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2018 KEYNOTES
2018 SPEAKERS

WORKSHOPS
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Hands-on React.js workshop; Silicon Valley's secret recipe
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From zero to hero hands-on Docker and Kubernetes workshop
OFFICIAL SCHEDULE
Attendee Check-in at the Avalon Desk
Swing by the check-in desk at the Avalon ballroom to save time and check-in
Speaker Dinner at Toro Restaurant
Pre-conference dinner for staff and speakers. Invitation Only.
Meet and Greet at Tiki Bar
Cocktail by the beach to welcome all attendees, speakers, and staff at Tiki Bar. This event is open to all.
Registration is open at the Avalon Desk
Warmup
Opening
Keynote 1 | Ten Traits of Effective Teams
Six and a half years ago Phil left Microsoft and joined what some internally deemed an anarchist organization, but is known publicly as GitHub. At the time, they were fifty employees with no managers. It was an interesting time. Over the years, they added more structure, managers, etc. Amidst all these changes, he picked up some lessons on what makes a team (and organization) effective.
He wishes he could tell you there’s a magic formula and it’s easy. It’s not. However, it can be easier for you than for him! In this talk, Phil will describe some of his failures in this journey and some of his successes. Hopefully, both will give you some ideas of what to avoid and what to try to make your own teams more effective.
Phil HaackKeynote 2 | Getting started in a complex world
Programming is really complex these days, and a lot of programming languages are really big. How do we introduce new developers to those languages? How do we structure languages so they can be learned in phases? How should this affect future language design?
Jon Skeet
Intelligent Web Apps with Azure Cognitive Service
Making your apps intelligent may sound like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be! AI words like natural language processing, computer vision, and text analytics, sound like things we’d like in our web apps, right? Well, you can have that and more available at your fingertips and in your language of choice with Azure Cognitive Services!
In this talk, we’ll talk to a GitHub bot, vote on cats vs dogs, and use Twitter to find out how excited attendees are about CDC to walk through some of what Cognitive Services have to offer. AI is a possibility for you and your apps, and you’ll leave this talk with a good starting point on how to do it with Azure Cognitive Services.
Jasmine Greenaway
Serverless Workflows with Azure Functions
Today, it’s hard to have a conversation about the cloud without talking about serverless computing. Like any new shinny tool, you might be wondering what you can do with it or where it a good place to use it.
In this talk, we’ll get an overview of serverless and the types of scenarios it enables. We’ll take a look at Azure Functions and see some demos of how quickly we can get started building serverless solutions. Some topics we’ll discuss include triggers, services integrations and monitoring. In addition to that, we’ll dive into the Durable Functions feature for creating stateful workflows.
Cecil Phillip
Lunch
For its convenience and proximity to the conference area, we recommend you grab lunch at Market Restaurant.
When Booleans Are Not Enough... State Machines?
Booleans are great to represent single states, but when it comes to multiple ones, they are far from ideal. This talk aims to explore cases where booleans are not the right solution, and how state machines may be a better approach when designing objects that describe multiple states and behaviors.
Harrington Joseph
Choosing the right cloud, a machine learning approach
As cloud services have grown in maturity and offerings, the differentiation between clouds has shrunk. For example, many CSPs now provide capabilities to host and run Jupyter Notebooks for Data Science workloads, but what makes one different than the other? This talk will walk through the process of curating and labeling a data set of notebooks from various clouds using GitHub’s API, then apply machine learning to determine the differentiations between them according to the code from each userbase. Finally, work will be presented to show how the same approach can be applied to other ubiquitous cloud services, such as image classification.
Nick Acosta
Building Serverless Web Applications with AWS Amplify
Building a modern production-ready web application entails many basic yet sophisticated requirements including but not limited to authentication, analytics, an API layer, storage, caching, & offline functionality. In this talk, we’ll look at how to quickly scaffold new cloud services like user-signin, a GraphQL API, Lambda functions, analytics, & even a chatbot directly from the command line. I’ll then introduce AWS Amplify, an SDK that allows developers to easily connect to cloud services to their web or mobile application & begin using these services from within their client application.
Nader Dabit
Revolutionize Your Workflow with… ChatOps!
ChatOps is revolutionizing the way you work! How? It allows you to automate your workflow, making all of your work processes easier, by connecting all your software tools that you use in a collaboration tool using chatbots. With 7,000 readily available APIs out there, this gives you so many options and opportunities to connect ALL these things! In this talk, you will learn how you can get started with ChatOps and how it will benefit the way you work as a developer.
This talk aims to teach a new skill that developers can use either to automate their workflow whether it’s DevOps tasks or any kind of developer tasks. It simplifies weeks of work into minutes using Chatbots.
Tessa Mero
Closing Day 1 | Create an AI powered photo sharing app in about the time it takes to order and eat a Pizza
This talk is no fluff, just code. In a short space of time, we’ll see how to build a cross-platform mobile app that allows you to take photos, upload them to the cloud, then have them available to other users of our app to view. To add extra magic we’ll unleash the power of AI over our photos to filter out anything rude, provide descriptions for visually impaired users and even apply snap-chat style filters to replace any faces in the images with an emoji that matches the emotions being shown.
All this in about the time it takes to order and eat a pizza!
Jim Bennett
Speakers & Community Gathering at Tiki Bar
Cocktail by the beach to welcome all attendees, speakers and staff at Tiki Bar. This event is open to all.
Organizational Transformation with SCRUM and Agile
This presentation will focus on the transformation that development organizations can achieve by adopting the SCRUM and Agile methodologies and tools, along with a Case Study of how this was achieved in an organization.
Gabriel Fernandez
Integration Test Coverage
Ever wondered what the test coverage is for your integration tests? Why should you even care about it if you’re already looking at unit test coverage? In this talk we’ll cover why you’d want to look at this metric, and how to get started. Examples will include setting up a test server inside of docker, using the JaCoCo agent on a server, and aggregating results.
Janine PattersonLunch
For its convenience and proximity to the conference area, we recommend you grab lunch at Market Restaurant.
Angular Workshop
Let’s create a web app with Angular in 3 hours!
This intensive technical workshop will start from scratch and walk you through how to develop an Angular data-centric application with Angular, TypeScript and Visual Studio Code; covering many topics including Data Binding, Services and RxJS.
By the end of the workshop, you should walk away with a solid overview of Angular and be comfortable starting your own project!
Laurent Duveau
Women (and men) in tech: key concepts to help you succeed in your career
During this talk, I am going to present important lessons learned from people that were really successful in their careers, that might help you to plan and succeed in your own career.
The main goal is to motivate women to invest in technical careers and also help to drive it to the direction they want and finally master in their field to successfully achieve their goals. Although the discussion is focused on women it applies to men’s career as well.
Yara Senger
What’s new in Entity Framework Core 2.1?
Entity Framework (EF) Core 2.1 is the lightweight, extensible, and cross-platform version of Entity Framework, the popular Object/Relational Mapping (O/RM) framework for .NET. This talk will give a quick look at the new features for .NET Core 2.1. We will look at the new release, how to install it and show sample projects covering the following topics:
• Improved LINQ Translation
• Owned Entities and Table Splitting
• Global Query Filters
• DbContext Pooling
• String interpolation in raw SQL methods
• Explicitly compiled queries
• Self-contained entity configurations in code first
• Query types
• LINQ GroupBy
• Data Seeding

Kubernetes: The Developer Experience
Containers are the next evolution in modern development, enabling organizations to be more agile than ever before. They can write their app once and deploy everywhere, whether dev, test or production. Containers can run on any hardware, on any cloud, and in any environment without modification. In short, they offer a truly open and portable solution for agile DevOps. This session will begin with a short intro to Kubernetes followed by an end to end demo of testing and deploying a .Net Core application to a Kubernetes Cluster with a CI\CD pipeline. We will finish the session with lessons learned and best practices of using containers in production.
Dave Strebel
Lunch
For its convenience and proximity to the conference area, we recommend you grab lunch at Market Restaurant.
Is the Caribbean ready for digital transformation?
All revolutions are disruptive, and Industry 4.0 is no exception. It poses an opportunity: for new products and services. Better ways to serve citizens, customers, global neighbors, it will bring new jobs, and wholly new business models. Today it transforming economies, jobs, an even the way society itself. How prepared is the Caribbean in the transformation? What is our digital DNA? Do we have the infrastructure? are we providing the needed support to the emerging technological leaders? Are the citizens aware of the changes upon us?
Melanie Wynter
Debugging the Internet of Things with Tracing
In IoT applications, distributed systems are the norm. Debugging can be especially challenging, as devices in the wild can behave in erratic ways, and our systems can give us limited insight into what may be going on.
Worse still, traditional debug tools only let us see one piece of our application at a time.
Tracing is a method of seeing a full request as it passes through your distributed system. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the Open Source tools and standards to come out of tracing, and how they can be used to build more robust IoT platforms.
Kirk Kaiser
Xamarin App architecture with MvvmCross an Azure
In this workshop you’ll learn how you need to setup a Xamarin app that is ready to grow and scale without compromises. You’ll about abstraction, MVVM, Dependency injection and IoC, and all of this in a understandable way! Also you’ll learn how to connect this to a Azure backend, and use platform specific features. After the workshop you’ll be able to create your own MvvmCross app and build it out to a enterprise ready code base!
Martijn Van Dijk
How to Navigate Corporate America as a Minority
We are all bright, young, ambitious, and talented individuals when we graduate. However, this does not always translate into success in corporate America. I want to have a frank discussion about pitfalls that many young professionals find themselves trapped in, due to being unable to find their place amongst a group of individuals who are completely different.
This is a topic that every minority who has been in corporate America can relate to and is very necessary to push our attendees to success. Many leave their companies after a short period of time because they don’t feel like they fit into the corporate mold. But I want to teach attendees that they don’t have to fit in; they can stand out and use their diversity as a strength and as motivation to be successful.
Nik Kemp
Registration is Open at the Avalon Desk
Warmup
Opening
Keynote #3 | .NET Everywhere and for Everyone
In this Mobile First, Cloud First world, it’s critical to have a high-performing, powerful framework available on every platform you’re targeting. That framework is .NET and has expanded to every device imaginable. Whether it is server, web, mobile, wearables, or IoT, .NET is there and fully cross-platform. Developers can now leverage Xamarin to craft native Mobile and Desktop applications from a single shared code base, while building back-ends and web sites in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core to run on any operating system to power them. This keynote session will focus on how you can leverage your existing .NET and C# skills to build apps for any platform. You’ll go through everything you need to get started building apps and a few revolutionary tools to help learn the amazing APIs packed into each platform.
James Montemagno
Angular Ivy - Theory and Example
After over a year of work, Angular has a new rendering pipeline and view engine, code named Ivy. What is it? Why and how was it developed? Gain an understanding of the basics of Ivy and the principles under which it was developed. Look under the hood to know why Ivy code is so small and performant. And see live examples of how Ivy opens up new ways of developing Angular applications.
Jason Aden
Porting MVVM Light to .NET Standard: Lessons learned
.NET Standard is the new way to create portable assemblies. After learning about portable class libraries in the past years, it is now time to upgrade our game and start coding for Linux, Mac OS and other platforms untouched by .NET until now. More and more libraries are getting ported to .NET Standard, sometimes really easily and sometimes more painfully.
In this session, Laurent Bugnion, the creator of the popular open source MVVM Light Toolkit, will help you understand why .NET Standard can benefit you, and talk about his experiences converting his framework to .NET Standard.
Laurent Bugnion
Don't get Lost in Space: How high performing teams collaborate to ship world class software
Learn what Nasa’s Mission Control Center can teach us about collaboration and teamwork. Not every startup has the ability to create rigorous guidelines for communication, but GitHub can give you the guidelines and the tools to make every launch and release feel as easy as getting a rocket to the moon. At the end of the day, GitHub is your control center. Apply these learnings to how you work with your team can collaborate to ship world-class software no matter its size and scale.
Key Takeaways: GitHub approaches collaboration modalities similar to NASA: explicitly, thoughtfully and mindfully. Using GitHub for Collaboration will make you better at shipping software as a team.
Brian Douglas
Lunch
For its convenience and proximity to the conference area, we recommend you grab lunch at Market Restaurant.
A Tale of Two Frameworks
Microservices have redefined the way server-side systems are architected, selling the promise of isolated, easily maintainable services in lieu of tangled monoliths. Client-side systems, however, are not typically mentioned in the same breath as microservices. Shouln’t application frontends also be designed to gain some of the benefits of microservice architecture?
This talk will dive into the increasingly popular use of micro-frontends, or applying microservice architecture to frontend development. We will go through a case study in which an application using a single frontend framework evolved into two pieces, each using a different framework.
Attendees will learn what micro-frontend architecture is, and how, why, and when to use it.
Amanda Muñoz
Machine Learning in iOS Application Development With Watson and CoreML
CoreML is a machine learning framework offered by Apple. It is the foundation for Vision and Natural Language processing. Often times, custom models do not suit our needs and we need to create our own models and with our own datasets. Although popular, frameworks for creating our own models such as TensorFlow, Keras, & Caffe require a strong grasp on machine learning and substantive computing power to train the models.
How can we utilize machine learning to train our data to create a custom model to use in our next application in a reasonable amount of time, and without substantive computing power?
You can use Watson Cloud Services as an easier and quicker alternative to simplify tasks and expedite your model to use in your next app. Watson Cloud Services host the full models, retrain them and make simple HTTP requests to retrieve the information about the classified objects. No need to worry about the tedious machine learning process requiring an arduous number of hours and perfecting the machine learning ins and outs.
The magic lies in training your models with existing cloud-based Watson services where you can quickly train your data to create a custom model, and plug this into your iOS application. This talk will explore Watson Visual Recognition by creating a custom model with our data set, which will be utilized by an iOS app via CoreML.
Helen Lam
Healthcare + Alexa Skills + Serverless + IoT + Machine Learning: live long and prosper!
During this talk, we will present different Cloud-based health-care live-demos designed with IoT, Serverless, Alexa Skills and Machine Learning using Echo Dot, Sensors, Mongoose, FreeRTOS. We will provide deep technical details of each live-demo to illustrate how we can create secure, reliable, globally scalable and Internet fail resilient architectures.
Vinicius Senger
Working in a distributed team
A distributed team allows your company to hire the best talent regardless of their location. But it is not as easy as one may think, to work well in a distributed team! It can be a real challenge to get right and work effectively. In this talk we will explore the three key areas (mastering our tools, fostering relationships, and developing the proper communication patterns) to make ourselves great remote workers! You may also find out a secret formula to remote working!
Kimberly Noel
Make fun, make music with Node.js 🎵
Make music with code! Learn how to string together notes, chords, and scales, building songs from music found online. For the grand finale, we as a collective group will create a song together on the spot.
Lizzie Siegle
Closing Ceremony
The closing ceremony is going to be taking place on the main stage.
Conference Party
The Conference Party is going to be taking place at Sundance Terrace.
T2018: Skynet owns us
Will be talking about how to use GPU computing to train models that allow computers to determine psych profiles of people by reverse image searching their face on social media. This is mostly used for advertisement micro-targeting and it also has sophisticated warfare applications.
Raul Roa
Bots, voice and the future
In the age of conversational interfaces, users are increasingly dispensing with swipes & taps and expecting to interact with applications in a more flexible & contextualized way: voice.
voice recognition software has increasingly grown in popularity from digital assistants to voice-print identification for individual speakers and always-on interfaces. In this talk, we will go through contextualised communications, why it’s a key element of applications in the present and future? And what bots and voice have to offer.
Rabeb Othmani
How to apply AI to testing
It is widely accepted that AI is the future of testing. However, because a fault lies in the eye of the beholder, it is pretty unclear how to apply AI to testing—called the Oracle problem.
There are literally thousands of UI test automation tools. But due to high efforts for creation and maintenance, together with the brittleness and unreliability of the resulting tests, testing often remains a manual task (confirming the testing pyramid). Meanwhile, Software testing accounts for 30%-40% of the budget of a typical software project.
However, there is a way to circumvent the oracle problem and use AI to not only find technical errors (i.e. crashes), but to generate tests for business functionality—autonomous automation. See how AI can be trained to generate tests that are optimized towards several goals and are even better than manually created ones.
Visit the future of testing and see how AI can help us create better software!
Jeremias Rößler
Lunch
For its convenience and proximity to the conference area, we recommend you grab lunch at Market Restaurant.
Ethereum Workshop
You keep hearing about how the blockchain is the next big thing. It will transform the banking industry, democratize access to financial instruments, and allow us to have secure control over internet data.
At this workshop you’ll learn the first steps on how to write, debug, and test programs on the Ethereum blockchain.
Amhed HerreraAutomating Cloud Infrastructure Security Controls
The Center of Internet Security (CIS) provides guidance on how to improve infrastructure configuration to demonstrate a strong security posture and deploy widely accepted controls, from rotating encryption keys to ensure networking rules provide protective restrictions. With CloudFormation and AWS-provided templates and code, the implementation of these controls can be highly automated. Learn more about these controls, how you can augment these controls, and how you can harden new AWS accounts and implement these best practices from Day One.
Luis Colon
Cloud Agnostic Infra Automation and Security - Simple Solution
Explanation of why immutable infrastructure is important, how it can be achieved, and ways that developers can setup their production environments using both with simple tools and processes regardless of the cloud they are using.
Thomas Gamble
Observability-Driven Development: What DevOps is Really About
The term “DevOps” too often gets mixed up with tooling, mischaracterizing the whole idea as something you can buy or hire your way into. In reality this misses the entire point: it’s not about tooling; it’s about people, learning, and creating a culture of understanding.
At the heart of this mindset is observability. You wouldn’t ship an app without testing it, so why ship one you can’t observe working in production? Building observable systems allows you to truly understand how they work, ask questions that help you build better products, and build a shared understanding that extends well beyond just the engineering team.
In this session we’ll dig into what it means to build observable systems, how your whole company can benefit from it, and how it might be far easier to get started than you might think. Along the way I’ll include real examples from building our own systems, to keep things grounded in practice instead of just theory.
Greg Shackles
Operational Analytics and Compass
The presentation will explain the basic concepts of operational analytics and how the Compass solution was developed to communicate the Government relief efforts in Puerto Rico after the passage of Hurricane Maria.
Juan Chipi
Creating magic with Houdini
Since the dawn of (internet) time, web developers have been at the mercy of browsers when it comes to features. But what if the black magic they use to create new HTML and CSS properties were given to you? Thats exactly what the Houdini working group is working to provide web developers today! In a futuristic, code heavy session I will show how in the not too distant future, you will be able to create your own custom browser features using low lever APIs never before available to developers.
Patrick Kettner
Lunch
For its convenience and proximity to the conference area, we recommend you grab lunch at Market Restaurant.
The Blockchain Developer Experience with Hyperledger Fabric
Enterprise blockchain is here and its here to stay. Businesses that require trade, trust and ownership can leverage the power of blockchain for fast, secure and transparent transactions.
Join me as we explore the world of business blockchain. We will look into how the developer experience is for various open source blockchain technology that is available now. We will dive deeper with Hyperledger Fabric, an enterprise blockchain solution under the Hyperledger project in Linux Foundation. We will also look into, Corda, Quoram, Hashgraph and some other.
Together we will learn how you as a developer can start building with blockchain. From this talk, you should expect to get some exposure to developing blockchain application as well as which technology works best for your use case.
Mofizur Rahman
Cross-Platform Voice Assistant Skills
Learn about how you can build voice assistant skills for Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, and more using .NET. Use your existing skills to bring content to the latest medium – Artificial Intelligence Assistants.
We’ll cover basics of how these different assistants work, look at the intersection of their capabilities, and talk about how to build skills in an abstract way to allow for the broadest consumption.
In the end you’ll leave with knowledge about each flagship platform and the skills to build your own skills and apps for each of them using C# and/or F#.
Alex Dunn201K8s
Kubernetes has celebrated it’s fourth birthday in 2018. This graduated pillar of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is revolutionizing how workloads are ran. Container orchestrators have been rising in importance and popularity as workloads are being containerized. A recent shift of describing your applications to an orchestrator deployment descriptor to building applications with the orchestrator primitives. This shift is being lead by the orchestrator SDKs. Will be running quickly through the history of Kubernetes and diving into Operators and the Operators SDK.
Ravi Lachhman
Web Performance as a feature in TransferWise
Our customers were getting increasingly frustrated with how slow the product got, our frontend kept getting bloated, we weren’t using our network as good as possible and overall even contributing code became quite bad, slowing down our iteration speed.
This talk will go into the following topics, in this order:
– organisational challenges (Working within autonomous teams does bring some prioritisation challenges, especially with so many other things one could do, why dedicate time to performance?)
– getting baseline metrics to prove your points (TransferWise is ruthless when it comes to proving something with data)
– understanding if performance matters for your customers (engagement metrics, what we found works for us, what doesn’t? there’s a lot of fuzzy metrics thrown around on the internet so sharing what worked for us in hope of helping anyone in a similar place)
– What we’ve changed internally to improve performance (talk about our new page rendering pipeline and challenges with React SSR, how we made sure our new codebase will not become one large frontend monolith, what new tools we brought to the rest of the org, especially for frontend engineers)
– How we’re making sure that regressions in performance don’t happen (will present organisational challenges around ownership and why automating regression tests will improve team’s responses to problems that are introduced)

Farewell Breakfast
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