Speakers
We are proud to announce our speakers for #osn2023!
Aaron Ploetz
Developer Advocate, Datastax
Building a Full-Stack Environment with Cassandra and React
Cassandra is the new black, and many developers and organizations are flocking to this open source database technology to meet their scalability, uptime and distribution needs. However, using Cassandra can be overwhelming for developers as they need to learn to use CQL in order to access the database – and the management of the databases can be challenging as well. Fortunately, there’s another option! The Stargate open source API engine can enhance any Cassandra database by offering HTTP APIs for data access, and it is included with the Astra free tier, a fully managed Cassandra in the cloud.
This talk will briefly cover Cassandra’s features, then we‘ll bring up Astra to get started. Next I’ll dive into a description of the various APIs available through Stargate. I‘ll discuss GRPC, REST, GraphQL and the schemaless document API. I will walk through the steps needed to bring up a development stack using free resources, giving you a great foundation for using these technologies going forward.
After attending the talk, you will understand how Stargate works to give you access to your Cassandra database via HTTP APIs, you’ll know how to bring up an application stack in just a few minutes, and you’ll have pointers to resources for learning more.
About the Speaker
Aaron Ploetz is a developer advocate at DataStax. He’s been a professional software developer since 1997 and has several years of experience working on and leading DevOps teams for startups and Fortune 50 enterprises. He is a three-time Cassandra MVP, and has worked as an author on the books “Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week” and “Mastering Apache Cassandra 3.x.”
Amy Leonard
Engineering Manager – Third Party API Integrations, Virgin Pulse
How to Beat Outages like Escape Rooms
Almost everybody hates outages… especially when they’re of complex, full-stack, interconnected systems. But not me! Outages get me excited. To me, they are just like escape rooms. I revel in the opportunity to investigate, to learn, and to win.
In this talk, I will review five strategies I believe are critical to employ when attempting to troubleshoot and resolve outages or production issues within complex, full-stack, and interconnected systems.
About the Speaker
Amy is a strategic and driven IT leader with 20 years experience across the retail, banking, and health care industries. After spending 14 years as a business and lean process analyst, she spent 4 years as an infrastructure automation engineer, and then moved into an engineering manager position in 2020. Passionate about continuously improving business outcomes, engineering excellence, team satisfaction, and personal well-being, Amy continually seeks to expand her experience and impact.
Andy Fleener
Director of Platform Technology, Total Expert
Are we there yet? Building an internal Development Platform
“We’ll get there.” The words you say to the preverbal “Are we there yet?” Building an internal development platform is not so much of a choice as it is an eventuality. The only question is are you intentionally building one or not? Undifferentiating engineering is a requirement for all software companies, not everything you do will set you apart from your competitors and generate value directly for your customers. The question is how do you do exactly the right amount of undifferentiating engineering to create the most value for your customers? In this talk I will discuss a decade of hard lessons I’ve learned about building internal development platforms, most recently with the Interstate Platform at Total Expert. What are the pitfalls, the fun part, the hard part, and the really really hard part that you should focus on if you want to have a successful IDP program at your company?
About the Speaker
Andy is a technologist with over a decade of experience developing and operating highly available SAAS software for the web. He’s a devopsdays MSP Organizer, a Humanist, a Systems Thinker, a self proclaimed Safety Nerd, and a Contributor to the O’Reilly Chaos Engineering Book.
Bill Zhang
Product Management, Sr. Director, Cloudera
Accelerate Open Data Lakehouse Implementation with Apache Iceberg
During this presentation, we are going to share with you what Apache Iceberg is, why we are integrating Apache Iceberg, an open table format, with a multiple compute engines for advanced features such as ACID transactions, multi-engine interoperability for both high-performing read/write, time travel and in-place table evolutions. How can you leverage Apache Iceberg for developing and deploying a multi-cloud, hybrid data lakehouse with all open standards.
About the Speaker
Bill is Senior Director of Data Warehouse Product Management at Cloudera. He is responsible for Apache HIVE and Apache Iceberg integration with Cloudera Data Platform.
Brad Koehn
President, Koehn Consulting, Inc.
Growing Leaders
When leaders in IT are asked how they are developed, they often admit that they’ve been left to fend for themselves. This results in an environment where leaders only succeed by a combination of luck and circumstance, and are often ill-equipped to handle a change to the status quo, whether external market forces or internal reorganization.
Leaders who develop their leaders have a sizable advantage, in that they have an organization that is more resilient and overall more effective.
In this session Brad Koehn, a consultant, advisor, and leader shares some stories about the different approaches leaders can use to grow their leaders (and themselves), and the bottom-line benefits to the business.
About the Speaker
Brad Koehn has been working in software engineering for 30 years doing everything from coding, managing, leading, advising, to coaching. In the past several years, his focus has turned increasingly to making his clients more successful by helping to solve human problems in technology organizations. Just as people are the center of good design, people are the heart of good engineering.
Brad Schlicht
Cloud Architect, Medtronic
DevOps and Platform Engineering – The Reality Behind the Hype
Platform engineering is currently experiencing a surge of interest in the realm of DevOps and Cloud, and rightfully so, as it represents the natural progression of DevOps practices. Esteemed technology companies worldwide are continuing to rapidly mature their platform engineering divisions and in some cases are launching open source software projects providing key platform capabilities. Amidst all this excitement, this presentation seeks to provide an inside look at the current state of the Enterprise.
About the Speaker
Brad is a senior principal engineer at Medtronic, where he focuses on modernizing their cloud architecture and works with platform teams to build out capabilities that enable product development. His background includes designing and building distributed on-premise infrastructure solutions, platform engineering, DevOps, and cloud architecture at various Minnesota based companies including C.H. Robinson.
Brian Olsen
Head of Developer Relations, Tabular
Federated data with Trino: Run SQL statements across any of your data sources (*or your money back). *It’s free.
Trino is an open-source SQL query engine that enables you to access data across your data platform from the convenience of a single SQL terminal without needing to move your data anywhere. This applies to SQL databases (like Postgres or MySQL), but also extends to NoSQL databases (like MongoDB), data warehouses (like Snowflake or AWS Redshift), data lakehouses (like Hive, Iceberg, or Delta Lake), or any data source that exposes data that can be represented in a tabular model. Trino not only provides uniform SQL access to all of these sources but can join data across these systems. In this talk, we’ll cover a more in-depth overview of Trino and run a demo of how to easily join data across multiple data sources.
About the Speaker
Brian is a U.S. Marine turned software engineer and developer advocate working to foster the open-source Trino community. Brian spent four years as a data engineer at a cybersecurity company working on pipeline maintenance and query optimization. While in this role, Brian was responsible for maintaining data pipelines and migrations to include replacing some legacy data warehousing systems to use open-source Trino. Brian is a published author in ACM and IEEE geospatial database conferences.
Cody Zwiefelhofer
Senior Software Engineer, Starburst
Federated data with Trino: Run SQL statements across any of your data sources (*or your money back). *It’s free.
Trino is an open-source SQL query engine that enables you to access data across your data platform from the convenience of a single SQL terminal without needing to move your data anywhere. This applies to SQL databases (like Postgres or MySQL), but also extends to NoSQL databases (like MongoDB), data warehouses (like Snowflake or AWS Redshift), data lakehouses (like Hive, Iceberg, or Delta Lake), or any data source that exposes data that can be represented in a tabular model. Trino not only provides uniform SQL access to all of these sources but can join data across these systems. In this talk, we’ll cover a more in-depth overview of Trino and run a demo of how to easily join data across multiple data sources.
About the Speaker
Cody Zwiefelhofer is currently a Senior Software Engineer at Starburst Data, where he works on Galaxy, their fully-managed SaaS platform for unlocking scalable data query federation and analytics. In his 10+ years in the software industry, he’s worked in both leadership and engineering at companies such as Amazon, Best Buy, and Optum, and has experience across many different technology stacks. He likes to build simple, scalable solutions that last and are future proof. When he’s not working, he’s a parent to two young kids; whatever other free time he pretends he has he spends playing tennis, reading, and going outside for long periods of time.
Daniel Jefferies
Head of Product, observIQ
The Future of Monitoring with OpenTelemetry
Join us for a comprehensive look into OpenTelemetry! OpenTelemetry is a new industry-backed set of standards and tools for gathering, processing, and transmitting all your telemetry signals. We’ll start this session by answering the question, “What is OpenTelemetry, and why is it the future of telemetry?”. You’ll learn about the best times to use OpenTelemetry in your organization (and when you definitely should not!), and you’ll get a glimpse into where the project is headed. Don\’t miss the chance to expand your knowledge about this powerful tool for monitoring and observability!
About the Speaker
Daniel is Head of Product at ObservIQ. He works with a talented team of engineers that have made major contributions to open source projects like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and others. Late last year they launched their latest open source project, BindPlane OP, the first observability pipeline built for Open Telemetry.In addition to his work at ObservIQ, Daniel is a founder, investor and advisor to several successful tech companies and funds including: Newmind Group, Babylist, Rickshaw (acq by DoorDash), Worklytics, and Earl Grey Capital.
David Sanchez
Senior Engineer, Datadog
Continuous Profiling, Effectively
Rather than profiling services intermittently and in carefully provisioned and controlled environments, it is becoming increasingly common for developers to enable continuous (always-on, always-available) profiling on their entire fleets. Despite this uptick in popularity, it can be frustrating when continuous profiling stops yielding quick wins with easily-interpreted results, or when system metrics appear to be at odds with profiling data.In this talk, we’ll explore some of the lessons learned profiling services at Datadog, with emphasis on C++, Rust, Java, and Go. We will discuss several use-cases where informed use of profiling data uncovered subtle, but impactful, application behavior. The final section will demonstrate the value of so-called “native” or “systems” profiling to help understand application behavior and uncover bugs and performance defects even in interpreted languages.Although this presentation may touch on some advanced Linux concepts and subsystems, the main emphasis should be accessible to a general audience.
About the Speaker
David works on the profilers team at Datadog, where he contributes to compiled-languages (C, C++, Rust) profiling. His background is in performance analysis, systems engineering, and systems diagnostics.
Derek Anderson
Head of Engineering, Blockless
Web3, Web Assembly, and the future of Computing at the Edge
The Web is changing. Web3 is all the buzz, we hear all the time about how the data revolution is going to change the landscape in favor of the customer. What about the developers and engineers who are under the tools, products, and experiences? Let’s explore how this rapidly evolving landscape is repurposing tech we already know and love to grow our toolset in a web3 world.
About the Speaker
Derek is a midwesterner. Currently residing in the Sioux Falls area, he worked his early tech career through the Minneapolis and Saint Paul tech scenes. For the last decade, he has been working for Fortune 500s such as PayPal, eBay, LG Electronics, and Walmart. For the last 3 years, he’s been working in the Web 3 infra and Blockchain spaces.
Derek Winters
Senior Principal Platform Engineer, Medtronic
DevOps and Platform Engineering – The Reality Behind the Hype
Platform engineering is currently experiencing a surge of interest in the realm of DevOps and Cloud, and rightfully so, as it represents the natural progression of DevOps practices. Esteemed technology companies worldwide are continuing to rapidly mature their platform engineering divisions and in some cases are launching open source software projects providing key platform capabilities. Amidst all this excitement, this presentation seeks to provide an inside look at the current state of the Enterprise.
About the Speaker
Derek is a Senior Principal Platform Engineer at Medtronic, where he focuses on designing and building scalable solutions for deployment and management of cloud infrastructure. He has worked in infrastructure for over a decade at both large and small companies, and is especially passionate about Terraform.
Isaac Johnson
Principal SRE Architect, Wellsky
Open Source and Cloud – It Just Makes Cents
For many, Open Source is a way of life. But for businesses, leveraging Open Source offerings can also greatly reduce cloud costs. We’ll explore several practical ways to reduce cloud spend with off the shelf OSS solutions as well as OS offerings for monitoring and reporting on cloud spend such as OpenCost (KubeCost) and Cloud Custodian. Attendees will have takeaways they can immediately put into use to reduce and manage cloud costs as well as confidently plan cloud spend.
About the Speaker
As a Principal Software Architect, Isaac has a passion for process and building out scalable solutions. With over 20 years experience, he has had the honor of working at local companies such as Medtronic, Thomson Reuters, and CH Robinson with a focus on SRE, DevOps and Cloud Migrations. Isaac lives in Woodbury and enjoy camping, canoeing and fishing with three wonderful daughters.
Javier Perez
Chief Evangelist & Sr. Director of Product Management, Perforce
The State of Open Source Software in 2023
Use and adoption of open source software continues to grow. We see more open source and more contributions to open source projects every day. A whopping 80% of organizations increased the use of open source in the last 12 months. This is just one of many research findings revealed in the 2023 state of open source report, a collaboration between the Open Source Initiative and OpenLogic by Perforce. Hundreds of industry professionals from around the world provided insight on how they are using open source software in their organizations.
What open source technologies are the most used today in organizations? What are the support challenges while using open source? What is the level of open source maturity in organizations? How many have OSPOs and Innersource projects? This session will reveal what is happening in open source today, from infrastructure and programming languages to data technologies and DevOps tooling. An informative session for all audiences about the latest trends in open source software and how organizations are strategic in the use and creation of open source.
About the Speaker
Passionate about technology and open-source software, Javier is Chief Open Source Evangelist and Sr. Director of Product Management at Perforce Software. He is responsible for technical thought leadership and advocacy for open-source software while driving the OpenLogic by Perforce offering. Prior to Perforce, Javier led the open-source program strategy for the IBM Z & LinuxONE platforms at IBM. Javier has been in the application development, open-source, cloud, app security, AI, SaaS, and mobile industries for 25+ years. From leading product strategy in the open-source security space at Veracode to product management for Axway’s successful Appcelerator open-source offering, and at Red Hat via startup acquisition as Director of Product Management driving the OpenShift-based Mobile Application Platform. Speaker and blogger, Javier has had the opportunity to speak at industry events all over the world and publish articles in popular publications. Javier holds an honors degree in Computer Systems and an MBA.
Jeff Blaisdell
Principal Software Engineer, SmartThings
IoT Eventing Evolution: SmartThings Case Study
SmartThings is a consumer IoT company that was launched in 2012 as the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign. In the decade that followed SmartThings was acquired by Samsung, and has seen the architecture grow from a humble monolithic Grails application to a globally deployed, distributed architecture composed of hundreds of systems. Throughout that journey Kafka has played a key part in our ability to scale. Join us as we talk through the evolution of eventing over the years using Kafka and now Confluent Cloud. We will also share some of the interesting hurdles we overcame with our Confluent partnership.
About the Speaker
Jeff is a software engineer with over a decade of experience across many industries. He has been an Engineer @ SmartThings for the last 8 years, and has worked across a variety of areas of the platform. His current focus is the Event Pipeline. Professionally, you’ll find him happiest when hunched over a laptop puzzling through a scaling / performance problem. Outside of tech he loves adventures with his family, and all things soccer.
Jeff Bursik
Principal Engineer, Target
Data Discovery – Building an Enterprise Data Search Engine
Have you been faced with any of these questions:
– Where can I find data to help with my research?
– Do you know who to contact when the data is delayed?
– Do you trust the accuracy or source of the data?
– Do you understand the data?
These are commonly asked questions for any user of data ecosystem and they were common questions asked at Target 5 years ago. Since then, we’ve built a data catalog powered by several open source solutions (i.e. Elastic, Kafka, Redis, etc.) to answer these questions and enable Data Discovery for the organization. Join us as we discuss Target’s DataPortal solution.
About the Speaker
Jeff is a principal engineer at Target with a passion for data and building products that make working with data easier.
Jennifer Ehman
Consultant, SDG
Let’s Chat About ChatGPT
Some say it is the way of the future. Some say it will make developers obsolete. Some say it is a dangerous tool that is the beginning of Skynet. Ok that last one is a bit of a stretch, though I can see why people might think it. Join us for a panel discussion to find out what ChatGPT is, why it has everyone all a buzz, and what it may or may not mean for the future of software development.
About the Speaker
There once was a girl named Jennifer Ehman,
She wrote some code and enjoyed the feeling.
20 years past and she just keeps on coding.
Hooray for Jennifer Ehman,
Now let’s do this thing!
Jessica Pennell
Senior IT Engineer, Xcel Energy
Sky Gardens: Working with MacOS Cloud runners
Covers techniques, pitfalls, limitations, and methods to provision MacOS cloud runners for Gitlab for applications such as iOS mobile apps. Discussion about Apple’s Walled Garden, how providers such as Google and Amazon are really providing cloud instances for MacOS devices, cost benefit breakdowns for rolling one’s own runner against using a gitlab shared runner, and many similar topics.
About the Speaker
Jessica is currently focused on Developer Enablement and DevOps support for Xcel Energy. Her career has a broad industry coverage from software development and QA to embedded and realtime systems, VLSI, and security development. She earned her Computer Engineering degree at Iowa State University and is passionate about continually finding better ways for teams to cooperate, communicate, and complete objectives, keeping quality as a first priority in our fast paced industry.
Joel Tosi
Co-Founder, Dojo and Co
Product Thinking & Architecture – Discovering Teams and Balancing Decisions
This is an evolution of the talk I delivered a few years back where we introduce product thinking concepts and how they apply to architecture.
This evolution includes strategic DDD and how we can leverage that technique to identify team boundaries based on cognitive load as well as communication protocols.
Leave this session with techniques you can apply in your organization – at the team level (identifying when architectural decisions are appropriate) to the cross-team level (which business domains map to teams to reduce coupling and accidental tech complexity).
About the Speaker
Co-author of “Creating Your Dojo” and “Coaching For Learning”, Joel helps teams and organizations simplify how they work and embrace continuous learning – or product, architecture, and process – to help people find more joy in their work.
John Russ
Software Developer, Chewy
Change your Purr-spective on Testing
How should we test our applications? What should our test coverage be? What the difference between an integration test and a functional test? We’re here to tell you none of that matters. Well, not exactly.
We’ll walk through the best practices that Chewy has established to build quality tests without getting bogged down in semantics. We’ll focus on the practices that matter most when creating quality, robust tests and provide some tips and tricks that can help you move faster and catch bugs sooner in your daily development.
About the Speaker
John is a software developer with a passion for testing. The only philosophy he subscribes to is “proving stuff works.” From building high throughput data processing pipelines to ultra low latency APIs, John has had opportunities to work on problems across many domains and technology stacks. This has helped him develop and refine an approach to testing that does not focus on any particular semantics or prescribed approaches, but rather focuses on demonstrating and documenting the behavior of applications. With a tight focus on maintainability and automation, John drives teams forward to deliver value quickly and reliably.
Justin Grammens
Founder & CEO, Lab651
ChatGPT: What’s Going on in that Brain of Yours?
ChatGPT is the talk of the town and for a good reason. Everywhere you look, it’s making its presence known. With hundreds of applications, it’s a game-changer in the AI world. But what’s going on under the hood? In this talk, we’ll delve into the inner workings of ChatGPT, uncovering the methods and algorithms used to train and generate large language models. From real-world industry use cases to hands-on demonstrations, we’ll explore the best practices for interfacing with its API. Get ready for an interactive experience, where the audience will have plenty of opportunities to share their own experiences with ChatGPT.
About the Speaker
Hi! I’m Justin Grammens. I’m a lifelong learner, passionate about Software Development, Artificial Intelligence, and driven by giving back to the community through service and education.
I’m the Founder and CEO of Lab651 where our teams guides and supports our customers to achieve successful software product launches. Contact us to learn about our Software Development Done Right framework and top-tier crew.
Additionally, I am the creator, producer, and host of the AppliedAI Podcast which allows me to interview some of the world’s leading experts on Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, and am a co-founder of the 501(c)(3) non-profit AppliedAI and an Adjunct Professor teaching graduate-level classes at the University of Saint Thomas
Most importantly, I’m blessed to have a loving wife and two amazing boys who are the light of my life and keep me strong and centered. Let’s connect! I would love to help you however I can.
Karen Huaulme
Principal Developer Advocate, MongoDB
GraphQL: The Easy Way to Do the Hard Stuff
GraphQL is rapidly growing in popularity as the new standard for working with APIs, and it’s easy to see why! This groundbreaking API query language gives developers a single endpoint to access exactly the data they need. This eliminates over-fetching, decreases the response payload, and avoids multiple costly round trips to the server and long page load times.
In this session, we’ll start with the data and set-up a hosted, serverless, and secure GraphQL API in minutes. Then we will extend that API with relationships to other data collections and custom resolvers in order to bundle together different data sources and APIs together under the same schema. Finally, we will build out an entire web application using our GraphQL endpoint to demonstrate how GraphQL gives us exactly the data we want- nothing more, nothing less.
About the Speaker
As a Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB, Karen Huaulmé (pronounced “You-Old-Maid” – but with no d’s) develops and presents applications to help developers unleash their creativity across all aspects of data and technology. Leveraging her past experience as a Solutions Architect for some of MongoDB’s most demanding customers, Karen loves to trigger that “aha” moment in the minds of developers – when they recognize a better path to simplify, enhance, and accelerate their projects in ways they never thought possible.
Prior to MongoDB, Karen spent most of her career working with video game developers as a Solutions Architect and Integration Engineer at Nvidia, Amazon and Twitch. In her free time, Karen embarrasses her 2 kids, spoils her dog, and feeds her addiction to adventure travel – not necessarily in that order.
Kate Wardin
Engineering Manager, Netflix
4 Reasons your Best Engineers are Leaving
Engineering Leaders across industries and time zones are struggling to retain technical talent even after offering the shiniest of benefits and perks. Why is that? This session will cover 4 common reasons Engineers choose to leave an organization and how you can proactively avoid these departures.
About the Speaker
Kate Wardin has always been passionate about the people side of software development. She is currently an Engineering Manager at Netflix working remotely in Minneapolis, MN with her husband, daughter, & dog (Ralph).
Keith Resar
Sr. Kafka Developer, Confluent
Real-Time Data Transformation by Example
Learn what tooling works best for your next data transformation project. Compare the most common real-time engines – ksqlDB, Spark, Flink, and Kafka Streams. See them side-by-side, each chewing through a common data set with working code examples. In this talk we demonstrate the unique approach each of these powerful tools takes to solving data filtering, enrichment, and windowed aggregation.
About the Speaker
Keith is an integration engineer working with all things data streaming and processing, especially Apache Kafka. Most recently at the data in motion company Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka.
Kevin Hakanson
Senior Solutions Architect, AWS
Sharpen your “Architecture Documentation” Saw: Architectural Decision Records (ADR) and Diagrams-as-Code
All solutions implicitly have an architecture, ideally one which is both intentional and documented. The Architectural Decision Records (ADR) process distributes architectural decision-making across team members. Accelerate the time-consuming process of hand drawing diagrams by rendering from a text-based source. Communicate effectively by committing both your markdown-based ADRs and text-based diagrams into your source code repository. This talk will review these techniques, provide actionable steps to adoption, and even live-code some examples.
About the Speaker
Kevin Hakanson (kevinhakanson.com) is an experienced Software Architect focused on highly scalable web applications, especially the JavaScript and security aspects. His background includes both .NET and Java, but he is most nostalgic about Lotus Notes. He has been developing professionally since 1994 and holds a Master’s degree in Software Engineering. When not staring at a computer screen, he is probably staring at another screen, either watching TV or playing video games with his family.
Kevin Johnson
Senior Software Engineer, Cargill
Under-Engineering
Simplifying tech methodologies to increase feature delivery.
If you’ve spent any time as a software developer, you’ve probably run into a number of productivity traps: the “All-In-Wonder” components, fighting against frameworks, confusing terminologies, unmaintainable code, and over-architected solutions.
In this talk, I’ll share my experience tackling these obstacles, and what patterns have been useful to increase my teams’ velocity, reduce bugs, and improve maintainability of code.
About the Speaker
Kevin Johnson is a Venture Tech Lead building innovative solutions within Cargill. He previously worked as a solution architect overseeing multiple development teams building out agricultural supply chain software across North and South America. He is customer-centric and passionate about delivering high-quality software using simple design patterns.
Lauren Maffeo
Service Designer, Steampunk
Designing Data Governance for Data Mesh Architecture
Organizations own more data than ever before, but it’s of no value if you don’t know how to use it. Most organizations lack the strategy to clean, collect, organize, and automate data for production-ready projects.
The good news is that data governance — the people, processes, and strategy needed for deploying data projects to production –- offers new opportunities to improve service delivery.
This session shares how leaders can embed data governance into data mesh cloud architecture. Attendees will learn how to unite cross-functional teams of data stewards to automate unified standards throughout data mesh, which emphasizes data domain ownership through self-service architecture.
Whether you’re a chief data officer or individual contributor, this talk will show you how to manage up, get the buy-in you need to build data governance, find the right colleagues to co-create governance, and build cloud architecture that better serves your users.
About the Speaker
Lauren Maffeo has reported on and worked within the global technology sector. She started her career as a freelance journalist covering tech trends for The Guardian and The Next Web from London. Today, she works as a service designer for Steampunk, a human-centered design firm building civic tech solutions for government agencies. Her book, “Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up”, is published by The Pragmatic Programmers.
Prior to Steampunk, Lauren was an associate principal analyst at Gartner, where she covered the impact of emerging tech like AI and blockchain on small and midsize business owners. An advocate of open access publishing, Lauren serves as a founding editor of Springer’s AI and Ethics journal, the first multidisciplinary journal on this subject. She is also an area editor for the open access Data and Policy journal with Cambridge University Press. Lauren has spoken at open source events including the Open Source Summits in North America and Europe, All Things Open, DrupalCon North America, DrupalGovCon, and GitHub Universe.
Lindsey Miller
DevOps Coach, Thrivent
Divining your Role Leading Teams Through Transformation
Imagine your whole job changed and nobody told you!
Like many organizations, Thrivent is transforming the way we deliver software using Product, Agile, and DevOps methodologies. These methodologies also change the way team-level leaders like Engineering Managers (EMs) and Tech/Team Leads (TLs) should approach their jobs to maximize their impact. Yet within these methodologies, their roles are only loosely defined. Team-level leaders are frequently underserved when it comes to training in times of transformation.
This presentation, geared towards EMs and TLs, will explore the way team leadership roles change in the context of Product, Agile, and DevOps transformation. We’ll cover the philosophies behind these transformations and boil them down into actionable principles and practices you can use to better serve your teams. Some topics to include
– Adjusting to new (and often unspoken!) expectations for leaders
– Developing new definitions and measures of success for software delivery teams
– Growing a culture of ownership in and around your team
– Supporting teams empowered in areas like tool selection, tech debt management, and capability maturity
About the Speaker
Lindsey is a DevOps coach at Thrivent helping development teams evolve their technical and cultural capabilities. She comes from a background of engineering management as well as software implementation and support. Lindsey especially loves working with leaders to keep teams performing through transformation.
Lynn Wehrman
Founder & President, Digital Accessibility by WeCo
How History, Law and Societal Norms Continue to Exclude Users with Disabilities from Digital Inclusion
User experience was founded on the insights of human users. Yet why are we intensely focused on replacing the insights of users with disabilities with software? From dashboards to quick fix tools bars and overlays, the accessibility industry offers little opportunity to engage users with disabilities.
The answer to this question is complex. But it does provide us with an opportunity to explore how we approach developing for people who fall outside of social norms.
In this presentation, Lynn Wehrman, Founder and President of WeCo, a digital accessibility company staffed entirely by professionals with disabilities, leads this presentation/discussion.
Attendees will come away with an understanding of how history, laws and traditional societal views of people with disabilities may be making digital inclusion much more complex, and problematic today, than it has been for users without disabilities.
Attendees will also come away with a sense of positive empowerment and best practices they can use to create a more disability-inclusive design trajectory in their organizations.
About the Speaker
Lynn Wehrman, Digital Accessibility by WeCo’s Founder/President, began her career working in digital accessibility as one of the first government digital accessibility specialists in 2008.
With an education in communications, and professional background in federal program coordination, she led an early effort in government digital accessibility for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Digital Accessibility by WeCo came to life after she witnessed firsthand the power of people living with disabilities working as subject matter experts, in her government role. Lynn comes from a family with generations of inherited cognitive disabilities, and lives with two cognitive disabilities herself.
An experienced keynote speaker, here are a few of Lynn‘s recent events: University of Minnesota’s World Usability Day keynote from 2017-2019 and the New York City Public School’s Educator’s Conference keynote in 2019.
Digital Accessibility by WeCo s a mission-based consulting group founded and staffed entirely by digital technologists who live with disabilities. The company works to make government, private and nonprofit organization’s websites accessible to people who live with disabilities in accordance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and US and international legislation. Our products include: Manual Accessibility Audits, Disability-Focused Usability Testing, live-taught training and WeCollege On-Demand Accessibility Learning.
WeCo is not only blazing an employment trail to engage people living with disabilities as subject matter experts in digital communication accessibility, but also putting organizations in direct contact with professionals who can help them make their website and software truly accessible to customers who live with disabilities.
Our client include local Fortune 100 companies such as 3M, General Mills and Medtronic.
Digital Accessibility by WeCo is a DisabilityIn Owned Business Enterprise that has been named a Leading Disability Employer by the National Organization on Disability each year since its first application 2019 to present.
Madhu Rao
SVP, Head of Enterprise Architecture & Process Reengineering, U. S. Bank
Enterprise Architecture – How we’ve scaled within to build a cloud ready team
At the heart of transformation is change. A change in how we operate, how we think and in our technology transformation, change in the skills we have. So how do you adequately equip an engineering organization to migrate a 160-year-old financial institution with global offices to the cloud? You get creative. At U.S. Bank, we’ve scaled our technology teams’ skills using a cohort model of learning. Then, we leverage employees who’ve earned their cloud certification to captain a 50 to 60-person cohort. The cohort trains, bonds and gets certified. And the process repeats, creating a culture excited about learning and growing leadership opportunities.
In the past year, we:
· Trained roughly 4,000 employees
· Obtained approximately 2,000 Microsoft Azure certification
· Facilitated 100,000 hours of learning
All while moving the project forward. Our efforts to transform how we work alongside our technology has earned us recognition from Forrester’s Enterprise Architecture Awards. In this presentation we’ll share more about what we’re doing, and how you could implement a similar model and mindset within your organization.
About the Speaker
I am Madhu G Rao, SVP – Head of Enterprise Architecture and Process Reengineering at U.S. Bank. I love architect digital transformations leveraging public cloud, modern engineering and more importantly the power of people. Engineering a mindset change towards API-first, cloud native, microservice based scalable solutions excites me. Solutions Architecture, Serverless, Open Banking & AI-ML via Alexa and IOT are my forte. I love driving tangible outcomes through building high performing engineering teams with a strong growth mindset and infusing them with a start-up like mentality, enthusiasm, and agility.
Manish Rajkarnikar
Principal Engineer, Shipt
Service Mesh at Shipt
Shipt is a personal shopping and delivery company that connects retailers with local customers for everyday essentials brought right to the door. Our mesh implementation solved problems around ingress, security, multi-tenancy, and multi-cluster operations at scale. Join me as I delve into our implementation, challenges, and successes, all to help spark ideas for your implementation.
About the Speaker
Principal Engineer at Shipt working on the Infrastructure Platform team, specifically with Kubernetes and Service mesh technologies. Been with Shipt for a little over 2 years. Previously worked at other companies like UHG, Target, Thomson Reuters and organized k8s meetups.
Matt Richards
Solutions Architect, Infinite Campus
From VMs to Containers to Serverless: A Demonstration of Evolving Architecture Enabled by the Cloud
The public cloud and cloud native technologies have created myriad brand new architectural patterns. This session is going to illustrate some of these patterns in practice by demonstrating the evolution of a simple web application from a traditional VM-based deployment, through the world of containers and Kubernetes, and then to a 100% serverless public cloud architecture.
About the Speaker
Hi! I’m Matt Richards. I am a Solutions Architect at Infinite Campus, an Educational Technology Company in Blaine, MN. Software is hard, and there is so much to learn. I love doing what I can to help people connect some of the dots to make challenging concepts a bit less intimidating.
Meagan Taylor
UX Designer, Riot Games
Give the UX Designer a Cookie. UX in Gaming: A League of Legends Story
Grab a cup of coffee or two, and join Meagan for a look behind the red curtain of UX at Riot Games. In this project retrospective we will talk about how one simple ask became so much more. Leave no cup behind as Meagan will be sharing all the insights, hurdles, and discoveries it took to deliver the new emote expansion feature for players in League of Legends.
About the Speaker
A UX Designer with over 5 years experience, Meagan has a diverse background designing for E-Commerce, Enterprise, and the newest challenge Gaming. Creating designs that are utilized around the globe, Meagan specializes in creating and implementing player focused experiences for the 150+ million active monthly players on League of Legends – Summoners Rift at Riot Games. Originally from Shoreview, Minnesota Meagan now resides in Santa Monica, California with her family. When not trying to climb the Ranked ladder in League of Legends you can find Meagan at her game table slaying goblins and monsters in Dungeons and Dragons, or in her craft room working on her latest cos-play/dice creation.
Michael Jordan
Independent Software Consultant, Michael Jordan Consulting LLC
Goodbye Jenkins! Hello Github actions – Migrating your CI/CD to Something Less Crappy
The thing about continuous integration tooling is that it should be simple and composable. It should allow you to design a workflows that make sense for your team. It should automate all the necessary checks so you can confidently ship to multiple environments. Github created Actions to allow you to customize workflows right in your repository. You can discover, create, and share actions to perform any job you’d like, including CI/CD, and combine actions in a completely customized workflow. In this talk, we will talk about some of the cool things you can do with Github Actions, including spinning up PR-based ephemeral environments.
About the Speaker
MJ has 14+ years in full-stack software development with an emphasis on Javascript/Typescript. He can’t dunk, but he’s written code for startups and fortune 5 companies. Father of three, with a love for biking and running triathlons.
Mike Bollinger
CEO, Livefront
UI Design Trickery that Makes Software Faster
People expect websites and mobile apps to be fast. But for many large organizations, the underlying legacy systems powering those digital products are slow and cumbersome, with no cheap or easy ability to improve the underlying speed to satisfactory levels. But, customers and consumers still expect fast. So what to do if your hands are tied but you still want to create a great product? In this talk, Mike will share various UI/UX design techniques to trick people (in a good way) into thinking your product is faster than it actually is.
About the Speaker
Mike Bollinger is an explorer and entrepreneur. He is founder & CEO of Livefront, a team of senior-level designers and engineers helping companies grow by creating digital products people love. With over twenty years of experience in software design and engineering, he has helped launch mobile products for Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. His love for international travel and photography inform his approach to creating beautiful, simple design experiences for people in motion.
Monica Tamboli
Software Engineer, IBM
GitOps to the Rescue – Boosting Productivity and Automation
Automation and especially test automation is vital to the success of any software development team to ensure repeatability, stability, consistency, and quality of the software under development. GitOps is on the rise as an Infrastructure-as-Code approach for driving operations based on manifests stored in a Git repository. Can we pair the two together and push the boundary of test automation? What are the benefits and challenges of this approach?
Open Liberty is an open lightweight cloud-native Java runtime proven in large deployments. As part of the Open Liberty test team, we are responsible for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) for our test applications (Microservices and Monoliths) as well as various dependencies like DB2, MongoDB and Jmeter. We gave GitOps approach a try for our OpenShift/Kubernetes deployments using the OpenShift GitOps operator and argoCD. This approach reduced test setup time from days to hours if not minutes as we automated installation of various operators as well as applications.
In this session, we will share how we benefited from using GitOps in our CI/CD flow with a demo, and some challenges we faced. Other organizations can use similar approach and benefit from our experiences.
About the Speaker
Monica Tamboli works at IBM and leads System Verification Test (SVT) team for WebSphere Hybrid Edition which includes Open Liberty runtime and various application modernization tools. Monica has more than 20 years of industry experience most of which is focused around the Java Ecosystem. Currently, her focus has been on testing applications in containers on Kubernetes especially OpenShift on private and public Clouds (IBM Cloud, Azure and AWS) using Open Liberty and WebSphere. She is also involved in testing operational and application modernization using tools like Transformation Advisor and Mono2Micro. She enjoys sharing her experiences with modern technologies at various conferences and STEM events for schools. She is passionate about going green and sustainable living.
Neil Buesing
Co-Founder/CTO, Kinetic Edge
Kafka Streams – A Journey From Evaluation to Production
Kafka Streams is a Java client library that is distributed with Apache Kafka. It leverages Kafka to provide a stateful and distributed platform for scaling up streaming services for your application development. With a rich library of features, it’s challenging to evaluate if Kafka Streams is a suitable library to bring into your organization.
Within this session, you will see if Kafka Streams can provide value to your organization while understanding the challenges. Event Driven Applications have many design and implementation challenges; let’s see how Kafka Streams can help. Let’s make Kafka Streams a tool to consider for your journey with event streaming.
Not only will this session help you decide if Kafka Streams is the right development tool for you, but it also builds on the fundamentals to give even experienced users insights for building maintainable Kafka Streams applications.
About the Speaker
Neil is responsible for setting the technological strategy and vision for Kinetic Edge. Neil brings 25+ years of experience with midmarket and enterprise companies, tackling complex data and IT projects. More recently, Neil has become an avid fan and expert of all things Apache Kafka and the Kafka ecosystem. Neil is tasked with building and leading a world-class engineering team, leveraging cutting edge technologies and passionately advocating for his clients.
Nick Larson
VP of Technology, Improving
Flink Around, Find Out
The stream processing landscape has expanded quickly over the last few years. If you’re working in the Kafka Streams space then you have likely been watching the rise of Apache Flink out of the corner of your eye. Well, now it’s right in front of you and you need to figure out if you should be adopting Flink.
Apache Flink is a powerful and widely used open-source framework for distributed data processing and analytics. It offers both batch and streaming processing capabilities, high performance and scalability, and advanced features such as window operations, event time processing, and state management.
In this presentation, we will dive into the ecosystem of Apache Flink and explore its various components, such as the DataStream API and DataSet API, and the state backends available. We will also examine real-world use cases and best practices for using Flink in your data processing pipeline.
We will then compare and contrast Flink’s ecosystem to that of ksqlDB and Kafka Streams, which are also popular open-source frameworks for distributed data processing. We will explore the similarities and differences in their capabilities, performance, and ease of use, and discuss when it might be more appropriate to use one over the other.
At the end of the presentation, attendees will have a good understanding of the features, capabilities, and use cases of Apache Flink, and an overview of how these three frameworks can be integrated and used together to create a complete data processing pipeline.
About the Speaker
20+ Year IT Professional. Nick loves learning new technologies and helping clients solve problems!
Nick Morgan
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, C.H. Robinson
Theoretical Gains and Practical Pitfalls: Learnings from A/B Testing at CH Robinson
One of C.H. Robinson’s back-end tools is a recommendation engine in the domain of logistics. This system uses two data science models in order to provide semi-truck drivers with a list of available shipments that will be most relevant to their booking history.
These models are trained using offline metrics on historical data. These historic metrics serve a purpose – but are often not a fool-proof indicator of how successful a new model will be on live data.
C.H. Robinson mitigates this risk through production experimentation – slowly introducing carriers to a new model and comparing metrics between models before completely rolling out a new model.
This presentation will focus on the technical challenges associated with implementing this experimentation in our elaborate ecosystem. Such challenges include:
– Historic metrics vs live, real-time metrics
– Metrics that cannot be captured during the span of a http request
– Managing temporary code during the experiment lifecycle
– Significance testing on sparse data
– Sampling & Re-sampling of a/b groups in production
About the Speaker
Nick spent 5 years as a data scientist before moving into a machine learning role at C.H. Robinson, where he has been for the past 3 years. He received a Master of Science in the field of Software Engineering at Harvard University.
Ramesh Babu
Sr. Director of Engineering and Associate Technical Fellow, Best Buy
Technology Modernization using a Multi-Cloud Workload Distribution Strategy
High Level Agenda:
-Introduce the topic of Technology modernization and the importance of having a workload distribution strategy
-Discuss the current state of application modernization at BestBuy and need to think about Lift and Modernize strategy
-Explain the concept of transactional and analytical workload separation
-Explain BestBuy’s Multi-cloud workload distribution strategy using cloud native services and how we do new service introductions
-How is BestBuy scaling the use of cloud services for analytics and integration workloads
-Summarize the benefits of having a multi-cloud workload strategy
About the Speaker
Ramesh has 20 years of experience in technology modernization working for multiple enterprises in the twin cities area. He has been part of BestBuy’s digital transformation journey for more than 10 years. He has diverse experience in building web scale transactional systems, data and analytical platforms and leading technology architecture in Cloud.
Rob Koste
Director of Product (Data Sciences), Target
Data Discovery – Building an Enterprise Data Search Engine
Have you been faced with any of these questions:
– Where can I find data to help with my research?
– Do you know who to contact when the data is delayed?
– Do you trust the accuracy or source of the data?
– Do you understand the data?
These are commonly asked questions for any user of data ecosystem and they were common questions asked at Target 5 years ago. Since then, we’ve built a data catalog powered by several open source solutions (i.e. Elastic, Kafka, Redis, etc.) to answer these questions and enable Data Discovery for the organization. Join us as we discuss Target’s DataPortal solution.
About the Speaker
Rob Koste, better known as RIGBY, is a self proclaimed data geek and leads Data Science Platforms at Target.
Savannah Norem
Developer Advocate, Redis
When Probably Is Good Enough
Examining the probabilistic data structures that come built into Redis Stack will allow us to fully understand how, why and when they work best. We’ll examine count min sketch, top k, and bloom filters. Each of these has a distinct structure that we’ll start with so we can see how they work. We’ll then look at why each one is probabilistic and what the consequences are for that. Then we’ll look at use cases for each to see when they would best be used in the wild. We’ll wrap up with a demonstration of the space saving capabilities, for example the size difference between a bloom filter and a set with the same items added to each.
About the Speaker
Savannah joined Redis when she found out there was an opportunity to do two of her favorite things at once and get paid for it; working with and talking about cool technology. As a developer advocate, she gets to show developers some of the amazing things they may not know they can do.
Sean O’Neil
CTO, DiaspoCare
The Smart Village – How Open Source is Driving Sustainable Development in Africa
How can we use open source to drive sustainable development in Africa? The “Smart Village” platform delivers healthcare, education and food security at a wholistic community level. Through collective action, local co-ops can drive down the costs of goods and maximize benefits of economic output, which is then reinvested in community health and eduction. The Smart Village platform is 100% open source and can run on any device, including Raspberry Pi mini-computers. Partnering with AWS and Azure, the Smart Village is also available for free in the cloud.
About the Speaker
26 years of healthcare IT experience. Created the Open Source office at Optum in 2016. At Optum Health Innovation, Sean led their genomics, precision medicine and Artificial Intelligence programs. Since 2012, Sean has driven healthcare projects across sub-Saharan Africa, serving as the CTO of DiaspoCare.
Senthil S. Kumaran
Senior Technology Executive, HealthPartners
Role of Generative AI in Healthcare
Now that we all know what ChatGPT can do, let us look into some of the benefits of using Generative AI in healthcare? In this session we will explore the medical imaging improvements, role of AGI in drug discovery and development and also in disease diagnosis. This session will explore how virtuwell, a leading telemedicine platform from St. Paul, is using forecasting and prediction algorithms to analyze patient data and do systematic follow ups, connect patients with the right clinician at the right time. We will also cover how we Infused our platform with machine learning algorithms to be better at triaging on not only acute conditions but also on chronic conditions by integrating at home medical kit results. We will see how AI is used in cardiovascular diagnosis, Lung cancer detection, ophthalmic analysis, diabetic retinopathy, and other areas. We will also explore how AI powered Smart IOT devices in the future will help in decreasing the cost of delivering healthcare services while improving the quality of life for patients. We will also look at some of the challenges and future of Generative AI and its value proposition Healthcare.
About the Speaker
Senthil Kumaran is currently serving as CIO for Virtuwell, a HealthPartners company. He is a pragmatic leader, architect, designer and developer in Web and Mobile technology in developing Internet, e-commerce, and multi-tier client-server applications including healthcare, highly secure financial applications, manufacturing, retail, and consumer websites. He is part of HealthPartners AI and Machine Learning and Enterprise architecture group and a key contributor to the HIPPA/HITEC security and a conference presenter on Predictive Data Analytics, Rules, and Web/Mobile initiatives. He is currently working as an Adjunct faculty in Concordia University St Paul in Information Technology Management and Data and Analytics Management Master’s program. He is passionate about investing in both stocks and real estate and spends a lot of time analyzing cricket matches around the world. He received his MBA from St Thomas University, Minneapolis and Masters in Electronics Engineering from Bharathiar University, India.
Shaun Jurgemeyer
Principal Engineer, Chewy
Change your Purr-spective on Testing
How should we test our applications? What should our test coverage be? What the difference between an integration test and a functional test? We’re here to tell you none of that matters. Well, not exactly.
We’ll walk through the best practices that Chewy has established to build quality tests without getting bogged down in semantics. We’ll focus on the practices that matter most when creating quality, robust tests and provide some tips and tricks that can help you move faster and catch bugs sooner in your daily development.
About the Speaker
Shaun Jurgemeyer has been in software development for over 20 years, mostly focusing on back-end services and cloud architecture. He’s been involved heavily in the Minneapolis tech community as a conference organizer and developer advocate. He’s currently a Principal Engineer at Chewy where he’s helping to expand their micro-service and event-driven architecture as the company continues to scale their architecture.
Sri Harsha Gajavalli
Software Innovator, OWASP
Machine Intelligence for Cyber Defense
This session focuses on fundamentals of security, various open research problems in security and how AI can be leveraged in solving the cyber security problems and building intelligent solutions.
About the Speaker
Sri Harsha is a Cyber Forensic Enthusiast with great experience in machine learning, backend programming, and good at maintaining complex and critical systems. On a mission of creating an AI-Powered environment by fostering the interactions between students, developers, startuppers, and professionals interested in AI.
Stu Keroff
Technology Integrationist, Aspen Academy
Open Source in School: Successful and Proven Strategies
Open Source is almost always overlooked as a solution for learning in public education, but should it be? We say no and have been proving it by developing strategies for use of Open Source in schools to help kids learn and help schools save money.
The Aspen Academy Penguin Corps has been developing different methods for using Open Source at school and want to share with you what we found that works. You will hear us discuss Open-Source learning activities and lessons, different levels of integration (general education classroom, technology classes, and clubs), hardware procurement, and different methods of deployment. And everything we talk about is something we’ve tried. Open Source is how we have made a difference in the education of hundreds of Minnesota students.
Come hear Stu Keroff and the Penguin Corps and be inspired!
About the Speaker
Stu Keroff is a technology integrationist at Aspen Academy in Savage. He is the founder of the first two middle school Linux clubs in Minnesota: The Community School of Excellence Asian Penguins and the Aspen Academy Penguin Corps. He has spent the last 12 years developing methods to integrate Linux into the K-12 classroom.
Stu was the winner of the 2016 MN Association of Charter Schools Innovation Award, the 2017 MNSU-Mankato Alumni Association Distinguished Humanitarian Award, and the 2019 MESPA STEM Innovation Award. He has written several articles on school-based Linux clubs and is the author of “The Linux Club Guide” at www.linuxclubguide.com
Todd Gardner
CEO, TrackJS
Hostile JavaScript: Attacking and Defending the Browser
How much JavaScript is on your website? Do you know what it does? No really, have you looked at the code and seen what it does? Probably not.
JavaScript controls the client-side environment, and we can use it to compromise users, consume resources, and steal data. Yet many websites continue to add scripts without review, audit, or thought.
Let’s explore what JavaScript can do to a browser, the vectors that JavaScript can get added to websites, and how we can defend against JavaScript attacks.
About the Speaker
Todd Gardner is a software entrepreneur and developer who has built multiple profitable products. He pushes for simple tools, maintainable software, and balancing complexity with risk. He is the cofounder of TrackJS and Request Metrics, where he helps thousands of developers build faster and more reliable websites. He also produces the PubConf software comedy show.
Travis Gosselin
Distinguished Software Engineer, SPS Commerce
Unleashing Deploy Velocity with Feature Flags
A lot of development teams have built out fully automated CI/CD pipelines to deliver code to production fast! Then you quickly discover that the new bottleneck in delivering features is their existence in long-lived feature branches and no true CI is actually happening. This problem compounds as you start spinning up microservices and building features across your multi-repo architecture and coordinating some ultra-fancy release schedule, so it all deploys together. Feature flags provide you the mechanism to reclaim control of the release of your features and get back to short-lived branches with true CI. However, what you’re not told about feature flags in those simple “if/else” getting started demos is that there is an upfront cost to your development time, additional complexities, and some pitfalls to be careful of as you begin expanding feature flag usage to the organization. If you know how to navigate these complexities, you will start to unleash true velocity across your teams.
In this talk, we’ll get started with some of the feature flagging basics before quickly moving into some practical feature flagging examples that demonstrate its usage beyond the basic scenarios as we talk about UI, API, operations, migrations, and experimentation. We will explore some of the hard questions around “architecting feature flags” for your organization.
About the Speaker
Travis is an accomplished software developer, architect, and speaker. A tech enthusiast and blogger, Travis finds his niche in architecting and working with teams to compose highly automated service-oriented systems both in the cloud and on-premise. Travis currently works as a Distinguished Software Engineer for SPS Commerce, the world’s largest retail network. He has a strong focus on continually learning new architectures and development patterns across different stacks and technologies but has a special place in his heart for Developer Experience and Productivity.
Ty Sbano
CISO, Vercel
The Future of the Web: Collaborative, Open Source, Global Cloud Autonomy
The Web has progressed by leaps and bounds over the last decade, and with that, so too have user expectations. By giving frontend developers the infrastructure they need, baked directly into the framework, they are empowered to build a better, more performant Web. And while the world’s most beloved frontend frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt, and Svelte are creating a new era of developer experience, there is still room to grow.Ty Sbano has been leading his team in making the web faster by customizing the tooling developers need to build experiences their users love. Now, he is putting his sights on the next generation of the Web.In this session, Sbano will discuss his vision for a next generation web where global developers can create freely and execute new ideas that enable everyone to experience a faster, more distributed, performant web regardless of device or geographic location. Drawing from real-world experience amplifying the power that engineers and developers have built over the last ten years, including his own, he will dive into the key components needed to make this vision a reality.
About the Speaker
Ty Sbano is an Information Security executive with over 18 years of experience heavily focused on empowering end users, securely. Ty currently serves as Vercel’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).Ty’s career was focused on developing application and product security programs for Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, LendingClub, and Target. Key areas of knowledge include developing security champions, threat modeling, secure code training, static code analysis, component analysis, dynamic analysis, penetration testing and red teaming. Outside of being a CISO, Ty is an active angel investor as part of Silicon Valley CISO Investment Groups (SVCI) and actively advises security start-ups.Ty’s security mentality has been concentrated on enabling engineering and product teams to securely move at the speed of the business to make it a competitive advantage. Ty graduated from Penn State University with a B.S. in Information Science & Technology and from Norwich University with a M.S. in Information Assurance. He currently holds a CISSP, CEH, CCSK and CPT.
Valerie Lockhart
Executive Director, Code Savvy
Stable Diffusion and the Open-Source AI Art Revolution
In this session we will discuss open-source in AI, art generation, prompt engineering, and talk about some of the coolest projects, some of the new problems, and of course, some of the most innovative solutions. Hoping to include a panel discussion about this with creators, IP experts, and others.
About the Speaker
Valerie is a creative technologist and media producer – She is Founder of the MN Women in Tech and serves as the Executive Director of Code Savvy.
Zach Dahl
Software Engineer, Cargill
You Should Write Boring Code
Programming paradigms are often discussed and the war continues to rage between OOP and FP. However, a far more important skill that everyone can apply daily to their work life and is applicable regardless of programming paradigm is the ability to Write Boring Code.
This presentation will describe what is meant by “boring code”, how it benefits teams, and practices one can implement to help them write boring code.
About the Speaker
Zach has been developing professionally since 2014. Most of his work has been client-side, but he has a fair amount of experience with NodeJS and loves to use Rust in his free time.
Registeration Opens Monday, March 20!
Earl Bird registration opens on March 20! We are planning for 1,000+ attendees in 2023.