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A joint Chicago Chapter ACM / Loyola University Computer Science Department meeting
Do You Believe in the Users?
Speaker: Brian Fitzpatrick of Google Chicago
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm (Social Hour, light refreshments)
6:30 pm Presentation
Loyola University Water Tower Campus (Chicago/Michigan Area)
111 E. Pearson Street, Chicago IL 60611
Beane Ballroom (13th Floor, Lewis Towers) Campus map
Admission: Free (General Admission, No Reserved Seats)
RSVP on the Chicago ACM website (chicagoacm.org)
Too many programmers have forgotten about the lost art of customer service. All software has users, though most developers have forgotten how to respect them, trust them, or “sell” their software to them in an exciting (but honest!) manner. This talk will focus on anecdotes and strategies for keeping software design uncomplicated, making software fast, and putting usability above programming convenience. We’ll also focus on the importance of keeping a healthy illusion of simplicity, while allowing abstractions to deliberately leak for power-users.
Brian Fitzpatrick started Google's Chicago engineering office in 2005, and currently leads several of Google's Chicago engineering efforts, including Transparency Engineering and The Google Affiliate Network. He also started and leads Google's Data Liberation Front, a team that systematically works to make it easy for users to move their data both to and from Google. Lastly, he serves as internal advisor for Google's open source efforts.Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple's largest corporate customers.
Brian has been an active open source contributor for over thirteen years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF's VP of Public Relations. He is also a member of the Open Web Foundation. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing "Version Control with Subversion" (now in its second edition) as well as chapters for "Unix in a Nutshell" and "Linux in a Nutshell."
Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. Despite growing up in New Orleans and working for Silicon Valley companies for most of his career, he decided years ago that Chicago was his home and stubbornly refuses to move to California.
While there will be light refreshments available, feel free to "brown bag" it and bring in food from the outside to eat during the social hour.
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