Speaker:Elizabeth Smith

Abstract

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had a DBA to design and manage data for you? Most places don’t have this luxury, instead the burden falls on the developer. Your application is awesome, people are using it everywhere. But is your data storage designed to scale to millions of users in a way that’s economical and efficient? Data modeling and theory is the process of taking your application and designing how to store and process your data in a way that won’t melt down. This talk will walk through proper data modeling, choosing a data storage type, choosing database sofware, and architecting data relationships in your system. We’ll also walk through “refactoring data” using normalization and optimization.

Biography

I am skilled in development and application architecture for web and desktop based applications in multiple languages. I prefer C family languages (python, C#, C++, lua and similar) and am most familiar with PHP and C.

I’m experienced in multiple operating system environments including windows, several flavors of Linux, Solaris, BSD and Apple systems. I believe any good developer should be completely operating system and platform agnostic. I enjoy working on many open source projects and making them cooperate on windows systems. Good open source applications on Windows are like a gateway drug for the general user, which is why I advocate making things work cross platform.

I’ve had experience in working on client driven internet applications, and corporation driven intranet applications, desktop applications and services, and computer systems support and maintenance.

I code because I want to, not because I have to, and approach everything I do with a great deal of enthusiasm. Every time I squash a bug or make someone’s job easier it makes every moment of swearing at the screen worth the effort. After all, every programmer at heart just wants to solve problems.