Dave Thomas is a software architect and engineer located in San Francisco, CA. He has 17 years of experience building startups and enterprises as a part-time CTO and technical advisor. He is a strong polyglot developer proficient in Java, Scala, Clojure, and many other languages. He has deep experience with DevOps practices and tools like Docker, AWS, Ansible, and Continuous Delivery. His background includes roles as CTO for Delicious and Verifi, and he currently works on his open-source project PeopleMerge.
As an accomplished developer with over 5 years’ experience in the field of Zope/Plone 3(expert), 4(expert) anf 5(intermediate)/Python. I am well positioned to join your company and make an immediate positive impression. My key areas of expertise include, but are not limited to the following:
· A solid background in Plone CMS, Zope and Python.
· Good knowledge in Python 2.X, Linux, Unix OS, MySQL, PostgreSQL , CSS3, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, J Query and J SON, XML parsing etc.
As an accomplished developer with over 5 years’ experience in the field of Zope/Plone 3(expert), 4(expert) anf 5(intermediate)/Python. I am well positioned to join your company and make an immediate positive impression. My key areas of expertise include, but are not limited to the following:
· A solid background in Plone CMS, Zope and Python.
· Good knowledge in Python 2.X, Linux, Unix OS, MySQL, PostgreSQL , CSS3, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, J Query and J SON, XML parsing etc.
PowerSQL Aids Application Developer ProductivityMichael Findling
Embarcadero Technologies is known for its multi-platform tools that assist database
administrators and developers at every point in the database lifecycle. In March, the
company took a bold new step when it debuted PowerSQL, a professional SQL
development tool that dramatically improves productivity for application developers
charged with SQL development.
My presentation at the October Agile Austin DevOps SIG about how we implemented DevOps on my team at National Instruments - techniques we used and lessons learned.
1.Kent Beck
2. Mike Beedle
3. Arie van Bennekum
4. Alistair Cockburn
5. Ward Cunningham
6. Mar(n Fowler
7. James Grenning
8. Jim Highsmith
9. Andrew Hunt
10. Ron Jeffries
11. Jon Kern
12. Brian Marick
13. Robert C. Mar(n
14. Steve Mellor
15. Ken Schwaber
16. Jeff Sutherland
17. Dave Thomas
Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People ExcelSandy Mamoli
Here’s a radical idea: Trust people to know best and let them decide which team they should work in. Let them Self-Select!
Self-selection is the simplest, fastest and most efficient way to form stable teams, based on the belief that people are at their happiest and most productive if they can choose what they work on and who they work with.
In October 2013, Trade Me, New Zealand’s largest eCommerce provider ran the biggest Self-Selection event in the world since WWII, using a process which has since been repeated many times in multiple locations across the world.
In this presentation I will share my learnings and experiences from more than four years of running Self-Selection processes in large organisations. I will show you a repeatable process for how to establish efficient teams in growing organisations and will answer questions such as “Why would I do that”? and “How can I convince management?”.
How to find the real need with socratic questioningKent McDonald
A common piece of advice is that your team should discover the true need of your project. Unfortunately advice on how to make that happen isn't as prevalent. In this session you'll have a chance to practice a simple technique to get to the core of what your stakeholders need that has been around for over 2000 years - Socratic questioning.
Join Kent McDonald as he walks you through a technique aimed at uncovering the (not intentionally) hidden need that your stakeholders are trying to satisfy, without asking "why?" five times in a row. Kent describes the questions, why they work and in what context they work based on his experience with IT organizations and the Agile Alliance. You'll then have a chance to practice them out to find out about a real project.
The line of questioning was inspired by Brennan Dunn who uses them to understand the true needs of his web development consultants.
Come learn about and practice this technique so you can use it back at the office to drive toward the right outcome.
Agile Leadership: Accelerating Business Agility - ContextKent McDonald
The "one size fits all" approach to Project Leadership is inherently flawed. Practitioners have found that the two primary attributes of uncertainty and complexity of a project provide guidance to effective project leadership and governance. Complexity includes project composition such as team size and criticality, while uncertainty includes both market and technical uncertainty. The approach and leadership style required for a simple, stable project is quite different than what is required for highly uncertain, highly complex projects. This session demonstrates how to use the Context Leadership Model to determine the appropriate approach and leadership style for a project based on its uncertainty and complexity.
Key Learning Points
How to assess the complexity and uncertainty characteristics of a project
How to tailor the project approach based on those characteristics
How to determine the appropriate leadership style for a project based on its characteristics
PowerSQL Aids Application Developer ProductivityMichael Findling
Embarcadero Technologies is known for its multi-platform tools that assist database
administrators and developers at every point in the database lifecycle. In March, the
company took a bold new step when it debuted PowerSQL, a professional SQL
development tool that dramatically improves productivity for application developers
charged with SQL development.
My presentation at the October Agile Austin DevOps SIG about how we implemented DevOps on my team at National Instruments - techniques we used and lessons learned.
1.Kent Beck
2. Mike Beedle
3. Arie van Bennekum
4. Alistair Cockburn
5. Ward Cunningham
6. Mar(n Fowler
7. James Grenning
8. Jim Highsmith
9. Andrew Hunt
10. Ron Jeffries
11. Jon Kern
12. Brian Marick
13. Robert C. Mar(n
14. Steve Mellor
15. Ken Schwaber
16. Jeff Sutherland
17. Dave Thomas
Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People ExcelSandy Mamoli
Here’s a radical idea: Trust people to know best and let them decide which team they should work in. Let them Self-Select!
Self-selection is the simplest, fastest and most efficient way to form stable teams, based on the belief that people are at their happiest and most productive if they can choose what they work on and who they work with.
In October 2013, Trade Me, New Zealand’s largest eCommerce provider ran the biggest Self-Selection event in the world since WWII, using a process which has since been repeated many times in multiple locations across the world.
In this presentation I will share my learnings and experiences from more than four years of running Self-Selection processes in large organisations. I will show you a repeatable process for how to establish efficient teams in growing organisations and will answer questions such as “Why would I do that”? and “How can I convince management?”.
How to find the real need with socratic questioningKent McDonald
A common piece of advice is that your team should discover the true need of your project. Unfortunately advice on how to make that happen isn't as prevalent. In this session you'll have a chance to practice a simple technique to get to the core of what your stakeholders need that has been around for over 2000 years - Socratic questioning.
Join Kent McDonald as he walks you through a technique aimed at uncovering the (not intentionally) hidden need that your stakeholders are trying to satisfy, without asking "why?" five times in a row. Kent describes the questions, why they work and in what context they work based on his experience with IT organizations and the Agile Alliance. You'll then have a chance to practice them out to find out about a real project.
The line of questioning was inspired by Brennan Dunn who uses them to understand the true needs of his web development consultants.
Come learn about and practice this technique so you can use it back at the office to drive toward the right outcome.
Agile Leadership: Accelerating Business Agility - ContextKent McDonald
The "one size fits all" approach to Project Leadership is inherently flawed. Practitioners have found that the two primary attributes of uncertainty and complexity of a project provide guidance to effective project leadership and governance. Complexity includes project composition such as team size and criticality, while uncertainty includes both market and technical uncertainty. The approach and leadership style required for a simple, stable project is quite different than what is required for highly uncertain, highly complex projects. This session demonstrates how to use the Context Leadership Model to determine the appropriate approach and leadership style for a project based on its uncertainty and complexity.
Key Learning Points
How to assess the complexity and uncertainty characteristics of a project
How to tailor the project approach based on those characteristics
How to determine the appropriate leadership style for a project based on its characteristics
The evils of multi-tasking and how personal Kanban can help you Sandy Mamoli
We know for a fact that multi-tasking slows us down both physically and mentally. Agile, Lean, Scrum and Kanban limit work in progress (WIP) on a team and organisational level but what about the personal space? What practices can we use as individuals to avoid multi-tasking and achieve flow?
This session will explain the research on and theory behind why multi-tasking is bad at every level and through telling the story of Snapper, New Zealand’s primary contactless payments platform, I will show how an entire organisation organically adapted Agile practices to extend from the organisational and team level to the personal and individual space and how personal Kanban in turn has influenced our organisation-wide Agile adoption.
I will demonstrate how personal Kanban works and how my colleagues and I are using it. I will show the personal Kanban boards that have popped up everywhere around the office and how everyone at Snapper and the organisation as a whole have benefitted from their use. Come along and learn how personal Kanban can help you!
This session has been part of Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas and Agile Australia 2013 and have been very well received.
Tis better to be effective than efficientKent McDonald
Better. Faster. Cheaper. Many IT organizations are constantly seeking the "best" practices that will deliver those characteristics, and the fact that they continue to search indicates they haven’t found them yet.
It could be they are looking in the wrong place. Most efforts around achieving better, faster, cheaper center around becoming ultra efficient.
Effectiveness may just be the better target.
Join Kent McDonald to explore the difference between efficiency and effectiveness and learn three simple, yet powerful, techniques that he has found can help teams be more effective. You’ll learn how to:
Build a shared understanding of the problem you are trying to solve
Establish clear guard rails for distributed decision making
Measure progress based on outcome, not output
Along the way he’ll share stories about how he has used these techniques and help you figure out when these techniques may work in your situation.
You may be able to get faster and cheaper with efficiency, but in order to get better outcomes, you need to be effective. Come to this session to learn how.
Agile India 2016 Conference is Asia's Largest and Premier Conference on Agile, Scrum, eXtreme Programming, Lean, Kanban, DevOps, Enterprise Agile, Lean Startup, Continuous Delivery, Research and Patterns. Get to meet pioneers and expert practitioners from around the world on Agile Adoption, Scaling Agile, Offshore Agile and Distributed Agile. 14 - 21 March 2016 at Chancery Pavilion, Bangalore. More details: http://2016.agileindia.org
This presentation explores three important questions:
1. How does disciplined agile software development work?
2. How does agile analysis work?
3. How do business analysts fit on agile teams?
Versions of this presentation has been given several times at conferences internationally.
An updated version of this presentation is available at http://www.slideshare.net/ScottWAmbler/disciplined-agile-business-analysis-58401041
Joshua Kerievsky's 2016 keynote speech at Agile2016. Speech abstract follows...
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Over the past decade, innovative companies, software industry thought leaders and lean/agile pioneers have discovered simpler, sturdier, and more streamlined ways to be agile. While there is timeless wisdom in agile, today's practitioners would do well to bypass outmoded agile practices in favor of modern approaches.
Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles
• Make people awesome
• Make safety a prerequisite
• Experience & learn rapidly
• Deliver value continuously
World famous organizations like Google, Amazon, Air BnB, Etsy and others are living proof of the powers of these four principles. However, you don't need to be a name brand company to leverage modern agile wisdom.
In this talk, Josh will explain what he means by modern agility, share real-world modern agile stories, show how modern agile addresses key risks while targeting results over rituals, and reveal how the 2001 agile manifesto can be updated to reflect modern agile's four guiding principles.
Why Scaling Agile Doesn't Work (and What to Do About It)Jez Humble
There are now several frameworks designed to address the demand for "big agile."
In this talk Jez will explain the flaws in such frameworks, why they so often fail to produce the desired effects, and what we should do instead. He will also address some common organizational obstacles to moving fast at scale: governance, budgeting, and the project paradigm - and discuss how to address them. Warning: this talk will include liberal use of real, statistically sound data.
Value Driven Development by Dave Thomas Naresh Jain
Agile, OOP... are like good hygiene in the kitchen, it results in meals with consistent quality and predictable prep and service times. It doesn't result in great meals nor substantially impact the ROI! Lean Thinking clearly shows that the only way to make a significant impact is to improve the value chain by improving flow. If everyone is following best practices no one has competitive advantage. Major improvements in the value chain depend on continued disruptive innovations. Innovations leverage people and their ideas. We use case studies to illustrate the different business and technical innovations and their impact. We conclude with a discussion of how to build and leverage an innovation culture versus a sprint death march when dealing with high value time to market projects.
More details: https://confengine.com/agile-india-2017/proposal/3608/value-driven-development-maximum-impact-maximum-speed
How to Become a Thought Leader in Your NicheLeslie Samuel
Are bloggers thought leaders? Here are some tips on how you can become one. Provide great value, put awesome content out there on a regular basis, and help others.
1. Dave Thomas
Address: 1045 Mission St #3, San Francisco CA 94103
Phone: 213-705-7490
Email: davemonster@peoplemerge.com
Social: linkedin.com/peoplemerge tw itter.com/peoplemerge
Projects: peoplemerge.com github.com/peoplemerge
To make an appointment to speakto me by phone, please see my calendar at peoplemerge.com/availability (note:
times are in PST) then email me w ith a job description and a proposed time or calendar invitation.
Summary Builder of startups and enterprises as a part-time CTO, technical advisor, and enthusiastic
software and systems architect and engineer who really likes to write code. Strong polyglot
developer (OO and functional) in Java, Scala, CloJure, Groovy, Swift, Ruby, Python,
JavaScript / CoffeeScript, Erlang, PHP, Perl. Proficient in SQL and several NoSQL databases.
Deep DevOps cultural background, a Continuous Delivery toolsmith with extensive experience
in both development and operational organizations. Evangelist of Entrepreneurial tactics and
Lean Startup over a 17 year career.
Experience Software Engineer (contract) Trizic Inc
San Francisco, CA — Feb 2016 - Aug 2016
Divided a monolithic Java / Spring / MySQL robo-trading (financial portfolio management)
application into microservices, raising the standards of code quality using OO and functional
design. Employed RabbitMQ, Docker, Java 8, with minor updates to Node.JS components in a
CD environment based on Ansible, Nomad, Consul, Werker, and AWS. Working with the
support of a financial engineer, decoupled a quant code base that employed combinatorial
optimizations (such as branch and bound) so it could operate as a standalone messaging
worker.
CTO, Delicious (a division of Science Inc), then Delicious Media Inc (a division
of Paradise Modern Inc)
Los Angeles, CA — Sep 2014-Jan 2016
Implemented sweeping product changes targeting revenue growth, leading several small
teams (3-4 people) onsite and across 4 time zones. Wrote Coffeescript, Java, Python, Scala,
Objective-C, and CloJure application stack running on AWS. Built and maintained services
using EC2, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, SES, S3, Route53. Engaged 3 month cost-cutting effort
that resulted in a 80% reduction in costs by migrating to another AWS region in a VPC, and
increasing density using Docker and EC2 Container Service. Simplified an operational
infrastructure that served 100M unique visitors/day and previously required 100 EC2 instances.
Replaced a custom Zookeeper-based message queue that was forked from Apache Kafka with
AWS Kinesis. Architected, designed, implemented, and launched Delicious Mail, an email app
(web and iOS) that makes email revocable in Objective-C and Grails. Created and trained a
big data team to support statistical analysis on product experiments for the mobile apps
Wishbone and Slingshot (both top 10 social apps) using Looker on AWS RedShift, including
services from Data Pipeline, RDS, DynamoDB, and EMR. Following acquisition, performed
strategic and tactical guidance to the new owner of a major Internet property, and knowledge
transfer to a new technical team.
Software Architect, Verifi Inc
2. Los Angeles, CA — Mar 2013-Aug 2014
Re-architected the production real-time credit card processing system for geo-distributed fault
tolerance which led to a 5x increase in business on the platform in 1 year. Evaluated vendors
of critical platform improvement to bring in credit processing in-house based on source code
quality and strategic business objectives. Led a project to implement Chef and Openstack,
which maximized the efficiency of the engineering organization’s main bottleneck, and
introduced Rundeck, which managed all batch processing. Led software and systems groups
with the application of best practices, and frequently took a hands-on role writing java, ruby,
php, and python code. Extended DeploymentObjects code base to use grammars to parse log
file to entities in Riak that were replayed for load testing. Recruited and coached engineers
and managers, gave talks on engineering subjects such as coupling & cohesion, SOLID, DDD,
OO design patterns.
Sr. Software Engineer, Fox Filmed Entertainment
Los Angeles, CA — Nov 2012-Mar 2013
Designed and developed RESTful Web Services with Apache CXF, Oracle SQL using TDD.
Maintained Oracle 11g BPEL and BPMN 2.0 workflows that called the REST services.
Developed REST services for legacy Perl web app.
Open-Source Software Architect, PeopleMerge
Los Angeles, CA — Aug 2012-present
Created BSD-licenced orchestration platform, available at deploymentobjects.org. Employed
DSL using ANTLR as a novel IOC alternative to Spring and applied Domain Driven Design
methodology. The tool dispatches tasks using SSH, launches and manages VMs with libvirt
and kickstart, coordinates Puppet operations, and manages state with Apache Zookeeper.
Developed push web interface for Domain Events using GWT and Atmosphere before
replacing Atmosphere with Errai in a later sprint. Current iteration includes core refactoring to
SCALA.
Software Architect, CGI
Montreal, QC, Canada — Aug 2011-July 2012
Architect for new generation of foreign currency exchange software. Provided architectural
leadership and introduced a design based on test-driven development, real-time enterprise
systems, OO patterns, GWT with Atmosphere on J2EE, and provided 1-on-1 and group
training for the development team. Supported software group with business knowledge
through Domain-Driven Design (DDD) methodologies. Developed cloud POC with Amazon
EC2 and VPC.
Sr. Software Engineer, ValueClick
Los Angeles, CA Jan 2011 - Aug 2011
Developed J2EE RESTful web services using Spring and Hibernate and FLEX 4 front-end.
Contributed to a continuous delivery pipeline with perforce, maven, and hudson on Linux.
Maintained and extended a rich OO domain model (following DDD) with JUnit.
Sr. Software and Systems Engineer (contract), PeopleMerge
Los Angeles, CA Sep 2009 -Dec 2010
Edmunds.com: Developed bare-metal automated deployment and testing mechanism for
Hadoop effort using Puppet, MCollective, Cobbler, Libvirt, KVM, and Hudson on
RHEL.Developed an automated integration testing environment for Edmunds Traffic Manager
3. (ETM) using Fabric and JBehave. ETM is an Apache Zookeeper-based application for
coordinating the allocation of VIP pools in an F5 load balancer with Apache HTTPD rewrite
rules, triggered when applications are deployed to a container such as Tomcat. Developed
POC for the deployment of development environments to Amazon EC2.
SpinMedia (formerly Buzz Media): Administered high-volume 24x7 LAMP environment
supporting 50 million monthly users with CFEngine, XEN virtualization, and Fabric. Developed
log analysis tool using Hadoop/Apache Pig. Developed Ruby on Rails plugins for the Redmine
ticketing system, a Ruby on Rails app (open-sourced by permission,
github.com/peoplemerge/redmine-cclist-plugin). Developed POC for production deployment of
high-volume Wordpress applications to Reliam cloud and Amazon EC2.
TeamLead Sr. Software Engineer, Ericsson
Los Angeles, CA Jan 2007 - Jul 2009
Led systems engineering team designing a continuous delivery pipeline. The project entailed
highly-variable customer deployments spanning approximately 800 sites, 3,000 Linux and
Solaris servers, 50,000 JVMs. Implemented open-source solution using Puppet and
ControlTier tools with XEN.
Led Java development team for CORBA code base and migrated to J2EE/Web Services.
Developed test harness and deployment automation.
Rearchitected a .NET XML feed logger/transformer for performance for Java on Linux using
StAX and Spring (IoC and AOP). Achieved a 100-fold performance improvement (on same
hardware). Unit tests covered ~75% code base.
Rearchitected rights and guide schedule manager using agile principles. Developed search,
schedule, and guide import. Delivered product ahead of schedule. Unit tests covered ~75%
code base.
Software Engineer (contract), Solekai Systems
San Diego, CA Apr 2006 - Nov 2006
Developed Core Java-based content management system and test harness for a video
engineering tool designed for set-top boxes.
Implemented Eclipse RCP using Java with XML technologies using Subversion as a custom
persistence layer.
Gained further knowledge in digital video (MPEG2, ATSC, DSMCC) and GOF design patterns
for the tool to generate bit-streams containing audio, video, and metadata.
CTO, Bay Street Software
Los Angeles, CA Dec Mar 2004 - Aug 2005
Led several software development teams (3-5 people each). Applied entrepreneurial skills in
the development of business. Developed and launched 2 sites. Created a distributed web
scraping tool in Python for the DOM with XML/XPath/XSLT. Developed Zope/Plone user
community.
CTO & Founder, PeopleMerge
Los Angeles, CA Dec 1998 - Mar 2004
Contractor. Clients include Wells Fargo Bank, Sony Electronics, Supreme Anime Productions,
APICS–San Diego, SellerTracker, USC Pharmacy School, GirlGeeks.com, AutoBodyClub.com,
and various LA-based data centers.
Led several small (5 person) software development teams. Mentored junior programmers.
4. Developed websites with JSP, Servlets, EJB 2.0/XDoclet using Jakarta Struts and Hibernate
with MySQL and Oracle databases. Administered Apache Tomcat and JBoss application
servers. Engineered distributed systems in Java, C++, Perl. Acted as primary UNIX
administrator for Linux and Silicon Graphics systems and development/operational Oracle
Administrator. Performed hardware troubleshooting on x86 servers running Linux.
Web Developer and UNIX Administrator, DirectNet
Los Angeles, CA Jan 1997 - Dec 1998
Developed CGI in C and Perl modules for Web 0.1 sites. Administered IRIX and BSDi web
servers and Oracle 7.3 RDBMS
Education San Diego State University
MS Computer Science — 2016
Completed coursework, anticipated thesis defense Dec 2016.
Universityof Southern California
BS Computer Science — 2002
Minor in French, completed certificate at Sorbonne University, Paris
Minor in Business, completed emphasis in Entrepreneurship
Finalist, Top Business Plan of the Year, USC Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies