Northern Ireland Developer Conference 2018
9 Jun 2018 at Riddell Hall, Queens University Belfast

Introduction, safety and sponsor shout-outs.

Gatsby is a blazing fast static site generator based on ReactJS. The aim of the talk is to give the audience an insight into how simple it can be to create a fast static site using Gatsby and GraphQL content queries. (please note, this is not the actual start time of this lightning talk - lightning talk start times are spread between 09:50 and 13:20)

I knew literally nothing about coding until I started to study. On my first day of Java at foundation degree level I had no clue what was going on. Everyone had some experience with computers, IT or gaming and I was light years behind. I was asking my peers for help and getting stuck on everything. I was really feeling like I’d made the wrong choice of career path. To save myself from embarrassment I dove head first into the land of curly brackets and pizza meetups in an attempt to learn everything I could. I’m going to share how I have managed an attempt at kick starting my career despite not knowing wtf I’m doing.

In this lightning talk I’ll introduce the Software Testing Clinic (SWTC) that is launching in Belfast this June, I’ll explain what it is, who it’s for and give you a sampling of what participants can expect to learn from it. SWTC offers completely free monthly evening sessions for anybody interested in the testing craft. They are run in an interactive way using whiteboard sessions, hands-on exercises and discussions as a group as well as in smaller teams to deepen our understanding of software testing. We’re seeking to spread the word about the SWTC to create awareness, find local experts to help mentor those less experienced and hopefully many in the community will benefit. This an incredible learning opportunity from those experienced in software testing to those who will be completely new to the field to flourish in their careers. (please note, this is not the actual start time of this lightning talk - lightning talk start times are spread between 09:50 and 13:20) Help us create learning opportunities for those wishing to develop their testing knowledge, and show how practitioners of any parts of the craft can mentor and advance their own skills through the SWTC Belfast!

A talk about a project that pulled together a multidisciplinary team of people from different businesses and sectors to produce tools for the open industry. What is Open Development? There is no hard and fast definition but one of the best ways to try and answer this question is to look at some of the general principles in the context of a real world project. The project was initiated to create tools to help people in the open data industry; it used open source software and the project team was about as open as it gets. So, how did it come about? What were the processes used? What was the outcome? and was the project successful? These are all things we will see at as we look at this in more detail.

A walk through of some of the cognitive services available from azure, including (but not limited to) : Vision API : Retrieving a text description and other basic information from image, including facial detection. Language API : Evaluate meaning and intent, and auto moderation. Speech Recognition API : Recognising a user by their voice. A demonstration website will be provided for attendees to try out themselves.

Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper in 2009 titled, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. Since then, cryptocurrencies have an estimated market value of $425 billion (as of time of writing). Most people who are aware of crypto have typically heard of the two “B’s” - Bitcoin and Blockchain. The former, created in 2009, is a type of digital currency and was the first ever decentralised cryptocurrency. It has been coined the digital gold of the 21st century, and it’s popularity lead to the creation of hundreds of other cryptocurrencies which are commonly known as alt-coins (alternative coins). At the heart of Bitcoin and many of these alt-coins, they employ a technology known as a Blockchain. Being one of the core features of a cryptocurrency, it took me a while to truly grasp what it was and what role it played in a functioning cryptocurrency. In the 30 minutes provided I hope to demystify what a Blockchain is and break down the core features of a Blockchain by walking the audience through one created in JavaScript (being a JavaScript enthusiast and all..).

Every software development team has to deliver, some are more successful than others and tend to be happier with a lower attrition rate. The main reason for this is a great team culture but how does a team achieve this? This talk is a crash course in how to achieve this providing practical tips which anyone on a team can implement on their team but especially beneficial to those in leadership positions like project manager, lead developer or tech lead.

High level introduction to what “product” as a concept is, and how product managers and developers work together to create products that people love.

This talk will focus on Design/Component Libraries - basically a set of design rules and standardised/templated UI components for a project. We will look at why this technique has gained in popularity, and whether it’s worth considering for your project. We’ll look at the potential benefits and drawbacks with these systems depending on how they are implemented, and what should be avoided to make sure you don’t over-complicate your system, make development more difficult or encourage bad standards. By the end of this talk, you should have a reasonable idea of whether or not a style guide and component library would be a good tool for your project, and what steps you should take to ensure the addition does not create further problems or complexities.

Despite the title this talk is all about testing and taking a customer / consumer centric approach to designing and developing your api and integrating your micro services, by applying good testing patterns to inform your design. This talk will cover an explanation of what Consumer driven contract (CDC) testing is and how it can help inform your design choices for micro services, streamline your functional testing and continuous delivery cycle with earlier feedback on api integration and provide greater confidence for your deployment. It will also introduce some tools you can use to implement the pattern and some different implementation approaches. Takeaways for participants: * introduction to CDC testing as a technique and the technical problem it helps solve * Understanding how this helps in development and early integration of your micro services * Understanding how to fit this into your testing approach and strategy * Tooling that exists around this technique and recommendations (I may also attempt a simple demo of the tooling and the pattern)

How does technology support large enterprises? Typically these businesses have multiple applications serving many different purposes, including customer management, order management, billing, HR, and payroll. Imagine this scenario: You receive an order from a new customer, they have to be added to the customer management system, the order has to be added to the order management system with the customer ID, and an invoice has to be produced in the billing system with the order number and customer ID. In essence, multiple applications need to be integrated to enable data flow. However, what happens if one of these systems is out of support or needs to be replaced? Re-building the integrations from scratch with a new application will be costly and time consuming. Hear how middleware integrations can help connect these enterprise applications in a more innovative way. There will be a live demo using a leading Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solution so you can see it in action!

Everyone is doing Agile, right? I mean, it’s just the standard way of doing things now? But is it really? For many, it’s just stand-ups and sprints, and nothing else has changed. In fact, it’s probably worse, because Agile promises to be so much, and when it’s not done properly, leaves real disappointment and resentment; it feels like the Emperor’s new clothes. It just doesn’t feel very SAFe. Modern Agile attempts to address this by putting safety at the core of its being: the safety to experiment, the safety to fail, the safety to learn. This is more important for building awesome products, services and solutions than anything else, and unlocks true potential. I’m going to talk about management theory, about motivation, about safety, and about how Modern Agile principles should be at the core of doing things well.

In today’s world security breaches are a seemingly everyday occurrence. We are constantly being bombarded with news reports on data breaches, warnings about your connected devices spying on you, and anyone who has an email address receiving phishing emails which (for the most part) seem to be getting a little too realistic as time passes. Depending on your knowledge of IT and how to be secure this can be a really scary place. For this talk I’m going to take you to the other side of this problem. How do we build software to empower users to be more secure? Working on the UX team we strive to help our users know exactly what is happening and where they’re being attacked. To do this we need to filter out a huge amount of noise and help them pinpoint the exact moment of attack, and even better what they need to do next.

Building and leading top technical talent. It’s not all about the money or benefits. How does Bazaarvoice attract, build, and lead software engineering talent to own, create, manage, and grow the software that supports almost 1 billion unique user devices, over 300 million products, 140 billion queries, and more on a monthly basis. No holds bar all the fact what works well and what hasn’t.

When I was a kid, I had a vision. The room was ablaze in digital light, pulsing to the beat and dancing under my fingertips, while the crowd roared and raised their hands in the air. Forced to choose between being cool and being a nerd, however, I chose the latter. It’s been hard to live with this unfulfilled dream of audiovisual nirvana. To exorcise my demons, I must concoct a potent mix of web technologies - including JavaScript, CSS, Canvas, Web Audio and MIDI - in the hope of finally realising my techno-utopian 90s fantasies, right inside the browser. Pack your party bags* and join me to learn about creative web APIs, realtime graphics, music visualisation, and browser performance techniques, all wrapped up in an acid house/rave spin on retro aesthetics. You’ll learn a lot, have a good time, and we’ll all be friends forever (maybe). *Partying not guaranteed.

Vaguely star wars themed, Sequel to “A Node Hype”. Live demo with some background, using rust, cargo, npmjs.com and web pack Outline: Quick intro to WebAssembly Even quicker intro to rust Example of creating a rust package (crate) Publishing said crate to npmjs as wasm module Create a barebones html page in a clean environment (with no rust toolchain) Install rust crate/webassembly module from npm Embed the webassembly module in said html page Show it running, hopefully… Summary: Come to the dark side we have performance and powerful types Examples of some other projects using webassembly for cool things Potential warnings/drawbacks, no more view source, etc. If I have time: Brief sermon about formal reasoning being very powerful Implications in other areas (webassembly on the server? unikernels?) Some of my own Prognostication Potential gags include: Some sort of language based you killed my father/I am your father joke. Disappointing prequels (flash, java) BIG CORPORATE (still a bit disappointing, but better) sequels (asmjs, PNACL) “I am the Senate/It’s treason then” (reduced democratisation of the web) Audience Outcomes: Awareness that WebAssembly exists Awareness of Rust Demo that webassembly is already practical, now. Pun exhaustion Where we are on the “Birth and Death of Javascript” timeline

Final notes, thank yous, prizes and plans.

Post event party with complimentary food and drinks (token-based). Hosted at the Botanic Inn on Malone Road.