Warecraft: The Craft of Software and Hardware
21 Feb 2019 at Heath Software

What goes together better than engineers and coffee? Come early for coffee and muffins and have the chance to network with your local engineering community before the conference kicks off.

Take a dive into an in-progress serverless app build preparing for launch at this year’s SXSW. Think Pokemon Go meets Yelp running on Lambas. Follow from idea to launch as I use Where2Now as a case study in the rapid discovery, design and development of new software products. I’ll take you from initial discovery, through the design process, and into the code as we examine the benefits and drawbacks of a serverless architecture.

The divide between software and hardware isn't as big as you think. We will tear apart an internet connected lamp and show you what’s inside. You’ll get an inside look into the component parts that make up an IoT device and learn how they work together. By the end of it you’ll realize that you’re already halfway there to making your toilet tweet.

Apollo and GraphQL are new and popular buzzwords, but a lot of it is black boxed. I'll be talking about my experience with using React-Apollo for a production React Native app. Then I'll pop open the hood and we'll take a look at what Apollo is doing with GraphQL, caching, and property changes.

We all know there are some things you don’t discuss in polite company like sex, politics, religion and code. Take the hottest topics in engineering, pose them to a room full of engineers, and see what happens. Stack Battles is a structured interactive session to finally tackle life’s important questions like tabs vs. spaces, MVC vs. SOA, Hand Solder vs. PCB, REST vs. GraphQL. Come with strong opinions, weakly held.

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If you've spent long enough writing web applications, you've had firsthand experience with an API, whether internal or external, that leaves you scratching your head at best and banging your head against the keyboard at worst. To be fair, it takes more than exposing your application's database via a CRUD interface to get an API that's truly a joy to work with. We'll look at patterns, affecting everything from HTTP methods to versioning, from authentication to response codes, that'll make your API happily boring rather than uniquely frustrating. Including when to use REST, and when to pick a different design pattern that better suits the task at hand.

You're great at running containers but you shouldn't have to be great at building them. In this talk, you'll learn about Cloud Native Buildpacks, a higher-level abstraction for building apps compared to Dockerfiles. Buildpacks are a standardized tool for creating images in a secure, reproducible, and efficient manner. As an app developer, you don't need to know best practices around ordering commands for layer reuse. As an operator, you don't need to worry about exposing developers to the responsibilities that come with Dockerfile. Come learn how buildpacks meet developers at their source code, automate the delivery of both OS-level and application-level dependency upgrades, and help you efficiently handle day-2 app operations.

Why hire a developer when you can hire a barista and teach them to code? Since 2012, I’ve hired and worked closely with many professional developers... but I’ve trained almost as many first-time programmers myself. It’s going surprisingly well. We’re building higher quality software at a much faster pace than ever before. In this talk, I’ll show you how we did it. You’ll see how long it takes (at least for us) before “from scratch” developers can be effective on real-world projects, and I’ll share some tips on how to empower them to be productive even while they are still very much an apprentice. Finally, we’ll take a look at the numbers. Home-grown training takes considerable effort, and it isn’t for everyone. But hiring even a small team of professional, full-stack software engineers is an expensive and time-consuming proposition— and it doesn’t necessarily lead to better results. Depending on your financials and timeline, certifying some of your own talent could be the right decision for your business, your products, and your users.

A panel discussion featuring speakers from the day, as well as an audience question & answer.

Sponsored by Heath Software