Doors open at 5:30 PM. Presentation begins at 6:00 PM.

No matter the size of your team most of us developers work with users or stakeholders to develop project requirements. Making your way through competing requests to get to a good design takes a lot of time and skill. In this talk Derek Binkley will use what he has learned as a parent and humorously apply it to product design and requirement gathering. You will learn about effective methods for getting agreement on product features and interface design. You will learn about ways of discovering what stakeholders really need to ensure delivery of a great product. These are valuable skills that can help you create better applications, become more valuable to your team, and advance your career.

Derek Binkley is a Software Consultant with Spark Labs. While getting his start fixing the Y2K date problem in Cobol, Derek quickly moved on to spend almost twenty years using PHP, JVM Languages, JavaScript, MySQL, ElasticSearch, and Oracle.

He enjoys teaching others through speaking, mentoring, and writing articles. Derek encourages developers to write clean, testable code. When not in front of a computer he spends time with family, travels, makes pizza, and drinks beer.