Building Real-time Distributed Applications with Akka.NET - Aaron Stannard

Developers are living in exciting, but more demanding times - we're expected to create applications and services that can deliver better value faster, at higher volumes, with less downtime. And in order to meet these demands we must learn new technologies and programming styles. Enter the actor model and Akka.NET.

In this talk we'll discuss why many developers in the industry are building real-time, distributed applications and how that can be done sanely with Akka.NET as the underlying programming model.

Vision in Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and Applied AI - Andreas Erben

Computer Vision and AI are not easy. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services offers various commoditized yet powerful and sophisticated services to work with visual content through Computer Vision. With those services regular developers can use their existing skills and leverage to deliver AI enabled solutions without needing to find deep learning experts.

Currently those services can

• detect and recognize Faces,
• classify images or find objects in an image
• understand rich information in an image,
• process whole videos and get insights from the video
• recognize handwriting and ink in applications
• provide OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on documents
• automatically parse a scan of a paper form

This fast paced session will introduce the currently available set of services and explain through sample code and demonstrations how to use them, new services will be added as they become available.

Decision makers and architects will benefit to understand those capabilities to deliver value in their organizations.

Budgeting in the Cloud - Ari Friedman

While the cloud can seem like a fun and exciting place, it is also an environment with many pit falls the can be very costly from a financial perspective. My presentation will cover many essential steps one should take for keeping costs manageable as well as tips in tricks for spreading your dollar further in these high cost times. Some of the tips and tricks will be leveraging cost calculators, technology choices, cost savings of PAAS, SAAS, and IAAS.

Amazing Algorithms for Solving Problems in Software - Barry Stahl

Sure neural networks are cool but have you ever used a Firefly Algorithm to find the solution to a problem? How about an Ant Colony algorithm or one of the many other algorithms inspired by nature? In this talk we will see examples of a number of awesome bio-inspired algorithms that can be used to solve problems in software. We'll see how each one works, analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and determine when it is best used. We'll also see a demonstration of how to use the optimization algorithms to train a machine-learning model. You'll leave with the knowledge you need to solve problems using these algorithms in your language of choice.

Training Future Technologists: Building pathways for the future through FIRST Robotics - Bee Bube

One of the greatest challenges in technology is a combination of succession planning and having a deep pool for technical talent.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology) Robotics is a program that targets young people from early elementary school through high school to teach students how to lead and manage projects and build their technical skills, while also learning how to manage stakeholders, requirements, budgets, communication, and collaboration — all things that uniquely prepare them for work as software engineers in the future.

Learn how the FIRST Robotics program can develop thoughtful, well-rounded technologists for our teams both broadly and through the lens of Girls on Fire 5679, an all-girls FIRST Robotics Competition team from North Carolina, coached by Melissa "Bee" Bube.

RxJS operators, RxJS operators everywhere - Blagoj Jovanov

There are 90+ rxjs operators. While some of them are used quite often, there are many which are used rarely. The goal of this talk is to focus on the second group, providing basic examples about their usage. After that some rxjs-powered games like 'Lotto' or 'Crack The Code' will be presented where some of the less known operators are applied.

Since the games are rather small, it is also possible to do live coding for some of them. This would be the best way for the audience to grasp the possibilities the various operators offer.

High Availability with Azure PaaS for Websites - Brian McKeiver

Let's review how to accomplish highly available architecture for modern websites in Azure. We will see how to leverage PaaS based resources like Azure Front Door, Azure App Services, Azure SQL Databases, and other Azure resource types that allow sites to scale, be more fault tolerant, and ultimately provide more uptime.

This session is for developers and end clients who want to leverage Azure to host their sites in a modern way.

Azure Logic Apps can do WAY more than you think! - Bryan Soltis

OK, I know what you're thinking. Azure Logic Apps is just some, jazzed-up automation service in Azure that you'd hardly ever use. You may have seen them in a session and thought they might come in handy in a pinch, but that's the extent of it. Well, I'm here to tell they can SO much more! In this hands on workshop, Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect Bryan Soltis will show you how to automate processes, integrate systems with ease, and just simplify your development life. Whether you're into hacking away at app development, getting your thrills with data, or taping together infrastructure to make things work, there's something in Azure Logic Apps for everyone!

In Pursuit of Knowledge (Keynote) - Cecil Phillip

Sometimes working as a software professional can feel like riding a never ending wave. There’s always new frameworks to learn, new patterns to explore, or new platforms to experiment with. How are we expected to do our jobs and still keep up with all the latest trends? Where do we find the time to learn all these things and not burn ourselves out?

Being able to manage knowledge is critical as we advance through our careers. It helps us focus, set expectations and preserve our mental health. Yet, we don’t discuss it as often as we should. Let’s change that today.

Building Microservices with Dapr and .NET - Cecil Phillip

Building distributed applications is not an easy thing to do. Breaking down your application into a collection of focused services comes with a completely different set of challenges. This is where DAPR can help us out. It provides a runtime and a collection of building blocks that can be used with any language or on any cloud. In this session, we’ll dive into DAPR, discuss the various build blocks it supports, and see some demos of how you can make use of it in your .NET applications.

It Came From the Browser - Chris DeMars

They said it would go away...they questioned its use...but little did they know...it came back! It always comes back. Get ready to be shocked, brace yourself for the latest and greatest new CSS features to hit your browser. In this talk we will be covering some of the awesome CSS features you can currently use in the browser, as well as features that can be used behind a feature flag.

Ship Accessibility - Dale Sande

Accessibility is now and has been a hot topic for many years. Web projects come in all sizes as well does team support. From small startups, all the way to entrenched enterprise solutions, addressing accessibility continues to be a challenge. TBH, HTML and CSS by itself is 100% accessible. But as soon as we start to add complex layouts and interactive elements, things breakdown fast.

Of the 10 most common accessibility issues #4 jumps out at me as a complex issue wrapped up in a mosaic of issues.

"Missing WAI-ARIA attributes - The Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) is a technical specification used by developers to build accessible interactive content. Interactive content includes elements like drag-and-drops, accordions, or sliders. Unfortunately, these types of interactive content interfere with users who rely on screen readers or speech instructions if they’re not implemented properly. The web today and the web of the future is complex and it will get even more complex. Users are demanding more and more complexity as far as interactive elements and immersive experiences all at the same time, we can not leave people with disabilities behind."

It is here where we have the challenge. Stipulating that all the devs in an org will be 100% fluent in accessible code is a bar that few will set. All the documents and lunch-n-learns will not solve this either. In this talk I will go over modern strategies for how we can all ship accessibility.

Full-Stack Java Development with Spring Boot - Dan Vega

Are you interested in building full-stack web applications with Spring Boot? If so, this session is going to give you everything you need to get started. You will learn some of the different approaches to building full-stack applications and the pros and cons of each.

First, we will look at how to use a frontend framework like Vue but this could be any component-based framework like React, Svelt, or even Vanilla JavaScript. Vue is a progressive framework and will allow you to incrementally adopt it in your Java applications as your needs grow.

Next, we will look at how to build a monolith application where you end up with a single deployable JAR. Finally, if your frontend and backend teams are separate, we will look at a solution for you. When you leave this session, you’ll have everything you need to start building full-stack web applications with Spring Boot.

CI/CD using Azure DevOps - Danan Hudson

I will demonstrate setting up a K8S cluster in azure and configuring CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps to deploy code to the K8S cluster. Will be 50% K8S best practices and 50% Azure DevOps best practices.

Micro Frontends with Webpack's Module Federation Plugin - Daniel Frey

You probably heard before of "Micro Services" and maybe even used it at your current company, but, did you know that now you can do the same in the Frontend? In this talk, we will understand how does micro frontends work and the reasoning behind them. We will also explore one of the most interesting ways of applying them in your projects using Webpack's Module Federation feature.

Stack Overflow: 100 Million Uniques / Month on 9 Web Servers - David Haney

Join me for a technical deep dive into how we've scaled Stack Overflow - a .NET Core, SQL, and jQuery app - to 100,000,000 unique monthly visitors using only 9 web servers. We'll dive into patterns and practices, technical tips and tricks, and the overall fundamentals of scaling web applications. Topics will largely be tech stack agnostic and include caching, load balancing, technical trade-offs, SQL best practices, and everything else that goes into successfully scaling your app.

Let's talk about Blockchain, DeFi, NFTs and DAO's - James Ruffer

James Ruffer from web3devs will spend time talking basics to advanced concepts of how Blockchain technologies including DeFi, NFTs and DAOs having been changing our development eco system since 2015 with projects from companies from FedEx to new startups. He will show a number of example projects and how developers and designers can use bounty/grant programs to get to learn new networks and platforms to help stay up to date in this rapidly changing industry while getting compensated.

Azure Chaos Studio - Deliberately Introducing Faults - Jared Rhodes

This session will focus on Azure Chaos Studio, a fully managed chaos engineering experimentation platform for accelerating discovery of hard-to-find problems, and introduce the audience to:

• Azure Chaos Studio and what purpose does it serve?
• The basics of Azure Chaos Studio and the different kinds of chaos it can be used for.
• How to use it in testing scenarios with Azure DevOps.

Azure for the Enterprise - Getting Started - Jared Rhodes

After signing the Enterprise agreement with Microsoft, its time to start onboarding your first team to your Azure environment. How do you setup networking? How do you manage access controls? Where are the access logs? How do we prevent cyber attacks? What do we do with the existing applications in our data centers? In this session, we will cover the steps in creating an Azure environment for the enterprise by exploring different options available to satisfy enterprise requirements. These include: Policies, Role Based Access Controls, Disaster Recovery, and more.

What's New in SQL Server for the Developer - Jeff Taylor

Are you still using an older version of SQL Server? This session will cover new time-saving functions directly related to everyday queries you write as a developer in the latest versions of SQL Server. We will also cover ways to increase application performance.

Improving code quality with Static Analyzers - Jim Wooley

How do you keep code consistent across a team or make sure your independent code follows accepted standards, use a Static Analyzer tool. See how to use some of these tools for your .Net, JavaScript, Style sheets, etc. to improve your code as an independent or large team lead.

Whether you're an independent developer that needs assistance reviewing your code, or a member of a large team that wants to keep code consistency among the team, static analyzer tools can help identify and optionally fix issues in your code. Many platforms have their own version to help based on the language, including Roslyn, JsLint, CssLint, SonarQube. FxCop, StyleCop, etc. We'll take a look at some of these tools and explore how they can help identify issues in your code and improve maintainability and decrease errors before you deploy to production. We'll also look at the ability to build your own tool to enforce rules in your specific domain.

C# Past, Present and Beyond - Jim Wooley

With the modern open source C# Compiler we've seen so many new language features it's hard to keep up. In this session we'll survey as many of the newer language features from C# 6 string interpolation to C#9 Records and see how you can take advantage of them in your applications today.

Software Economics: The Engineer's Edge - Joe Short

You've learned how to write code. You've delivered projects successfully. But, can you deliver business value? Ninety percent of a project's success happens off the keyboard; engineers can, and should, have significant influence in the process. In this talk, I will review key concepts and strategies for ethically maximizing the business value of the software you help build over its lifetime and avoiding costly missteps along the way.

Event Driven Architecture with Azure Storage - Jonathon Moorman

An overview of event driven architecture along with a review of different Azure storage types. Azure storage types including cosmos, blob storage, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Cognitive Search. This session also includes different tools, with code samples, that react to changes in Azure storage. The code samples include Azure Logic App, Azure Function, and Azure Data Factory along with triggers on the Azure Event Grid.

The Need for Human Intervention in Accessibility - Marco Pagani

As web technologies are rapidly advancing, accessibility concerns can often be left behind. Many tools and services promise to automate the implementation of accessible features for us, but these are often woefully inadequate. As we look for shortcuts to simplify development, it’s worth exploring just why accessibility requires the human touch.

Catch my Drift: The Importance of Model Health Monitoring - Mary Sheridan, PhD

We often spend many hours building and implementing a model, but then what? As long as the model is running without errors, we assume it is performing as expected. However, there are many external factors that can cause unanticipated feature and/or prediction drift that can go undetected and impact model performance. Even without having access to the actual data being predicted (y), there are several metrics you can easily monitor to identify signals that a model's health may be degrading before it becomes completely compromised. This session will review common reasons models can degrade, key measures to identify drift, and the benefits of implementing ongoing model health monitoring to both the customer and model supplier.

Designing for Observability - An exercise with Microsoft Azure - Michael Mann

With the move to the cloud we have to introduce observability into our systems. To be blunt we should always have done that but traditionally didn't. Yes, there are tools and vendor solutions, but they are not a panacea. How can we introduce observability now. In this talk I will discuss the need for observability and what it is. We will walk through examples of identifying the cut points in a system and how we can approach introducing observability incrementally using a systematic approach. The examples will use Azure, but these principals can be applied with any cloud provider and even on prem.

Cloud-Native Architecture - Nathaniel Schutta

It seems like a new cloud-native technology or project is launched every week, and though there are technical changes required for building and operating cloud-native applications, technology alone isn’t a silver bullet. It turns out that how you build your applications is critical to enable seamless scaling and resiliency to failures. What do you have to do to ensure your applications can fully leverage the power and flexibility the cloud offers?

Harness the Power of Docker from Your IDE - Olivia Guzzardo

Docker has revolutionized developer productivity through a simple local setup and deployment story. It helps ensure everyone on your team is working on the “same box”, reducing overhead time spent on things like setting up projects, resolving dependencies, and onboarding other developers. Now what if we could capture the power of Docker, while never leaving the comfort of our IDE?

In this session, you’ll learn how to use the remote development extensions within VS Code to move to container-based development – even if you know very little about Docker.

The Web for All. The power of progressive web apps - Patricio Vargas

As web performance and user experience across both mobile and desktop devices continue to increase in importance, so do progressive web apps (PWAs). PWAs are becoming more popular because they have lots of enhancements that help your application perform better and they make apps accessible even to users with limited internet connection. In this talk, you are going to learn the advantages of using PWAs and how to turn your web application into a PWA.

Elevate Kanban to The Next Level - Paul Gower

Have you ever experienced working on a team that has fully embraced Kanban and working in a state of flow? You have the Kanban board where all the work is visualized, the WIP limits are set based on the team agreement, and all the team members are using a pull system to keep work moving across the board. Your team may even be more advanced and doing a great job of following the “Stop Starting and Start Finishing” mantra of Kanban. You believe in Kanban and know that it works, but often wonder is there an even better way? A tool that could help you work in an even better way. What if I told you this tool would also help expose hidden weaknesses in the system you have set up to allow work to flow from concept to delivered value? One that might even help you deliver faster and safeguard your company from team members on vacation, sickness, or just the ebb and flow of employee turnover. Too good to be true, eh? Come to my talk and find out!

Build Intelligent applications with ML.NET and Windows Machine Learning - Ron Dagdag

Need to integrate trained machine learning models into Windows apps? In this session we will look into how Windows Machine Learning can transform applications with the power of artificial intelligence and run it on the devices by taking full advantage of hardware acceleration. We will walk thru and learn how to train an image classification model with ML.NET Model Builder and inference with Windows Machine Learning.

Making neural networks run in browser with ONNX - Ron Dagdag

The world of machine learning frameworks is complex. What if we can use the lightest framework for inferencing on edge devices? That’s the idea behind the ONNX format. Attend this session and find out how to train models using the framework of your choice, save or convert models into ONNX, and deploy to cloud and edge using a high-performance runtime in javascript.

GraphQL as Data Layer for Your Application - Roy Derks

Applications are getting more and more complicated, often delivering far more than just a UI. With this growing complexity comes a growing need for knowledge from the developers creating it. But do you actually need to implement this logic in your application? This talk will show how GraphQL can be used to reuse application logic across different applications, while also seperating specific features.

What is a Technical Product Manager and why do you need one? - Schuyler Bishop

Technical Product Managers are key for a successful internal platform. Why?

The platform’s job is to serve its users needs. These users are typically the company’s internal developers, other internal technical consumers of cloud or infrastructure or other stakeholders in the company wishing to deploy custom developer or COTS software.

How you understand these internal customers and their needs must influence the design and prioritization of your internal platform. Identifying your use cases, relating them to the needs of these internal developers and prioritizing them by business value lets you show early wins and prove the return on investment of your internal platform.

In this talk Schuyler will give an overview on:

• What is a Technical Product Manager (TPM) for internal platforms and what do they do?
• Why do you need a TPM for your internal platform and tooling?
• How does a TPM create value?

Functional Web Apps - The revenge of dynamic web apps - Simon MacDonald

Building static websites with a Jamstack approach offers a fantastic solution for building massively available systems without the downsides of traditional dynamic stacks like Rails, Express or Wordpress. But there is a different way. In this talk you will learn how to build massively available dynamic web apps with pure cloud functions. Functional Web Apps (FWA) are built with pure cloud functions, sport a builtin database and deploy quickly and reliably. No more waiting on slow builds. No more trading off a dynamic end user experience by pre-rendering spinners. We will build markup on the fly with the determinism and reliability of immutable deployments leveraging the power and simplicity of the ultimate building block: pure cloud functions.

How Social Media Can Land You Your Dream Job - Taylor Desseyn

Have you ever wanted to know how to find a job without using a recruiter? Do you know how to actually use LinkedIn to connect with people or find a job posting? Do you even have a Twitter account? This talk is a hands on guide to navigating social media to leverage your network and find your dream job without the hassle of all those terrible recruiters :) Bring your computers, cell phones, and get ready to be a pro at the end of this session on leveraging your network!

Teach, Don't Tell: Tools on Becoming a Better Technical Mentor - Thomas Desmond

When you are in the tech industry it is pertinent to continually build your knowledge. This is especially true because there are always new frameworks, languages, and tools being released. What can you do with all of this learning? Share it, and share it well. Being able to teach your fellow developers is crucial to the improvement of your product and your team. In this talk, you’ll learn strategies and techniques to become a better technical mentor. Let’s become quality mentors, facilitators, and coaches– together.

Clean Code - Thomas Meadows

Computer software is written with what we call “Computer Languages.” If we write software in computer languages, then why has computer science become so important? Come learn why your company may be creating technical debt by focusing on science instead of english, the language your software is written in.

Deep Dive into Building Streaming Applications with Apache Pulsar - Timothy Spann

In this session I will get you started with real-time cloud native streaming programming with Java, Golang, Python and Apache NiFi. I will start off with an introduction to Apache Pulsar and setting up your first easy standalone cluster in docker. We will then go into terms and architecture so you have an idea of what is going on with your events. I will then show you how to produce and consume messages to and from Pulsar topics. As well as using some of the command line and REST interfaces to monitor, manage and do CRUD on things like tenants, namespaces and topics.

We will discuss Functions, Sinks, Sources, Pulsar SQL, Flink SQL and Spark SQL interfaces. We also discuss why you may want to add protocols such as MoP (MQTT), AoP (AMQP/RabbitMQ) or KoP (Kafka) to your cluster. We will also look at WebSockets as a producer and consumer. I will demonstrate a simple web page that sends and receives Pulsar messages with basic JavaScript.

After this session you will be able to build simple real-time streaming and messaging applications with your chosen language or tool of your choice.

Making A Strong Case For Accessibility - Todd Libby

Accessibility is often overlooked or bolted on to the end of a project from the experiences in my career in web development and design. This talk speaks on these points and how you can bring accessibility to your organization.

Refactoring a monolith into services - Usha Suryadevara

Every company that has been around for over 5 years has a legacy system that is in need of refactoring for one business reason or another. Contrary to popular beliefs, microservices are not a one-size fits all approach. There is no single best strategy to decomposing a monolith into microservices but there are general strategies that one can follow when refactoring the monolith into services. We want to ship features, but also improve our architecture. Come find out how you can improve the architecture while regularly releasing new features in this talk.

Rebuilding Together (Keynote) - Valarie Regas

Since March 2020, the world has changed, and the tech community has had to change along with it. Where do we go from here? How do we regain some of what we have lost, while looking forward to the future and adapting to our new reality? We move forward as one, together.

Rebuilding Together takes a critical look at the realities facing the tech community in post-pandemic life. I explore what the future might look like, if we all work together towards a new normal, based on empathy, compassion, and community. Rather than giving vague platitudes concerning the work ahead of us, I issue concrete, actionable tasks to us all, such that every attendee leaves with an idea of how to rebuild, and help the tech community thrive again.

Guerrilla Job Fair: Getting Hired in an Unfair World - Valarie Regas

Resumes are worthless. In today’s world, getting your dream job requires thinking outside of the box, taking risks, and disrupting the status quo. This talk helps people identify their true strengths in the marketplace, and learn to leverage them to land a great role.

This talk breaks down the steps each person can take to get closer to their dream role. At a high level, these steps involve:

• Identifying one’s strengths and weaknesses, as seen through the eyes of a potential employer
• Turning a long-term dream into an actual plan, with actionable steps
• Ways to get out from behind a computer, and get in front of those you want to hire you
• Ways to take chances, be seen, and stand out from your peers

I’ve been able to help those close to me; now I want to help you! Let me share some concrete ideas and techniques to assist you in moving onward and upward in your career.

Stop Depending on the Web Framework - William Shepherd

This talk intends to demonstrate to junior to intermediate level developers how to invert their app's dependencies so they no longer depend on the web framework. All too often, the framework, which should be an implementation detail, directs how our applications works. This is not great because it means updates to the web framework may impact our application code, making functionality more challenging to test.This talk will use Typescript as the demo language.