Interactive Video Conference with David Platt, author of Why Software Sucks

OCTOBER MEETING
Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Michael Bolton, TASSQ's Program Chair, says, "This October's meeting will be the first time that TASSQ has attempted a tele-presentation. It's a great opportunity for us to mesh Dave's busy schedule with ours. I attended his keynote at the SD West Conference this year, and it was brilliant--astute, perfectly targeted, entertaining, and thought-provoking--not to be missed!"

TASSQ's October meeting features an interactive video conference with David Platt, in which he will deliver a presentation laced with humor-sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You'll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You'll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer's face. But Dave hasn't written this book just for laughs. He's written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery-that software does, indeed, suck, and it shouldn't - and to make you a wiser, happier participant in developing and testing it.

Today's software sucks. There's no other good way to say it. It's unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It's unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it's hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It's no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or for personal tasks. In his book, Why Software Sucks, programming insider David Platt explains why that's the case and, more importantly, why it doesn't have to be that way. And he explain it in plain, jargon-free English, using real-world examples with which you're already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you can do about this sad state of our software-and how you don't have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out.

David Platt runs Rolling Thunder Computing (www.rollthunder.com), an education and consulting practice. He has more than twenty years of experience as a programmer, teaches software development at Harvard University Extension School and at companies all over the world, and is a popular speaker at conferences. He is the author of ten books, including Why Software Sucks,Introducing Microsoft .NET, Third Edition, The Microsoft Platform Ahead, and Understanding COM+ (all Microsoft Press)--as well as many journal articles and newsletters. In 2002, Microsoft designated him a Software Legend. Dave lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts