When: 13. Sep 2011 at 19:00 -

Abstract

GOTO Night with Valentina & Kresten

We invite you to an interesting GOTO Night on behalf of GOTO Amsterdam.

Date Tuesday, 13th September, 2011
Time 19:00 / 7PM
Venue Pakhuis de Zwijger
Address Piet Heinkade 179, 1019 HC Amsterdam

Costs Free of charge
Snacks & refreshments included
Speakers Valentina Rao and Kresten Krab

Our Goals

• Present top-notch speakers
• Network with the Dutch IT community
• Create awareness of GOTO Amsterdam

There will be no on-site Wireless Internet available.

"Beyond Gamification: Start Playing, and You'll See" by Valentina Rao

Abstract
Gamification, the application of game mechanics to non-game processes, is a main buzzword in 2011, yet its meaning is still unclear, and even more unclear is its destiny five years from now. In fact gamification is all but a new concept, and has been recurrently unsuccessful through history. But gamification is only one aspect of a major cultural change happening in our times, and, if it is true that in some time, as Amy Jo Kim puts it: "every developer eventually will think like a game developer", then we'll better be prepared. This talk will cut through the hype beyond badges, points, achievements, and rewards to understand how to make gamification more sustainable; we will explore the most effective ways to motivate long-term -rather than short-term - costumer loyalty, and we will discover how to take the best from the gamification trend and make apps successfully playful.

Short Bio
Valentina Rao is a designer and a PhD researcher working on persuasion through video games for serious purposes at GATE (Game Research for Training and Entertainment) research group, and since 2007 she has been presenting about the diffusion of game and play in non-game environments and social networks. Her goal is to explore all the opportunities for playfulness and improved quality of life offered by new technologies through her newborn consulting company Playful Pandas.

"Erlang, The Road Movie" by Kresten Krab

Abstract
In November 2009 I set out on a journey to learn Erlang. And not just learn it: I wanted to immerse myself in it, get under it's skin, feel it, get to think like Erlang. I took it for a test drive, and ended up spending 18 months in Erlang's company.

This is the story of my trip. Not so much a talk about Erlang itself, but about what I realized on the way about where things are going. The systems that we build are getting increasingly integrated, distributed, and fragile. And becoming so at a disturbing rate when I think about it.

Viewing the world from behind the steering wheel of this old beauty, I'll take you on a tour of some of the significant issues we're dealing with in today's software systems: cloud, multi-core, integration, high availability, and living with the fact that our software isn't perfect.

Short Bio
Kresten Krab Thorup is CTO of Trifork, a public Danish company providing software solutions to government and financial services providers. Trifork is also creator of the long-running JAOO conference, and co-creator of QCon. As Trifork CTO Kresten in responsible for technical strategy, and spends most of the time acting as internal consultant, researching future technologies, as well as being editor for JAOO and QCon conferences. Kresten has also been a principal contributor to Trifork's own Java EE certified application server "Trifork T4", where he authored the built-in CORBA ORB, a custom Java RMI implementation (now part of Apache Yoko), the transaction manager, the database connection management system, and the Java byte code rewriting subsystem.

Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.

In 2009, Kresten founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine, and has been active in the Erlang community since, contributing to, among other things, QuickCheck and Riak. In Stockholm, November 2010 Kresten received the "Erlang User of the Year Award 2010", an award given for technical contributions to the Erlang community.

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