7 Days of Learning & Fun

Sunday 16th July 2017

17:00
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OPENING REMARKS
Keynote by Heather White, Eli White (1 hour)

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Monday 17th July 2017

09:00 DIP YOUR TOES IN THE SEA OF SECURITY
Talk by James Titcumb (1 hour)

Security is an enormous topic, and it’s really complicated. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself vulnerable to any number of attacks which you don’t want to be on the receiving end of. This talk will give you a taste of the vast array of things there is to know about security in modern web applications. Whether you are writing anything beyond a basic website, or even a complex web application, this talk will give you insights to some of the things you need to be aware of.

2
FROM MONOLITHS TO SERVICES: PRUNING TECHNICAL DEBT
Talk by David Litvak Bruno (1 hour)

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10:15
1
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES RUNNING A WEB DEV SHOP
Talk by Julian Egelstaff (1 hour)

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2
ALGORITHM DEEP DIVE: IMPLEMENTING QUICKSORT
Talk by Nikita Makeyev (1 hour)

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11:30
2
STEPPING OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE: LEARNING TO TEACH
Talk by Heather White (1 hour)

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1
BEND TIME TO YOUR WILL WITH GIT
Talk by Chris Tankersley (1 hour)

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13:30
2
User Interface & User Experience: A Process & Strategy for Small Teams
Talk by Damon Sanchez (1 hour)

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WEB COMPONENTS: LEGO BRICKS OF THE WEB
Talk by Abraham Williams, Pearl Latteier (1 hour)

Are you writing the same login form over and over again? Web components offer a modular approach to creating reusable UI widgets. Ditch large, complex frameworks and drop these lightweight building blocks into your site. We will show you how to build custom elements and introduce you to the existing elements and tools available from Google’s Polymer Project.

14:45 A JOURNEY TOWARD CLEAN CODE AND ENJOYMENT
Talk by Chris Holland (1 hour)

The Video is 51 minutes While this presentation touches on PHP a fair bit, it does make parallels to other ecosystems such as Java and C#/.Net, building toward an approach for building Web Applications in a Test-Driven way. Most concepts covered in this talk are applicable to just about all programming languages and platforms for building Web Applications. Here's the Abstract I had submitted to the conference: Have you ever jumped into a legacy PHP Software project and gotten to a point where it takes a near-infinite amount of time to deliver any new feature, for fear of breaking legacy functionality you’ve barely begun to understand? Software Engineering can be extremely difficult and maddening. But it doesn’t have to be. With a brief look at PHP’s evolution toward OOP, we will explore leveraging TDD and OOP principles to make Software Engineering fun again.

RAPID REACT NATIVE MOBILE
Talk by Gant Laborde (1 hour)

React Native awesomeness! https://www.codercruise.com/sessions/rapid-react-native-mobile/ If you’re a web developer or interested mobile dev, you can use Facebook’s React Native to get up and running on mobile dev. No, you don’t need to learn the intricacies of Android or Objective-C, you can use good old-fashioned JavaScript to make native apps that work across multiple platforms. Join me as I give you the intro you need to get started building your dream application today.

16:00
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EFFECTIVE REDIS
Talk by Matthew Turland (1 hour)

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THE RED TEAM IS COMING!
Talk by Adam Englander (1 hour)

The Red Team, hackers, criminal organizations, and nation states, are a constant threat. The systems we build are the targets. We need to understand the human collateral that hangs in the balance. We embrace methodologies to write better code and make our lives better. They do nothing for the rest of humanity that is directly affected by security vulnerabilities we introduce. In this presentation, I will put a human face on the users of our software. I will challenge you to think in terms of flesh and blood rather than ones and zeros. We are all the Blue Team. We protect the rest of humanity. Join me in the fight. The Red Team is coming!

Tuesday 18th July 2017

09:00 DEVELOPING APPLICATIONS FOR PERFORMANCE
Talk by Leon Fayer (1 hour)

Scalability != performance. In fact, having to scale your architecture significantly with growth may be a symptom of a poor application performance. Yet, with the rise of cloud and the abundance of automation and container tools that simplify scalability aspect of your system, performance considerations are often pushed to the back row. Building systems for high performance is not easy. It requires a lot of considerations - from technology selection to design decisions. And "the cloud" does not magically solve those problems for you. In this talk I'll discuss common performance pitfalls across the stack and talk about useful techniques and examples that every application could benefit from.

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HOUR OF CODE: MINECRAFT ADVENTURER
Workshop by Eli White (1 hour)

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10:15
1
NOSTALIGIC ABOUT THE FUTURE
Talk by Julian Egelstaff (1 hour)

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11:30
2
SILENCE IS DEADLY
Talk by Amanda Folson (1 hour)

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13:30 GET STARTED WITH RABBITMQ
Talk by James Titcumb (1 hour)

As your application grows, you soon realize you need to break up your application into smaller chunks that communicate with each other. In this talk, we will take a look at the techniques you can use to vastly enhance inter-application communication, learn about the core concepts of RabbitMQ, cover how you can scale different parts of your application separately, and modernize your development using a message-oriented architecture.

1
WHAT MAKES A GREAT DEVELOPER?
Talk by Matthew Turland (1 hour)

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14:45
2
I BEAT DEVELOPER ISOLATION BY TALKING TO A DUCK
Talk by Korvin Szanto (1 hour)

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1
DAT REMOTE LIFE
Talk by Chris Tankersley (1 hour)

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16:00 GETTING STARTED WITH THE TWITTER API
Talk by Abraham Williams, Pearl Latteier (1 hour)

Learn from the author of TwitterOAuth how to quickly integrate your application with the Twitter API. We will show you how to speed up onboarding with “Sign in with Twitter” authentication, bootstrap profiles with Twitter identities, and increase reach with quick publishing to user timelines. We’ll go over some basic do’s and don’ts of the Twitter API and show how easy it is to integrate using the TwitterOAuth open source library.

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“TEN PRINCIPLES FOR GOOD DESIGN” IN DEVELOPMENT
Talk by Jason Charnes (1 hour)

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Saturday 22nd July 2017

09:30
0
GIVE ME A REST!
Talk by Amanda Folson (1 hour)

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1
NOT-SO-COMMON TABLE EXPRESSIONS FOR DEVELOPERS
Talk by Brian Dunavant (1 hour)

As applications get more complex, so does their interaction with the database. In this talk, we will walk through SQL’s Common Table Expressions and how these can improve application code. By using CTEs a developer can reduce transaction handling complexity while at the same time boosting performance, and readability which can reduce development time. For this talk we’ll use PostgreSQL, but most techniques work with any modern RDBMS.

10:45
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YOUR VIEWS KNOW TOO MUCH
Talk by Jason Charnes (1 hour)

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GET THE POWER OF NATIVE WITH PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS
Talk by Abraham Williams, Pearl Latteier (1 hour)

As developers, we want to create apps that engage users across multiple devices. But building native apps is costly and cumbersome. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) combine the power of native apps with the ease of building and deploying web apps. Learn to craft PWA experiences using new web standards, including service workers, push notifications, and home screen access.

12:00 BECOME A FRONTEND PERFORMANCE MASTER
Talk by Sven Anders Robbestad (1 hour)

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1
USER ADOPTION, USER DEFINITION AND USER INTERFACE DESIGN
Talk by Damon Sanchez (1 hour)

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14:00
1
FAMILY TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP
Workshop by Josh Holmes, Chris Tankersley, Eli White (1 hour, 30 minutes)

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15:30
3
SYNTAX IS NOT PROGRAMMING
Talk by Marcus Fulbright (1 hour)

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LOST ART OF TROUBLESHOOTING
Talk by Leon Fayer (1 hour)

There are a lot of great things about the cloud, but the "destroy and rebuild" philosophy which is really good for building a continuous delivery pipeline, really sucks when applied to troubleshooting production problems. When your application goes haywire, the most valuable engineering skill is not the the ability to bring up a copy of your system or even the knowledge of a your technology stack (although it doesn't hurt). It is the skill of understanding and solving problems. Finding the root cause of the issue and mitigating it with minimal disruption in production is a must-have skill for engineers responsible for managing and maintaining production systems, which nowadays includes ops, dbas and devs alike. In this talk I will discuss the skills required to troubleshoot complex systems, traits that prevent engineers from being successful at troubleshooting and discuss some techniques and tips and trick for troubleshooting complex systems in production.

16:45
4
CLOSING KEYNOTE: AI FOR EVERYONE
Keynote by Josh Holmes (1 hour)

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