Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Time: June 25, 2009 from 6pm to 9pm
Location: DeVry University
Street: 4000 Millennia Blvd
City/Town: Orlando, FL
Website or Map: http://www.orlandojug.org
Phone: Skype ::: mlevin77
Event Type: meeting
Organized By: Michael Levin
Latest Activity: Mar 19, 2012
Join us for a great talk on Refactoring with Neal Ford. Refactoring is a fine academic exercise in the perfect world, but we don't really live there. Even with the best intentions, projects build up technical debt and crufty bad things. This session covers refactoring in the real world, at both the atomic level (how to refactor towards composed method and at the single level of abstraction principle) to larger project strategies for multi-day refactoring efforts. This talk provides practical strategies for real projects to effectively refactor your code.
Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.
Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.
He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

Airbnb has redesigned its identity system to support privacy-first social features in Experiences. The platform introduces context-specific profiles that separate global user identity from externally visible profiles, preventing cross-context linkage. The migration leveraged automated auditing, manual validation, and AI-assisted refactoring to enforce correct identity usage across services.
By Leela Kumili
JEP 533, Structured Concurrency, has reached integrated status for JDK 27. It refines exception handling and type safety in its API, particularly focusing on exception flow with a new ExecutionException type. Changes include an updated Joiner interface and a new open overload for easier configuration. The steady evolution signals ongoing development as feedback shapes the API.
By A N M Bazlur Rahman
Paulo Arruda discusses Shopify’s evolution in AI adoption, moving from simple chat tools to a sophisticated swarm of specialized agents. He explains the transition from massive "all-in-one" prompts to lean, narrow-focused agent microservices that slash task times from hours to minutes. He also shares a future-looking hypothesis on using filesystem-based adapters to solve context bloat.
By Paulo Arruda
Backlogs in distributed systems are arithmetic problems, not mysteries. This article provides practical formulas for calculating backlog drain time, sizing consumer headroom, and setting auto-scaling triggers. It covers key failure modes — retry amplification, metastable states, and cascading pipeline bottlenecks — plus when to shed load instead of draining.
By Rajesh Kumar Pandey
Grafana Labs has launched Pyroscope 2.0, a rearchitected open-source continuous profiling database. This version improves storage costs, query performance, and operational complexity. Key changes include single write paths for profiles, stateless query processing, and enhanced capabilities for profiling data. It supports the OpenTelemetry Protocol, aligning with current trends in observability.
By Matt Saunders
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
RSVP for OrlandoJUG - Refactoring with Neal Ford to add comments!
Join Codetown