Sessions

12 skills every rookie programmer should have, but often don't

Students coming out of college, or the newly popular coding bootcamps, are
eager to get working in the business world of programming. Unfortunately,
many college programs and bootcamps are leaving students ill-prepared for
life in the working world of computer professionals.

In this talk, I'll present a dozen areas of knowledge that every programmer
should know, but may not have learned, or learned with enough depth.  We'll…

Elm is a language with immutable types (like Typescript) that is purely functional (like Haskell) and is a response to the cryptic error messages and hard to test edge cases of vanilla JS.  In production it is often more performant than React, Angular, or Vue.  If you like Elm, it can deploy incrementally, replacing just a single line of your existing code.

This talk is for web developers who would like an introduction to Elm.  Bring your computer: after giving examples that answer "Why Elm?"…

coming soon

According to a recent Bloomberg article, “Artificial intelligence is likely to be the most disruptive force in technology in the coming decade and companies that embrace AI may get a competitive edge while those that don’t risk extinction.”

There is a lot of hype out there, but in the end it is about achieving business goals. Enough of the core technologies have now been proven out (think Alexa/Siri, autonomous vehicles, visual/voice recognition, etc.) that it is only a matter of time before …

Include technologies covered - Node.js | ORDS | Spatial

Have you ever wanted to track the location of a physical object and trigger an action based on the proximity of that object? The problem is, how to do this without spending a small fortune?

In this session, Blaine walks through using Raspberry Pi to track a small Bluetooth LE beacon. After a short explanation of BLE beacons, he talks about configuring the Pi and adding the software.

Beacon tracking generates lots of data for analys…

Types and attributes. Language keywords and features. Disposable objects. Both C# and the .NET Framework have a ton of features and capabilities within, but sometimes erroneous information is spread about how they work. In this session, we'll set things straight on a number of topics so you know exactly what's going with your code.

C# has long been recognized as a robust and powerful language, favored by developers across the globe. What if you were able to write C# across the stack, even replacing JavaScript code? With the new experimental Blazor framework, you can do it! Come to learn about Blazor and where it is headed, and learn about the power of writing a single-page application (SPA) in C# without any non-standard plugins or extensions.

At my workplace, we have a fairly successful Developer Learning and Sharing group that meets every 2 weeks.  We have been able to cover some very timely topics and with a good deal of depth in our learning.  Regular attendance is over 50% of developers and growing.  Also, this group now is seen as a primary resource for guiding some of our development processes.


We've definitely had some growing pains in getting to this point, and I'd like to share with you some of the tips that we found mo…

We will be giving away Raspberry Pi IoT Kits during our session. ;)

Security is an important aspect of our lives and we use various means of security every day. In order for us to secure items in our lives, we have to have a trust factor. This applies to our bank accounts, our passwords, and even vehicles that we utilize every day. Sometimes, security can be complex -- in the case of bank account being accessed over the internet, or a rolling security codes in your car's remote start module, …

tl;dr - Let's develop an Action/Skill for Google and Alexa in one neat little package

Remember when the Echo was made available back in late 2014?  It was invite only, then Prime only, then finally available for everyone the next summer.  Only, most people didn't really seem to care.  What does it even do?  Why should I bother?  Can't I just use my phone?

Fast forward to 2018, and it seems like everyone at least knows the Echo, and probably the Google Home.  People know how to use them and…

The title mentions Rails but this talk is really for all interested folks to get an introduction to Docker and how it can be used for development. We'll cover docker compose and some strategies for organizing a workflow. We'll work through an example app that connects to a database as well. Along the way I'll share problems I ran into and how I overcame or worked around them. 

Have you ever been in a meeting and thought “why doesn’t anyone know what I’m trying to say”? Or in a project and thinking “how do I get us to speak the same language”? I have found from the various roles I’ve played through my journey to a Business Analyst, that if you get to know the humans you work with, the work will in turn become easier. This talk will be a journey with all the lessons I have learned on how to quickly Win Others Over (WOO) and how to take a step back and learn where your c…

tl;dr - Write less (but safer!) code in your Android apps or any JVM-based projects

Ever work on an Android app and tire of all the boilerplate code?  Or spend hours chasing down NullPointerExceptions in your Java app?  Enter Kotlin, JetBrains' new(ish) free, open-source programming language that targets the JVM.  This means you can use it everywhere you use Java, but with a modern, succinct syntax.

For native Android developers, Kotlin is not only available, but it's now considered a firs…

As AI continues to transform software development, the "soft skills" of leadership, problem solving, critical thinking, etc have become more important than ever.   Join me to learn the critical leadership skills for the era of AI and how to develop them

It’s Friday night and you’re making your character for a fun evening of gaming. You’ve rolled your abilities and even got two 18s. But what class should you pick given your rolls? If you pick that class, is your character playable? What kind of character have you created?

Or maybe you’re a game master and you’ve been running a game for some time. Do you need to know how much treasure that dragon hoard should have? Or are you wanting to figure out how many encounters your players will make it …

Service Fabric Mesh provides a PaaS based Service Fabric environment for deploying native microservice workloads. This session is a tour of Service Fabric, Service Fabric Mesh and why you might care. Come mash some mesh and lets start cookin' up some Service Fabric goodies.

Smalltalk is a pure object oriented language created by a research group led by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC. It was where Steve Jobs was amazed and inspired by the graphical user interface on the Alto computers, which was later implemented for the Apple Lisa, that failed for its expensive price and low performance. 

Pharo is an open source language inspired by Smalltalk. It is a live programming language and is its own integrated development environment, so it is kind of its own OS! 

Pharo full…

You've hit your Visual Studio breakpoint, opened the watch window and you're looking at a wall of nested collections and object graphs. You know the data you want is in there, but digging it out of the built-in data table UI feels like the "doing it the hard way" part of an infomercial.

Now, imagine being able to shape your data the way that makes it easiest to understand and debug, limited only by your imagination (and time, of course).

In this session, we'll take a look at the Visual Stu…

If you're a beer-lover and are searching for interesting ways to utilize your Raspberry Pi, search no further! In this talk, we will review the process to use IoT to measure beer consumption and predict when your keg is running low. Session will include discussion and code snippets from the IoT device all the way through to the Cloud and leveraging a Universal Windows Platform app.

Why did the programmer run out of shampoo?  The instructions on the bottle were: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It in this session we'll look at how to harness the power of recursion to make our lives easier.  We'll look at primitive recursion with Peano arithmetic.  Next we'll look at the most powerful Inductively defined data structure in the world, the con list.  Lastly we'll look at how to solve problems using structural and generative recursion.  You'll walk away with a new understanding of how …

Please join us when International Business Consultant & STEM University Instructor J. Dietenberger provides reflections on powerful leadership practices used around the globe.  If your professional journey has taken you from Code & I.T., to Entrepreneurship, and now to being in a Leadership and Management role, this 40-minute presentation is for you.  With Tech Talent, Skilled Developers, & Innovative Thought Leaders being in very high demand globally, J. Dietenberger will reflect on powerful le…

IoT means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We'll talk about what several of these definitions mean and start exploring the differences, and more importantly the similarities between them. Learn about the how you can mix and match the components of IoT to bring the greatest flexibility to the project you want to bring to life!

Computing represents 60% of STEM jobs, but only 25% of schools teach CS.  Learn how TEALS partners teachers with developers and engineers to teach Intro and AP CS.There is an increasing demand for computer science courses yet a shortage of teachers with the subject matter expertise required to teach these classes. TEALS provides a short-term solution to the teacher shortage and helps schools build a long-term and sustainable computer science program by partnering teachers new to computer science…

JavaScript has changed the world as we know it. It's applications are growing both in popularity and size. It is time that we give this language the respect it deserves. By leveraging TypeScript's type-system, your large JavaScript application code will be developed faster with fewer type-related bugs and allow for easier refactoring.

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that scales. Allow me to show you why I believe TypeScript makes JavaScript tolerable. Discover how TypeScript is backwar…

The syntax for Async / Await in C# is straightforward but the mechanics are not. This discussion will provide understanding of those mechanics so you can be a true wizard with Async / Await in C#. While sharing a few advanced scenarios we’ll touch on various topics including: System.Threading.Task, Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern, ConfigureAwait, Synchronization Context, Execution Context, Task debugging, Unit Testing, TaskCompletionSource and AsyncLocal. This is for developers who are already u…

C# is an open-source, mature object oriented language, used by millions of .NET developers, yet its evolution is still underway. In this session, we'll cover the latest features that have been added to C#7 and how they work in detail so you'll know when to use them effectively in your new .NET projects. You'll also see the direction C# may be going with C#8 and beyond.

Your heart is in the right place. But no matter what you say, everyone seems to think you're being mean or a jerk. Why ask for feedback if they're going to get mad?  

Does this sound familiar? 

Let's face it, most of us programmers aren't great at giving constructive criticism. I'm perfectly comfortable with facts, figures, programming and tech, but when it comes to sharing with other humans, sometimes things just seem to crash and burn.

Well, no more, my friend! I have the secrets of g…