Kinect 1.5 SDK was going to release toward the end of month and it’s here and there’s some great new stuff. Here’s what excited to me:

  • Face Tracking. This is huge for those trying to do animated films on the cheap. This will map a person’s eyebrows, mouth position and more onto a 3D mesh. You smile and your puppet self will smile.
  • Kinect Studio. Record and playback of Kinect data (No more jumping up and down just to write software.. though this was great exercise). This is going to make debugging key scenarios much easier.
  • Seated skeletal tracking. Seated skeletons will no longer dissolve into painful yoga poses.
  • Joint Orientation. The Kinect can tell you about rotated joints such as the rotation of the wrist. Good for playing twister and revving virtual motorcycles!
  • Improved green screen effect (mapping RGB to depth) most noticeable in the speed of tracking (from about 10ms to 2ms), though it still comes with a halo of noise.
  • Additional languages for speech recognition.

For new users and old, the quality of the Kinect developer samples and especially the Kinect Explorer (the key sample application to demonstrate Kinect features) have been greatly improved. Also released is a well written Human Interface Guidelines document. This 70 page PDF gives insight into good Kinect HCI for both audio and kinetic inputs. It also lends a domain language with which to discuss Kinect. What the guide doesn’t do is give technical details on how to develop gestures.

Developers are still hoping a gesture recognition and possibly a facial recognition SDK are in the works, but there isn’t a clear indication if these are in the works.

 
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Posted in Kinect, Talks

 

My No SQL Slides Available

24 Apr

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking about No SQL to some super smart college kids at SMU. I’m always impressed with the talent at SMU and love the opportunity to visit their beautiful campus. No SQL is a fascinating topic. It and what it often supports – “Big Data” – are going to be two of the most important technologies of the next decade as the IPO of Splunk makes clear.

Organizations that get it and invest in No SQL will gain advantages in agility and insight. The challenge will be convincing IT professionals and architects to embrace No SQL solutions after nearly half a century of only relational thought processes.

I like to be where the early innovators are because that’s when it’s fun. For Big Data and NO SQL, it’s the wild west right now.

 
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Posted in Talks

 

The Craft of Coding

23 Oct

On the 17th of October I presented a talk at SMU to a group of computer science students.

Here’s my abstract:

This presentation will show how fundamental computer science concepts such as data structures, recursion, object orientation, and runtime analysis are not only useful beyond the classroom today but also essential skills for tomorrow’s software engineers. I’ll begin by demonstrating real world code where these fundamental concepts come into play. I’ll then show how a robust understanding of fundamentals can mean the difference between an elegant solution and a hack. I’ll conclude by discussing how tomorrow’s reality of many cores, functional languages, massive scalability, and the coming cloud revolution necessitate a solid computer science foundation.

The value of a college education to a career in software engineering has always been questioned. The venerable Robert Martin recently tweeted:

“It doesn’t take a college degree to be a programmer.  Programming is a trade that can be learned through apprenticeship and mentoring.” – Robert Martin

Bob is being narrow; Programming is a broad concept.  Designing compilers, operating systems, embedded systems, circuits and DSLs does require a foundation of computer science. While you can succeed in object oriented business programming without a college degree, you will appreciate knowledge of fundamentals when you step outside this comfort zone.  Yes, you can succeed in today’s 4GL languages without a degree ,but you will be at a disadvantage each time the industry shifts.

Joel Spolsky offers the following on the subject of fundamentals:

“I want my ER doctor to understand anatomy, even if all she has to do is put the computerized defibrillator nodes on my chest and push the big red button, and I want programmers to know programming down to the CPU level, even if Ruby on Rails does read your mind and build a complete Web 2.0 social collaborative networking site for you with three clicks of the mouse.” – Joel Spolsky

I couldn’t agree more.

 
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Posted in Talks

 

Connect with your Kinect Slides and Code

09 Oct

I had the pleasure of presenting the expanded version of my “Connect with your Kinect” presentation at both the C# Special Interest Group and the Ft Worth .NET User Group this month.   I’ve really been enjoying both speaking on Kinect and developing with the peripheral.  I promised code and slides so here they are!

The code can be pulled from BitBucket here. Slides are available here

I also just learned I get to do this one more time at SMU. The SMU Computer Science Department has invited me to give the talk again on Oct 27th to students.  The talk is open to everyone so if you are interested in attending look here for more information later this month.

 
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Posted in Kinect, Talks

 

Dallas TechFest 2011 (Kinect code and slides soon)

21 Aug

I had a lot of fun at Dallas TechFest this year as both a speaker and a participant.  This was my first year to speak at Dallas TechFest and I was both humbled and honored to be selected.  Much thanks to the event organizers for putting together such an excellent event.

I find Techfest exciting for many reasons, one of which is that it takes place at the University of Texas at Dallas.   Due to this my audience was a mix of personalities from freshman students to PhDs to professional developers. 

The code focused talk I gave was entitled “Connect with your Kinect”.  On a technical level the talk demoed broad API functionality found in the beta SDK of Microsoft Kinect.  On a deeper level I sought to inspire developers on the potential of this device and get their interests perked.

I was happy with the reaction to this talk.  I think the audience left enthused and I felt some real energy in the room.

I promised to post some code here, but I have been asked to expand the talk and give it again at the Dallas C# SIG group in about two weeks.  Because of this, I’m going to do some code cleanup and post it shortly there after.  Stay tuned!

 
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Posted in Kinect, Talks

 

Video of my Silverlight Testing Talk Now Available

25 Jun

A little over two months ago I gave I gave a talk at the user group I manage, the North Texas Silverlight User Group on Silverlight testing.

The talk divided into two sections.  The first part was about unit testing Silverlight.  I started out with some hard to test code and worked it into easier to test code.  I also demonstrated the Silverlight unit test runner. The second part was about automating functional testing using Telerik’s WebUI Test Studio .  Everyone was impressed by Telerik’s tooling and their automated testing experience.

Shawn Weisfeld, one of our most stalwart community members, was there and recorded the talk and has made it available on his recently launched media site usergroup.tv.  If you are interested you can check it out here.   This was one of my favorite meetings we’ve had because people really got involved in the discussion of testing.  FYI this lead to some long pauses in the video, so be ready to skip past those.

 
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Posted in Silverlight, Talks

 

Code and Slides from my C# Influences Talk

09 Apr

This morning I gave a talk at the North Texas PC user group on influences to C#.  This group is steadily going through the teach yourself C# in 24 hours book.  This talk gave a glimpse of things to come for that group.

It’s hard to believe that C# and the .NET framework are decagenerians.  Over that time C# has been influences by  academia, innovations in other languages, and the evolution of hardware platforms.  This has made C# a very big language with lots of varied paradigms at work.

This talk discusses some of those influences and ties them back to specific language features and innovations.

 
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Posted in C#, Talks

 

Slides from my SMU Consulting Career Talk

12 Mar

A couple of students asked me to post slides from my SMU presentation on careers in consulting. My slides tend to be more visual than text so I thought I’d break it down a bit as well.

I had two purposes to this talk.  Chris Harper (HR Manager at Sogeti) asked me to talk about the Velocity project and the work we did at Broadlane from a technical perspective to explain what a consulting project looks like.  I also wanted to try and convey some of the benefits I get from being a consultant and working at Sogeti.

Velocity was an excellent project built by an extraordinary team.  Not every project is going to be a Velocity.  Yet the more agile methods taking hold in the industry, the more Velocities I think we’ll all have a chance to participate in.

The first couple slides show Velocity.  I then moved on to talk a bit about agile methods.  Then I discussed some of the core technologies that made up Velocity.  I concludes with some reasons to look at consulting as a career and some book recommendations.

I enjoyed giving this talk and meeting some of the impressive teachers and students at SMU.

 
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Posted in Talks

 

MVVM Smack Down Videos Now Online

12 Dec

In November myself and some friends presented an “MVVM Smack Down” at the North Texas Silverlight User Group.  We did a head to head comparison of Prism 4, The MVVM Light toolkit, Caliburn Micro, and Jounce.  It was presented with a bit of friendly banter and was meant really to enlighten, compare, and contrast more than to judge the various frameworks.

The videos are available here:

 

For many of us this was our first technical presentation in front of a public audience.  There was areas for improvement and I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but I think all things considered it went fairly well.

I also wanted to give a special thanks to Shawn Weisfeld for recording the sessions for INETA (and all the sessions he records).

 
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Posted in MVVM, Silverlight, Talks

 
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