Who doesn't love development (or solving business problems)? Who doesn't love SciFi/Fantasy/Comics? Who thinks combinations of these things are going to be even better? If you answer ME - then this is the virtual-con for you!
This conference is a dream of mine to satisfy our need to hear from others in the community and also another chance to give those who love speaking about what they know and have learned a place to keep doing it (and doing it well), even in these unprecedented times. While adding a sci-fi twist.
This unique event is a chance to hear about things other developers are doing and learn new or better ways to improve your daily workflow.
The best parts about this conference will be that not only will we be talking tech, but we'll be requiring all presenters to enhance talks with sci-fi/fantasy/comics/gaming, and anything else in what was traditionally called "geek/nerd" culture.
TL/DR. Stay home and avoid the con-crud. Learn cool stuff from industry and thought leaders. Embrace sci-fi/fantasy/culture in the process. Have a great 31-day event by the community for the community.
Co-Founders - Brilliantly Resilient
Kristin Smedley and Mary Fran Bontempo know their brilliance. But they didn’t always. In fact, both Kristin and Mary Fran know what it feels like to be lost, afraid, unsuccessful and unhappy. That’s a lot of yuck, but without it, there would have been no need for resilience, the key to uncovering your brilliance. After learning to navigate challenges including blindness and addiction, Kristin and Mary Fran discovered shared strategies and tools they used to overcome crisis. Now as TEDx speakers, authors, content creators, hosts of their own online show and podcast, a founder of a global research organization and an advocate for families struggling with addiction, they want to share their hard-won wisdom and wit with the world, because they know YOU are BRILLIANTLY RESILIENT!
Brilliantly Resilient Premium - Wed, 29 Jul 2020, 9:00am - 10:30am
What’s your train wreck? Everyone has one—past, present, or future. Now, COVID19 is the world’s collective train wreck. But how do you keep your train wreck from becoming your story? How do some people come through stronger while others never recover?
A crisis can leave us lost, frustrated, and stuck, wreaking havoc on our mental health. But everyone has inherent Resilience that can help us come through challenges Brilliant, not broken. Kristin Smedley and Mary Fran Bontempo overcame enormous train wrecks and sucker punches by uncovering their resilience as well as a “toolbox” of skills and strategies leading to their brilliance.
In this program, you will learn to:
Learn more at Brilliantly Resilient.
Inspired Living Chiropractic/Inspired Nation Online
Dr. Dustin Behn is has had his finger on the pulse of overall whole-istic wellness care for over 15 years. His passion for helping people achieve their health goals and understanding the fundamentals of true health has led him to create numerous community events, talks and programs that support ‘wellness’.
He has organized community events such as the ‘Rebuild the Temple Program’ –a sixweek intensive program that has helped people get healthier by implementing the four areas of health—physical, chemical, mental/spiritual and functional health. In his 11 years of practice in Jesup and 4 years prior in Tucson,AZ he has led many discussions on nutrition, exercise, mental stress reduction techniques as well as organized many activities all with the goal of helping change the face of healthcare. Events include 5K Walk & Runs, Kids Day/Family Fests, ‘Inspiration Steps’ that helped over fifty people train and successfully compete in a 5K walk/run.
Most recently Dr. Behn launched The Inspired Nation podcast that has now been downloaded in over 40 countries worldwide bringing messages of hope, health and inspiration to the masses. He has done one-on-one life coaching in his EMERGENCE Program as well as hosted numerous EMERGENCE- LIVE Experiences, each designed to lower the barriers and false beliefs that hold people hostage from going after what they want from life.
He has enthusiasm that is contagious and a passion that truly is unmatched when it comes to inspiring and empowering people to achieve their goals. His speaking style works on what he refers to as the ‘Three E’ model’---Educate, Empower and Entertain. Dr. Behn, his wife, two daughters and son currently reside in Jesup,IA where he owns and operates Inspired Living Chiropractic--a 100% Lifestyle Wellness Clinic- a family wellness practice designed to lead people to a healthier life and future.
Break the Code of Mediocrity
Session details coming soon...
TBD...
TBD...
Session details coming soon...Helping tech companies close the soft skills gap
As a kid I enjoyed taking charge.
Seeing my parents at points in their career as business owners imprinted in my mind.
My supervisor at my first full-time job out of college asked me, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”
I responded, “Not here.” At that point I knew I wanted to own a business one day.
Working for someone made me realize: freedom and flexibility of schedule is what motivates me. It’s my why.
As someone who is introverted, I prefer connecting with people individually or in small groups. For me it’s about quality over quantity.
That’s why I initially chose coaching. Because I like to push myself to be better, I like to push my clients too.
I value fitness, so I workout 5 times a week.
I value health, so I maintain a Keto lifestyle.
I value growth, so I put myself in uncomfortable situations because I like the challenge.
But earlier in my career the one area I feared as a leader was public speaking. I’d do it, but reluctantly.
Until one day I realized…I’m not a good speaker because I think I’m not one.
So I decided to change my self-talk. From there I started hosting a monthly network event and volunteered to speak at my dad’s church once a month.
In 2019, my goal was to land a TEDx Talk. I wanted to prove to myself I could do it.
In 2020, I did my first TEDx Talk in Laie, on the island of Oahu in Hawaii entitled “Saving Soft Skills From Extinction.”
So as I stand here today I want you to know my why hasn’t changed.
As a husband and father, I care most about creating a lifestyle that allows me to spend time with my wife Lisa, daughter Kayla and son Isaiah when I want to.
My hope is to give my kids the opportunity to chase their desired lifestyle because dad continues to do so on a daily basis.
Based on his 2020 TEDx Talk in Laie, Oahu, “Saving Soft Skills From Extinction,” Scott teaches audiences how to model soft skills to the next generation producing better communication and performance in the workplace.
Learn more at https://www.scottasai.com/.
Director, Engineering, TriNet
Chris Holland leads a small Software Engineering Team at an HR company. Throughout a career spanning more than 20 years, Chris has held Sr. Engineering and Leadership roles for small and large successful publicly-traded companies such as EarthLink and Internet Brands, serving business models across Content, Commerce, Travel & Finance on a wide variety of technology stacks including PHP/LAMP, Java/J2EE and C#/.Net, catering to audiences over 100 million monthly visitors.
Taming Change: Keynote - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 9:00am - 10:00am
Change is Software's greatest threat, and its defining characteristic. Disagree? How's that Agile Transformation going for you?
We will explore this cognitively-dissonant statement as we investigate the challenges that we've faced, how we continue to fail to address them, and what we can do tame this raucous beast.
To do this, we will study the most ambitious, most expensive computing system built by the United States military in the post cold-war era of the 1950s, looking at the challenges they faced, and the choices they made to overcome them.
We will then explore how many of those choices were carried-over to modern-day software engineering throughout the 1990s until we, as an industry, decided to free ourselves from the shackles of certain self-imposed limitations.
In doing so, we got ourselves into different sorts of troubles. We will explore what they are and how some of us have chosen to overcome them.
ERA CEO
Mark is a mathematician turned programmer. He runs a VC backed Open Source company and has traveled to 30 countries. The diverse cultures he has experienced fuels his passion for learning, sharing, and creating open technology freely for all.
Back to the Future of the Internet: Keynote - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 10:00am - 11:00am
The internet of the Future is free, equal, and open. The only way to secure this is to go Back to the Future - join Doc & Marty in the DeLorean as we re-decentralize & end-to-end encrypt the internet the way cypherpunks would have.
Lead Developer at Aviture
Armed with over 15 years of experience and a passion for his profession, Nate is no stranger to developing quality software applications. He applies his expertise in C++, Java, .Net and JavaScript, and his focus on test driven development (TDD) and clean code, to write revenue-generating applications. Nate has the expertise to work solo and the personality to work alongside a larger team. His work positively impacts a variety of industries, from small startups to Fortune 50 businesses. When he’s not working at Aviture, speaking at a conference, or creating courses on Pluralsight, you can find Nate training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and spending time with his wife, kids and herds of cats, rabbits and other pets at home.
Focus on People: Keynote - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 10:00am - 11:00am
In 2008 my mom was diagnosed with ALS. Over the next 18 months, ALS stole more and more abilities from my mom, including her ability to speak. But what ALS took, software was able to help restore.
While not everyone will receive an ALS diagnosis, most of us will interact with software on a regular basis. As a result, software engineers need to approach writing software with this in mind.
This talk explores the role of software engineering in human flourishing. You’ll learn how the software you write today impacts the lives of your users, and how you can make that better. You’ll also learn ways to improve interactions with your team, considering them not just as coworkers but also people.
How Test Driven Development Improved My Quality of Life Additional Sessions 1 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
I used to love development. Then, sometime after I started doing it professionally, it really started to ware on me. I had days or weeks where I dreaded coming to the office. After all, I knew what I was going to find there. Bug reports from customers that would force me to dig deep into the bowels of the application, make a change and hope that my fix worked. And really hope that it didn’t break anything else.
Whenever I read old code, I absolutely hated it. Especially if I was the one to write it. It would bring back vague memories of conversations we had about the feature, but they were vague. I wasn’t really sure what the code was supposed to be doing, and reading it didn’t always help.
Then I started practicing Test Driven Development, and it changed how I looked at my job and how I looked at my code. Now I enjoy coming in to work. I sometimes find it hard to leave because I’m making so much progress. I find myself having features and user stories just fly by, as I’m continually making progress towards the goal line. Even my code has become more readable.
In this talk, we’ll look at how it was that TDD was able to help me achieve that, how it can do it for you, and how, in the end, TDD is about much more than just testing.
Other/Any - Introductory and overview
Founder, Kansas City Women in Technology
Jennifer Wadella has been writing code since before she realized it was a credible career path. She currently works as a JavaScript Consultant and loves building performant web applications, speaking at technical conferences, and brewing kombucha. Jennifer is an active member of the KC tech community and the founder of Kansas City Women in Technology(KCWiT), an organization aimed at growing the number of women in technology careers in Kansas City. She is the PubConf Sydney 2018 Champion, a Silicon Prairie Champion Award Nominee, Rising Trendsetter STEMMy award-winner, and is apparently Missouri's Coolest Woman according to Pure Wow.
I Want to Believe: Making Angular Apps More Performant with Scully: Keynote - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 9:00am - 10:00am
If you’re looking for ways to improve performance of your Angular applications, look no further than Scully. Scully is the JAMstack tool the Angular community has been craving to make pre-rendering and serving static pages a breeze, with a great supporting community and a variety of plugins to meet any application setups needs. This talk will teach you about JAMstack concepts and how to get started with Scully to make your Angular applications more performant today.
Infinity Interactive
John is the VP of Technology for Infinity Interactive, a technology consultancy and bespoke software development shop. When he's not madly trying to keep up with the pace of change in Javascript development, maintaining Perl modules, or tweaking his Emacs config, he likes to play around with new languages like Swift and write about himself in the third person.
Confessions of a Space Cadet: Themed Business Room - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Folks in IT spend a tremendous amount of time every day working on their keyboards -- writing code, updating tickets, sending emails, building out project plans -- but most of us don't give any thought to _how_ we use that keyboard. This talk will cover a number of keyboarding changes you can make that enable more effective keyboaring -- changes that will potentially reduce the negative consequences of over-use of traditional keyboards. We'll also explore the fantastic range of keyboard customizations that are available today with custom programmable keyboard firmwares.
Other/Any - Introductory and overview
Associate Software Engineer Accenture Digital
I am working as an associate software engineer in Accenture Digital. Former microsoft student partner and Mozilla Firefox student ambassador.
Azure-The Real Ninja's of the .Net Core 3.1: Additional Sessions 1 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm
In this talk, I plan to provide a in depth concepts of azure and . Net core. Let's understand why we need Azure as a .Net Developer. The most important things yet to cover in this session is Advanced Azure concept like Azure Kubernetes and Azure Data storage.
Azure - Introductory and overview
Developer Betterer
Jeremy Clark makes developers better. By drawing on over 15 years of experience in application development, he helps developers take a step up in their skill set with a focus on making complex topics approachable regardless of skill level. He is a Microsoft MVP for .NET, and he has authored seven courses for Pluralsight, including "C# Interfaces", a course aimed at giving developers a clear understanding of abstraction. He loves speaking and has delivered over 300 technical presentations in the last 10 years in the United States and Europe. Jeremy lives in northern Washington with his lovely wife, 3 cats, 2 dogs, and a banjo.
All Systems Functional: Understanding Delegates in .NET: Themed Tech Sessions - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Delegates are the gateway to functional programming. So lets understand delegates and how we can change the way we program by using functions as parameters, variables, and properties. In addition, we'll see how the built in delegate types, Func and Action, are waiting to make our lives easier. With the help of a few commanders from your favorite TV shows (or maybe some you've never heard of), we'll see how delegates can add elegance, extensibility, and safety to our programming.
Microsoft - Introductory and overview - Commanders from TV shows
Anti-matter Injectors Online: Getting a Grip on Dependency Injection: Themed Tech Sessions - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Many of our modern frameworks have Dependency Injection (DI) built in. But how do you use that effectively? We need to look at what DI is and why we want to use it. With the help of some commanders from TV shows you love (or maybe haven't heard of), we'll use DI patterns such as constructor injection and property injection to break tight coupling. We'll see how loosely-coupled applications are easier to extend and test. With a better understanding of the basic patterns, we'll remove the magic behind DI containers so that we can use the tools appropriately in our code.
Other/Any - Introductory and overview - Commanders from TV shows
Task, Await, and Outer Space Commanders in C#:
Themed Tech Sessions - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pmThere's a lot of confusion about Task and await in C#. So let's start with the basics and look at how we can consume asynchronous methods using Task and then see how the "await" operator can makes things easier for us. With the help of some commanders from TV shows you love (or maybe have never heard of), we’ll look at continuations, cancellation, and exception handling.
Microsoft - Introductory and overview - Commanders from TV shows
Principal at Cole Consulting
Mike Cole is a developer currently focusing on .NET working remotely from Cedar Falls, IA. He's been around the proverbial block in the IT profession and has a wide array of experience in many fields. He is incredibly lazy and is always looking for easier and more streamlined ways to solve everyday problems. His passions in life include his family, sarcastic memes, the outdoors, and always having the last word.
GitHub Pages: An Often Overlooked Web Platform: Additional Sessions 2 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
GitHub Pages is a highly scalable web host with world class infrastructure, free SSL, and robust workflow tools. And it’s FREE. In this session Mike will explain how to determine if your project is a good fit for GitHub Pages and leave you with enough information to be able to implement from top to bottom. We'll go into the basics of setting up a new site and will cover some built-in functions to add a little dynamicity to your static site. He will show you how to set up a local development environment for you Windows developers out there, several scenarios dealing with different types of publishable content, and we'll look at a few third party services to complement your available toolset.
Other/Any - Intermediate
#RemoteLife When You Can’t Just Beam Into The Office: Themed Business Room - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
In this talk, Mike will present tips and techniques that he has learned over several years working remotely. We’ll cover what you can do when you have issues staying motivated because you are isolated physically from the rest of your team. We’ll review a few different kinds of communication breakdowns and what you can do if you feel like a second rate employee of the company. We’ll also look at ways to foster a good remote relationship with your manager and co-workers.
Working remotely is culturally becoming a viable option more and more as time passes, increasing by 140% since 2005. There are great opportunities available to people that may feel stuck or restricted geographically. This presentation is aimed at giving you a headstart or boost in your remote life.
Other/Any - Intermediate
Senior Software Developer at Aviture
Arthur (or Art, take your pick) has been a software engineer for 16 years and has worked on things as exciting as analysis software for casinos and things as boring as banking websites. He is an advocate for talking openly about mental health and psychology in the technical world, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how we program and why we program, and about the tools, structures, cultures, and mental processes that help and hinder us from our ultimate goal of writing amazing things. His hair is brown and his thorax is a shiny blue color.
Communicate Like a Captain: Star Trek and the Psychology of Communication: Themed Business Room - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Do you ever feel like your coworkers are speaking a different language and you've misplaced your translator? It turns out that communicating with others can be hard sometimes - you have distinct and unique individuals attempting to take what's inside their head and put it outside so that everyone else can understand it. Worse yet, they can disagree with you. If you're not a Betazoid, how do you handle all of that?
Together, let's examine our favorite Star Trek captains and commanders, comparing and contrasting the strengths of each of their communication techniques (with a surprise appearance by Amelia Bedelia). Along the way you’ll learn what communication contexts are and how to use them effectively, you’ll learn about false cognates and shibboleths, you'll learn ways to work through conflict, and you might even learn some things about listening. Boldly stride into your next conversation with confidence!
Other/Any - Introductory and overview - Star Trek
Owning Your Experience: Talking about Mental Health In the Workplace: Additional Sessions 2 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Your thoughts and your emotions affect your work, no matter how much you pretend that you can leave them at the door of your workplace. It's easy to deny your own experience the importance it deserves, especially if it's only inside your own head. But boxing it all away because you have "work to do" is like trying to run a marathon while carrying a Labrador Retriever.
It doesn't have to be that way. This talk will teach you how to frame your world using experiential language rather than clinical language, giving you a powerful tool to discuss your mental health in a way that can be easily felt and understood - and that won't get you in trouble with HR. That sharing becomes the key that unlocks the true power of your team... so come find out how to finally bring your whole self to work!
Mental Health - Introductory and overview
Microsoft MVP, Senior Consultant at Inmeta
Devlin Duldulao is a Filipino full-stack cloud engineer based in Norway. He is a Microsoft MVP, an Auth0 Ambassador, a trainer, an international conference speaker, and a senior consultant at Inmeta. He loves going to universities and user groups to share his expertise.
Automating your infrastructure deployments in Azure, AWS, and GCP using Terraform: Additional Sessions 1 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Terraform is an amazing toolset for automating infrastructure in the public and private cloud. This course will teach you the fundamentals of Terraform to deploy infrastructure in a consistent, repeatable manner across multiple services.
Systems Administrators and DevOps Engineers have always been charged to do more with less. Defining infrastructure in code and automating its deployment helps improve operational efficiency and lower administrative overhead. In this session, you'll learn foundational knowledge of Hashicorp's Terraform software, a toolset for infrastructure automation. First, you'll discover how open source tools, such as Terraform can be leveraged to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Finally, you'll learn how to automate your infrastructure deployments in the Cloud with Terraform
Other/Any - Introductory and overview
Microsoft MVP, Data Science Adventurer, Polyglot Programmer
Sarah has been in the technical realm since the late 90s. She has served in many roles – including technical support, manager, desktop support, server administrator, database administrator, developer, instructor, and mentor. Throughout her career, Sarah has found her place in the technical community – as an organizer, speaker, facilitator, author, editor, reviewer, blogger, and advocate. Due to her community involvement, Microsoft has awarded her the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award – 2009-2020 in Visual C# / .NET / Developer Technologies. Sarah loves sharing her passion for tech with the community whenever she can!
Data Adventures with Azure Notebooks: Additional Sessions 1 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Is there a relation between buy and sell values on the Animal Crossing marketplace? Does ramen style - cup, bowl, can, or bar - matter when it comes to ratings? We have the data, and we can present our findings with Azure Notebooks! Come on our data adventure and learn more about this great tool!
Azure - Introductory and overview
Training Our Padawans - Mentoring as a Jedi: Themed Business Room - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
While it is one thing to learn from videos or blog posts, it is a different experience when you have someone to turn to that can answer the questions you have when you have them. It makes a world of difference to be able to ask someone “What do they mean when they say ‘inheritance vs. interfaces’?” When you have someone who forces you to think about what it is you want in life and what steps you may need to take to get there… someone who can make introductions and offer direction… it makes your career and life a little less scary and a lot more manageable. In this session, we will look at some practices that are used by great mentors in the field and learn lessons on how we can be great role models and mentors for our future – junior developers!
Business Leadership - Introductory and overview - Star Wars
Industrial IoT Consultant, codecentric AG & VP of Apache PLC4X
Full blooded Apache and Open-Source enthusiast. Invests all of his work and private time in multiple Apache Projects. Deeply interested in the IoT Area he is currently VP of the Apache PLC4X project and deeply involved in Apache Edgent (incubator) as well as mentor to the Apache IoTDB (incubating) podling.
Episode IV - A New Hope: Industry 4.0 done our way: Themed Tech Sessions - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm
It is a period of technological change. Rebel Industry 4.0 open-source software solutions, striking from hidden bases, have won their first victories against the evil proprietary Industrial Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to implement industrial protocols to the Empire’s ultimate weapons, the industrial Programmable Logic Controllers, almost unprotected pieces of hardware with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, a representative of the project races through cyberspace aboard his GitHub account, custodian of his plans to revolutionize the way we are building Industry 4.0 applications, that can free all companies and restore freedom to the industry …
Learn how the Apache PLC4X project has evolved and what we have planned for the future and especially how it can currently help close the gap between industrial hardware and modern software solutions to build the next generation of industrial IoT solutions, based entirely on open-source software.
Java - Introductory and overview - Star Wars
Instructor at Tech Elevator
Matt is committed to helping people (and their code) achieve greater things. After nearly two decades of working as a professional software engineer, Matt put away his mechanical keyboard and made teaching others his primary job in a continuing quest to invest in the community and up-and-coming developers. Matt has been working with code since 1987 yet constantly discovers new things to learn. Matt focuses on building quality software applications using C#, F#, TypeScript, Angular, Vue, and plain-old JavaScript. When he's not teaching or coding, Matt writes on software engineering at KillAllDefects.com, builds highly unusual side projects, goes on refactoring frenzies, and enjoys learning new things to share with the community at large.
Lessons Learned from Getting Stunned: Themed Business Room - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
In this session Matt will share his story of surviving a paralyzing condition known as Guillain Barre Syndrome and the lessons he learned on getting through tough things and handling life when everything goes on hold.
We'll start with a brief overview of Guillain Barre Syndrome (GBS) and the typical onset and recovery process of this and then move on into lessons learned from handling life one day at a time.
There are a surprising number of parallels between suddenly being paralyzed and those of us who have encountered sudden shifts to self-isolation, remote work, and potentially even unemployment or furlough.
This session will be partially educational about a rare disease, but will shift into more relevant and applicable content about the "new normal" many of us will find ourselves in at one point or another and tips for handling stress, emotions, and that desire to accomplish things and contribute when life suddenly changes.
Mental Health/Physical Health - Introductory and Overview - Star Trek
Using Scientist .NET to Safely Upgrade the Warp Core: Themed Tech Sessions - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Our starship is in trouble. The warp core that engineering built a decade ago is now awash in technical debt and legacy code and in urgent need of replacement.
Thankfully, our science officer has heard of a library that will let us replace the warp core without risking anti-matter explosions destroying the entire starship.
While Scientist is available in many languages, we'll walk through code samples in C# using Scientist .NET as we explore the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating Scientist into your workflow.
You'll leave with enough information to get started with Scientist and the knowledge of whether or not it makes sense to do so given your project.
With science at your disposal, you'll get that promotion to first officer in no time.
Microsoft/Processes - Introductory and overview - Star Trek
Developer Advocate @ Hazelcast
Nicolas Fränkel is a Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Currently working for Hazelcast. Also double as a teacher in universities and higher education schools, a trainer and triples as a book author.
3 easy performance improvements in your microservices architecture: Additional Sessions 2 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
While a microservices architecture is more scalable than a monolith, it has a direct hit on performance.
To cope with that, one performance improvement is to set up a cache. It can be configured for database access, for REST calls or just to store session state across a cluster of server nodes. In this demo-based talk, I'll show how Hazelcast In-Memory Data Grid can help you in each one of those areas and how to configure it. Hint: it's much easier than one would expect.
Java - Introductory and overview
A Change-Data-Capture use-case: designing an evergreen cache: Additional Sessions 2 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
When one’s app is challenged with poor performances, it’s easy to set up a cache in front of one’s SQL database. It doesn’t fix the root cause (e.g. bad schema design, bad SQL query, etc.) but it gets the job done. If the app is the only component that writes to the underlying database, it’s a no-brainer to update the cache accordingly, so the cache is always up-to-date with the data in the database.
Things start to go sour when the app is not the only component writing to the DB. Among other sources of writes, there are batches, other apps (shared databases exist unfortunately), etc. One might think about a couple of ways to keep data in sync i.e. polling the DB every now and then, DB triggers, etc. Unfortunately, they all have issues that make them unreliable and/or fragile.
You might have read about Change-Data-Capture before. It’s been described by Martin Kleppmann as turning the database inside out: it means the DB can send change events (SELECT, DELETE and UPDATE) that one can register to. Just opposite to Event Sourcing that aggregates events to produce state, CDC is about getting events out of states. Once CDC is implemented, one can subscribe to its events and update the cache accordingly. However, CDC is quite in its early stage, and implementations are quite specific.
In this talk, I’ll describe an easy-to-setup architecture that leverages CDC to have an evergreen cache.
Java - Intermediate
Introduction to stream processing: Additional Sessions 1 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm
While “software is eating the world”, those who are able to best manage the huge mass of data will emerge out on the top.
The batch processing model has been faithfully serving us for decades. However, it might have reached the end of its usefulness for all but some very specific use-cases. As the pace of businesses increases, most of the time, decision makers prefer slightly wrong data sooner, than 100% accurate data later. Stream processing - or data streaming - exactly matches this usage: instead of managing the entire bulk of data, manage pieces of them as soon as they become available.
In this talk, I’ll define the context in which the old batch processing model was born, the reasons that are behind the new stream processing one, how they compare, what are their pros and cons, and a list of existing technologies implementing the latter with their most prominent characteristics. I’ll conclude by describing in detail one possible use-case of data streaming that is not possible with batches: display in (near) real-time all trains in Switzerland and their position on a map. I’ll go through the all the requirements and the design. Finally, using an OpenData endpoint and the Hazelcast platform, I’ll try to impress attendees with a working demo implementation of it.
Java/Cloud/Processes - Introductor and overview
Centric IT Solutions, Software Developer
Coding and teaching represent my passion, learning is my hobby, having an impact in technology is my goal.
I am a software developer and technology passionate, I enjoy building and delivering quality, all the while trying to have fun as much as possible.
GRAPHQL vs. BFF: A Critical Perspective: Additional Sessions 2 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm
Imagine an application that has a web and a mobile, IOS and Android, or that your API is consumed by similar frontends from totally different teams. The functionalities they provide are distinct, hence the need for distinct sets of data and functions. You might think that the solution for this is having an “as generic as possible” backend for all UI’s. From my experience, this kind of backend leads to big issues in matters of performance, entangled user experience as well as extra and unnecessary communication for the development teams in order to align and meet their needs. Fortunately, there is a promising set of approaches taking the stage as they are created with the intention to optimize how front-end applications collaborate with back-ends: BFF (Backend-For-Frontend) pattern and GraphQL. Given these two approaches, which one is the right to consider? Join me in a talk where we will discuss the two approaches, underline both their good and bad sides, and determine which you should consider as the backend technology for your frontend application.
Angular/Vue/React/Javascript - Intermediate
Director, Technology at Quicken Loans, Organizer of Desert Code Camp, Microsoft .NET MVP
Joe Guadagno is a Director of Engineering at Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, which is based in Detroit, Michigan. He has been writing software for over 20 years and has been an active member of the .NET community, serving as a Microsoft MVP in .NET for over 10 years. At Quicken Loans, I lead 3 software development teams building and modernizing our internal services. He has spoken through the United States and at international events on topics ranging from Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Azure, Ionic, Bootstrap, and many others. You can see the complete list at https://www.josephguadagno.net/presentations. When not sitting at a computer Joe loves to hang out with his family and play games. When not playing games with the family, Joe is checking out the latest in Home Automation. You can connect with Joe on twitter at @jguadagno, Facebook at JosephGuadagnoNet, and on his blog at https://www.josephguadagno.net.
Build Native Applications with JavaScript and React Native: Additional Sessions 1 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.
With React Native, you don’t build a “mobile web app”, an “HTML5 app”, or a “hybrid app”. You build a real mobile app that’s indistinguishable from an app built using Objective-C or Java. React Native uses the same fundamental UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps. You just put those building blocks together using JavaScript and React.
Angular/Vue/React/Javascript - Introductory and overview
Debugging Tips and Tricks with Visual Studio: Additional Sessions 1 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Debugging an issue with an application is hard! In this session, we’ll walk through all of the powerful debugging features that Visual Studio provides. We’ll cover how to use breakpoints. Introduce data tips. Show you how you can share your debugging information. Work with the different debugging windows like Locals, Autos, and Watch. Then we’ll look at ways we can follow or step through the code to find issues using the call stack and Intellitrace.
Microsoft - Introductory and overview
Typescript for the Microsoft Developer: Additional Sessions 1 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Whether you like it or not, if you are building applications for the Web you are going to need to know JavaScript. Sorry, Flash and Silverlight! Unfortunately, JavaScript is not the easiest language to learn or to understand and the tooling for it is not really good. This is where TypeScript comes in. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that tries to solve a lot of these problems and make the code more structured, and less error-prone. And it also offers tooling support in a way that JavaScript just can’t.
Angular/Vue/React/Javascript - Introductory and overview
Technical Accessibility Specialist
Courtney is a Technical Accessibility Specialist for Gallup, a company that provides analytics and advice for everything that matters, in Omaha, Nebraska. Courtney's passion for the web all started with teaching her 11-year-old self how to write CSS on a dial-up internet connection on a farm in rural Iowa. Since then she has been in a myriad of positions including a Flash developer, a designer, a full stack developer, and a project manager. Her passion is making a web that is usable and accessible to all. When she's not playing with new technology, you can find her creating new recipes in her kitchen or working on her farm.
The Dark Side of UX: Themed Tech Sessions - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm
User experience design brings clarity and removes obstacles. It rewards - makes us feel accomplished and like a successful, happy droid. Users are confident when using a well-designed application - as easy as turning on a light switch: [Buy]
But has the dark side of the force ever tricked you in to buying something?
We will explore the wild universe of user manipulation and Jedi mind tricks. The Bait and Switch. Trick Questions. Misdirection. Confirm-shaming! Discover the latest ways UX experts trick their users, how easy it is to do by accident and how it affects your brand.
[ Sounds great ] [ These are not the droids you are looking for ]
Other/Any - Introductory and overview - Star Wars
Co-founder, UaceIt | Sophomore, Computer Science
I am an inquisitive person who seeks the why of everything. I love researching new technologies and developing solutions around them. I want every girl in this world to know that her voice can change the world. To do so, I've lead two projects with unique solutions to empower women and make them self-reliant. With UAceIt, I hope to bring many more like-minded individuals together and bring about positive change in society.
The Powerful Women of Sci-Fi: Themed Business Room - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm
Science fiction has long been accused of being a male-dominated universe. The off-screen world has changed dramatically over the years, but change appears to have come at a much slower pace on-screen, with female characters often restricted to being damsels in distress or space babes.
Nonetheless, a number of brilliant female characters have made their mark on sci-fi audiences over the years, particularly on the small screen. More recently, as sci-fi fandom has made a home for itself online, its female contingent has become increasingly vocal and empowered, reclaiming heroes from the past and identifying icons for the future.
This talk focuses on 10 powerful women of Sci-Fi:
Other/Any - Introductory and overview - Star Trek, Dr. Who, Aliens, Terminator, X File, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Hunger Games
Want to become a better leader? Learn from these sci-fi characters!: Themed Business Room - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm
One of the most appealing joys of science fiction is how it can give a fresh set of eyes to the regular day-to-day. By placing its protagonists in bizarre situations, we recognize our own lives, with a twist. But strong sci-fi characters don’t just provide a more entertaining version of reality. They actually help us recognize how much better our lives could become.
This talk focuses on the leadership style of five sci-fi characters:
Business Leadership - Introductory and overview - Ender's Game, Authority, Dawn, V for Vendetta, A Song of Ice and Fire
Sr. Software Engineer
Jen Luker is a Senior Software Engineer at Gremlin, Inc., and a BookBytes podcast co-host. When she's not advocating for better accessibility practices, optimizing webpack builds, or building new dev tooling, her spare time is spent spinning yarn from raw wool and knitting; she's even been known to 3D print her own tools for the job.
'Forbidden Planet' Cured my Imposter Syndrome: Themed Business Room - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Come with me on an adventure with a heroic robot, a mad scientist, a feminist, a pilot, and our monster: imposter syndrome. Let me share how a sci-fi movie from 1956, starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, taught me how to recognize imposter syndrome not as the monster hellbent on ruining my romance with an ever-evolving frontend ecosystem, but as a tool to prevent burnout.
Mental Health - Introductory and overview - Forbidden Planet
CTO at operationspark.org
George is a software developer, speaker, teacher, writer, and comedian with an interest in the various techniques that can make software simple, extensible, and communicative. He has worked in software consulting in all sorts of positions for over a decade, currently CTO at the Operation Spark code school in New Orleans. He mentors with Operation Code (unrelated), writes, teaches, and speaks regularly on Javascript, C#, testing, interviewing, etc at conferences, usergroups, and to his cat (singular - the other one won’t listen).
Org-Mode and Farscape: Two things totally worth your time: Themed Tech Sessions - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Org-Mode is a fascinating agenda manager, todo system, markup language, notebook programming environment, and static site generator which is worth learning a little Emacs for. Farscape is a show from the late 90s that Guardians of the Galaxy director, James Gunn, once said was among the greatest influences on his films. You just gotta try both.
Other/Any - Intermediate - Farscape
Solution Architect at BizStream
Brian McKeiver is Co-Owner & Solutions Architect at BizStream, a software development company in Allendale, MI. He has over 17 years of experience leading his agency of more than 30 employees, about a hundred clients spread out across North America, and one heck of an interesting story of how it all started from a two-person team. In addition to his expertise in web development, integration, and digital marketing, Brian is active with the tech community via his blog at Mcbeev.com.
Feature Flag Football with Azure App Configuration: Additional Sessions 2 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Utilizing Feature Flags is a powerful technique for allowing developers to modify system behavior without changing any code. .Net Core recently introduced a new Feature Management Library that makes implementing feature flags a breeze. Ultimately, flags standardize feature management in your system.
Azure App Configuration is also a recent Azure offering for configuring a host of variables in your .Net Core application. It offers a central place to manage configuration values that can change the features of your application with a simple flick of a switch. The service also allows updating these configurations at runtime without needing to restart or redeploy an app service.
Imagine these two items being used in conjunction to create a solution where automation rules, deployment risk is reduced, and new features can be introduced into your application very rapidly, but more importantly, very safely. It would be like if the New England Patriots wanted to try out a new offense against the lowly Detroit Lions for one week, while not worrying about de-railing their annual trip to the Super Bowl.
Azure - Introductory and overview
.NET Contractor and Consultant
I've been working as a .NET developer for over 13 years now in a variety of industries including government, retail and manufacturing. But as a coder, I've been playing with making computers do whatever my crazed imagination could devise since I was old enough to read my Dad's copy of the ZX Spectrum BASIC coders manual.
I've been speaking about Functional C# at various user groups and conferences around the UK, USA, and India, and am particularly interested in seeing just how far we can push the capabilities of C#.
When I'm not coding, or running after my two small children, I have been known to enjoy the classic series of Doctor Who, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, Cryptic Crosswords, and rather more coffee than is probably good for me.
Functional Programming in JavaScript: Additional Sessions 2 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Functional Programming is becoming increasingly popular and relevant with each year that goes by. With so much discussion around languages such as F#, Haskell and Erlang, it can seem as though getting started with Functional programming would mean first learning a whole new syntax...but what if it didn't?
Using just a few JavaScript libraries, such as RamdaJS, developers can implement some of the most powerful patterns and techniques from the world of functional programming?
This talk will demonstrate how, using ES6 and a few extra libraries, we can write Functional code that is:
More robust
Easier to read
Easier to maintain
This talk might be of interest to anyone looking into moving to a new platform, or in improving the scalability of an existing application, or even just interested in seeing what Functional Programming is all about, but all within the comfort of a familiar language.
We might even attempt the impossible, and explain what a Monad is!
Angular/Vue/React/Javascript - Intermediate
Hacking C#: Development for the Truly Lazy: Additional Sessions 2 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
I don't know about you, but I'm a lazy developer. What do I mean by lazy? I don't mean I don't want to do my work - far from it - I mean that I hate to write out a great deal of code to get the job done. I want to accomplish my goals with as little effort as possible.
One of my pet hates is writing enhancements that involve copying and pasting blocks of code, changing a variable name, then leaving everything else the same. I hate having to consider each and every possible null reference exception, and adding in a whole ton of boilerplate to handle it. I hate having to spent ages jumping back and forth in a legacy codebase, trying to understand what it actually does!
What's the alternative? In this talk, I'll demonstrate a way of working that avoids all this unneccesary work, and gives you more time to do something more productive.
We'll look at:
Microsoft - Intermediate
Pride & Prejudice & C#: Additional Sessions 2 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Who doesn't like Jane Austen? She's kick-arse and awesome. The only problem though, is that she didn't write a great deal. Just 6 (ish) books? Not enough! In this talk I'm going to show how, with a bit of C#, some relatively simple maths, and a bit of Blue-Peter-Style creativity, we can automatically generate as much Jane Austen as anyone in their right mind would ever want. I might even show you how this is useful in your day job as well!
Microsoft - Intermediate - Jane Austen
Developer Advocate at Redis Labs
Guy works for Redis Labs as a Developer Advocate. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for sharing what he has learned, Guy goes out into developer communities and helps others build great software.
Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He is President of the Columbus JavaScript Users Group, an organizer for the Columbus Machine Learners, and has even has helped teach programming at a prison in central Ohio.
In his personal life, Guy is a hard-boiled geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and technology. He also has a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics. In his spare time, he volunteers for his local Cub Scout Pack, goes camping, and studies history and linguistics.
Guy lives in Ohio with his wife, his three teenage sons, and an entire wall of games.
Dungeons, Dragons, and Graph Databases: Themed Tech Sessions - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Are you an adventurer? Do you want gold? Experience? Levels? Of course you do! And where do you get these things? The dungeon, where else? That wonderful container of all things adventurous! But, unfortunately, dungeons aren't setup for the convenience of adventurers who wish to extract these fine things. It’s almost as if the dungeon master just made the dungeon up at random. And so you wander about and you get what you get.
But you’re also a developer. You could build a database of all the rooms with their shiny and monstrous content. Then you could query it and find the optimal route to get the gold and the experience and the levels. But how would you model this data and write these queries? The rooms. The corridors. The monsters. The sparkling hoozits. That’s a lot of entities to relate to each other. And that’s gonna be a monster of a SQL query. Whoa–look at that JOIN! Better get my text editor ready.
Or, you could use a graph database. A graph database allows you to model these relationships simply and intuitively with nodes and edges. Being schema-free, you can evolve your graph as you encounter new things such as traps or secret doors. And, using the Cypher query language, you can write elegant and easy to understand queries that find the best routes to get the stuff adventures desire most.
In this talk, I’ll use the aforementioned example to introduce you to the concepts of graph databases. I’ll compare how to solve this problem with a relational database and how a graph database makes it easier. I’ll show you how to query and modify your graph. And, as no talk would be complete without a live demo, I’ll do it all using a real-time procedurally generated random dungeon (I am a dungeon master after all).
So come, have a flagon of mead as you learn about graph databases, optimize your dungeon crawl, and equip another weapon in your quest for better software!
Other/Any/Tools - Introductory and overview - Dungeons and Dragons
Understanding Probabilistic Data Structures with 112,092 UFO Sightings: Themed Tech Sessions - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 3:00pm - 4:00pm
There are three reactions to the title of this talk:
This is a talk about the first bullet point with the second thrown in just for fun. I like weird stuff—UFOs, Bigfoot, peanut butter and bologna on toast—maybe you do too? As far as the third bullet point, well, that’s how many sightings I have.
Now, if you’re like most developers, you probably have no idea what probabilistic data structures are. In fact, I did a super-scientific poll on Twitter and found that out of 119 participants, 58% had never heard of them and 22% had heard the term but nothing more. I wonder what percentage of that 22% heard the term for the first time in the poll. We’re a literal-minded lot at times.
Anyhow. That’s 4 out of 5 developers or, as I like to call it, the Trident dentist ratio. (It’s actually a manifestation of the Pareto principle but I’m a 70s kid). That’s a lot of folks that need to be educated. So, let’s do that.
A probabilistic data structure is, well, they’re sort of like the TARDIS—bigger on the inside—and JPEG compression—a bit lossy. And, like both, they are fast, accurate enough, and can take you to interesting places of adventure. That last one might not be something a JPEG does.
More technically speaking, most probabilistic data structures use hashes to give you faster and smaller data structures in exchange for precision. If you’ve got a mountain of data to process, this is super useful. In this talk, we’ll briefly go over some common probabilistic data structures; dive deep into a couple (Bloom Filter, MinHash, and Top-K); and show a running application that makes use of Top-K to analyze the most commonly used words in all 112,092 of my UFO sightings.
When we’re done, you’ll be ready to start using some of these structures in your own applications. And, if you use the UFO data, maybe you’ll discover that the truth really is out there.
Other/Any/Tools - Introductory and ovrview - UFOs
Developer. Tester. Advocate.
Dana Scheider is a member of the Cucumber core team. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, she currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she works as a Ruby on Rails developer for Envato. She is particularly interested in testing, behaviour-driven development, and improving processes within engineering organisations. In addition to her work as a developer, Dana is an outspoken advocate for mental health and LGBTQ inclusion in the workplace. An in-demand speaker, notable conference appearances include SwanseaCon, CukeUp! London, Full Stack Toronto, and RubyConf Colombia.
When You Can't Just Make it So: Managing Executive Function Disorders in the Workplace: Themed Business Room - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Executive function deficits are common among individuals with mental illness and those on the autism spectrum, as well as those who have suffered traumatic brain injuries. Yet even those who suffer from these poorly understood cognitive conditions are often unaware they exist. Consequently, sufferers and those around them often attribute their problems to laziness and other character flaws rather than to a medical condition. In this talk, I explain what executive dysfunction is, how it can affect individuals and teams, and how to help individuals suffering from this type of condition be happier and more productive at work.
Mental Health - Intermediate
UX Strategy Expert and Partner in Truematter
Founder and partner of truematter, a user experience strategy firm, Dean has been advocating for user-centered digital products since the advent of the commercial web. He oversees truematter’s UX practice, leading strategic engagements for innovative regional organizations as well as the Fortune 100.
Dean’s expertise and work includes researching, prototyping, and testing digital products with real users. He regularly speaks, writes, and teaches on user experience design & strategy, usability, user research, content strategy, and building UX-focused development teams. He also organizes UX Columbia.
It’s not all UX all the time (even though it’s close). Dean is also an avid ultra marathoner, trail race-director, reader, and traveler.
The Science, Psychology, and Secrets of Great UI: Additional Sessions 2 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Need to improve user experience, but don't know where to start? Worried that UI/UX can only be done by right-brained, artistic people? Take heart. Learn simple, yet powerful UX principles and UI tricks that will help you radically improve your digital products. These secrets are perfectly suited for logical, left-brain, development professionals. What’s more, you can put them into practice now. Esoteric mathematical equations included at no extra cost.
What You’ll Learn
Other/Any/Soft-Skills - Introductory and overview
What the Soviet Space Program Taught Me About Digital Product Development: Themed Business Room - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
The space race between the USA and USSR was one of the great dramatic stories of the 20th century. Our very industry was born as Washington and Moscow relentlessly competed to master the stars.
For space nuts like me, this fascinating time is utterly compelling. It’s also highly instructive for digital product developers. After all, engineers drove the innovation that pushed us beyond earth. The lessons they learned and processes they created can help us today as we make software, apps, and advanced functionality online.
Of course, the Soviet side of the story tends to be less understood. And that’s exactly what we’ll explore. It’s unbelievable stuff, and a cautionary tale for development teams.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
Other/Any - Introductory and overview - Space
Flying Code Ninja! - Microsoft MVP
Mitchel Sellers is globally known as a 10 time Microsoft MVP, an ASPInsider, a DNN MVP, is an MCP (Microsoft .NET, ASP.NET and SQL Server), and CEO of IowaComputerGurus Inc. Sellers has a deep understanding of software development and when speaking focuses on proper architecture standards, performance, stability, security, and overall cost effectiveness of delivered solutions. This message and his abilities resonate in the technical war room as well as the executive board room.
Mitchel is a prolific public speaker, presenting at user groups and conferences globally, such as DevUp and Code PaLOUsa. Sellers has been the author of multiple books in the software development space and is currently working on an ASP.NET Core book to be released in 2019.
When Mitchel is not working in technology, you will find him flying his airplane, teaching others how to fly, or spending time with his wife and 2 small children. He is also actively involved in the Open Source Community working diligently to further the movement.
But It was Logged! Practical Logging & Monitoring with .NET Core: Additional Sessions 1 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
.NET Core makes writing log entries a breeze within your applications, however, that is where the out-of-the-box simplicity ends. So you have decorated your code with all of these pretty log messages that are designed to make your life easier, but then what? Have you actually reviewed them? Something bad happened, did it tell you? What about confidential information, have you limited that from being logged?
Well, this session is designed to help take your logging from ***IMPLEMENTED*** to ***USABLE***. Logging is great, but we have so many questions to answer, including where you store the logs, how you get notifications etc. In this code-focused solution, we explore the following concepts, with detailed examples.
Microsoft/Processes/Tools - Intermediate
Effective Unit Testing with .NET Core & XUnit: Additional Sessions 1 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Documentation for .NET Core is great and includes detailed examples regarding Unit Testing. However, these examples often skip over the real-world issues that arise with unit testing. What happens when you use that one thing that Microsoft hasn't actually moved from an Extension Method? What happens if you want to mock a static object that we might use every day, such as DateTime or TimeSpan? In this session we take a dive into real-world unit testing strategies for .NET Core applications, focusing on quickly and easily achieving 100% unit test coverage.
Attendees will leave with a set of examples to help implement effective unit testing, quickly, upon returning to work.
Microsoft/Processes/Tools - Intermediate
Transitioning to .NET Core: It doesn't have to be painful: Additional Sessions 1 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
As more organizations are looking to transition to .NET Core from existing technologies it is important to understand the processes necessary to make the transition. Although a seemingly daunting task, it is something that can be managed with a bit of planning.
This session will dive into the pre-requisite work, as well as a process that can be followed to make the transition as smooth a possible. and will discuss real-world successes and pitfalls of the transition with a goal of making your transition smooth and painless.
Microsoft - Advanced
Engineering Coach at Help Scout
Anjuan Simmons is a technologist with a successful track record of delivering technology solutions from the user interface to the database. He is an energetic and informative speaker who presents at conferences, seminars, schools, and community centers around the world on topics including Agile software development, diversity, and leadership. Anjuan has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Texas A&M University.
Lending Privilege: Premium - 1:00pm-2:30pm, Wednesday, July 29
Diversity and inclusion have become hot topics in technology, but you may not know how you can make a difference. However, this talk will help you understand that, no matter your background, you have privilege and can lend it to underrepresented groups in tech.
Privilege is access to societal and economic benefits based on characteristics you possess. The most well understood forms of privilege are birth privileges like racial, gender, and physical privilege, but there are also selected privileges like religion, education, and career.
This session will teach attendees how to lend their privilege to their fellow technologists. They will learn the various types of privilege lending including credibility lending (where you provide visibility to someone without privilege), access lending (where you provide access to someone without privilege), and expertise lending (where you provide a voice to someone without privilege). These different types of privilege lending will be illustrated through well known examples and an explanation of how they can be applied to the technology industry.
Leadership Lessons from the Agile Manifesto: Themed Business Room - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Whether you’re a Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, or Project Manager for an engineering team, you probably weren’t handed an instruction manual when you were given your first team to lead. This talk will show you how to apply the principles in the Manifesto Agile Manifesto to become a better leader.
Business Leadership - Introductory and overview - Wonder Woman/Star Wars
Managing the Burnout Burndown: Additional Sessions 2 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
In addition to managing backlogs and burndown charts, technology leaders have to follow an ever-changing software landscape, manage team dynamics, and navigate office politics. It’s no surprise that this leads to burnout. This talk will provide tools to help manage stress and reduce burnout.
Developers are, almost by definition, highly capable and strongly driven individuals. These traits are indispensable to success in creating working code, but they are also the very traits that makes developers susceptible to burn out. People who can get things done often find themselves overwhelmed by their to-do lists.
This talk will combine the understanding from the trenches of Anjuan Simmons (who has been a developer and engineering manager for more than 20 years) with the academic understanding of his wife, Dr. Aneika Simmons. Together, they will provide a framework for reducing burnout and consistently keeping stress levels in a managed state.
Mental Health - Introductory and overview
Microsoft MVP and Managing Consultant at Excella
Alexander is a Microsoft MVP, and a Managing Consultant and .NET Xpert at Excella, based out of Washington DC. He is an international speaker, and have spoken at conferences such as NDC London, ProgNET, Big Data Europe, .NET Jetbrains Global Online Day, Beer City Code, Music City Tech, Code PaLOUsa, Code On The Beach and Philly.NET. He's the co-founder and organizer of The Virtual ML.NET Community Conference and the organizer of the .NET DC User Group. He is passionate about .NET and cloud architecture, and constantly attempts to push his knowledge on data science and machine learning. When not coding, you'll find him out running or enjoying a good IPA! Say hi on Twitter @alexslotte or tune into one of my live streams on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/alexslotte)!
Helm, Warp One, Engage - Set coordinates for ML.NET: Themed Tech Sessions - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
It’s no exaggeration to say that Machine Learning (ML) is quickly changing the way we live. Things we are accustomed to today are things we could only dream of 10 years ago. As ML is becoming more and more mainstream, you may be asking yourself how to get started.
Historically, many of the tools and libraries used to train a model have been found in the Python and R communities (e.g. Scikit Learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow), but what if you’re a .NET Developer?
This session will be introducing ML.NET! ML.NET is an open-source, cross-platform machine learning library, specifically built to enable .NET developers to train their own custom machine learning models in C# or F#.
In this session we’ll introduce some fundamental ML concepts and terms before transitioning into the world of ML.NET and building our first model from scratch.
Beware, there will be live coding!
Microsoft - Introductory and overview - Star Trek
Oops...how did I miss MLOps?: Additional Sessions 2 - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 11:00am - 12:00pm (60 minutes)
Automation has long been a corner stone of modern Software Engineering and has given rise to successful initiatives such as DevOps.
Automating the end-to-end lifecycle of a machine learning model, from training to deployment in production, is a lot more complex and requires careful consideration of multiple axis of change, such as data, code and configuration, but can yield fantastic results when done right.
MLOps, also known as Continuous Delivery for Machine Learning (CD4ML), has recently gotten a lot of traction and was mentioned by ThoughtWorks as a technique worth keeping a close eye on (https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques)
Join me in this session where we’ll walk through some of the common concepts related to MLOps, and look at tools and techniques to achieve this both on-premise and in the cloud.
Microsoft - Intermediate
Senior Consultant with Keyhole Software
Mat Warger is a senior software consultant with Keyhole Software in Kansas City. He enjoys learning new concepts and has leveraged this curiosity in positions ranging from startups to the enterprise over the past decade. He is a co-organizer of the JavaScript KC meetup group and organizer of GraphQL KC meetup group. He can be found chasing the latest and (sometimes) greatest in a wide range of languages and platforms, including React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and the cloud. Find him on twitter @mwarger.
Rise of the State Machines: Themed Tech Sessions - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Come with me if you want to live... without confusing state management! State machines enforce a simple set of rules for your application state - a single state is allowed at any given time and only certain transitions can be made between states. These explicit rules lead to more predictable code and fewer bugs. In this talk, we'll discover what state machines are and learn how they can be incorporated into modern applications. We'll also see how using state machines can help communicate meaning and encode business logic across teams (and beyond just developers). You'll leave with an understanding of how to effectively create and use state machines for your own applications while keeping the business logic clean and declarative. Terminate complexity with state machines!
Angular/Vue/React/Javascript - Introductory and overview - Tools - Terminator
Professional Software Consultant at Lean TECHniques
Scott is a software consultant at Lean TECHniques Inc. where he primarily does web development using ASP.NET Core and JavaScript. His second dev passion behind web development is building DevOps pipelines and automating everything automatable. He also co-organizes the Iowa .NET User Group (iadnug.org) in his spare time. You can find Scott on Twitter @scottsauber or on his blog at scottsauber.com.
10 opinions to prevent your .NET Core apps from turning to the Dark Side: Themed Tech Sessions - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
As an application adds more and more features, if you're not careful, it can quickly spiral into becoming the application no one on the team enjoys working on. This session is structured as a series of lightning talks on various topics to help you improve the maintainability of your .NET Core applications. We'll discuss libraries and best practices to help with folder structure, validation, ORM's, automated testing, code flow, DevOps, microservices, and more. By the end, you should be able to take a few ideas away that you can start implementing immediately when you get back to the office.
Microsoft - Introductory and overview - Star Wars
SQL Server DevOps: Additional Sessions 1 - Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
In this session, we'll start from the beginning and discuss the decisions you need to make when deciding how you want to build and deploy SQL Server schema changes. We'll talk about Migration vs Model based approaches and the pros and cons of both. We'll discuss common gotcha's and review the workflows I've gone through to get to a successful build and deploy pipeline up and running in no time (including a multi-tenant SQL Server database that got its start over 25 years ago).
Microsoft - Introductory and overview
Principal Systems Developer
Robert Boedigheimer works for Schwan's Home Service providing business solutions with web technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP, a Progress Developer Expert (Fiddler), an ASPInsider, a Pluralsight author, and a 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Robert regularly speaks at national and international events.
Tell Web Ads to Shut Their Pi-hole! Themed Tech Sessions - Fri, 31 Jul 2020, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Speed up your browsing and protect your privacy and security by setting up a Pi-hole! It is free small DNS server that is "a black hole for Internet advertisements" that runs on a Raspberry Pi. We'll talk briefly about the Raspberry Pi, then learn how to setup Pi-hole on your network for use with all of your devices. With a low cost Raspberry Pi and an hour of setup time, we now surf faster and more securely, with nearly 40% of our DNS queries blocked. Its amazing how much more enjoyable using the web can be, you'll cry when you have to surf without it.
Raspberry Pi - Prevent Ads while you surf!