Schedule 2021
8:30 - Registration Opens/Visit Expos/Networking
9:00 to 9:45
Stage 1
This talk discusses the basics of natural language processing and a few deep learning techniques that help to solve problems of Natural Language processing.
Stage 2
We all know that sinking feeling when you’re interested in participating in a project or community, but you’re a newcomer, an imposter, an outsider. Not all of us have the privilege of experiencing that uplifting feeling of being accepted, guided, and given the opportunity to improve irrespective of current abilities. There's a need to set up a specialized team in open source communities and organizations whose primary goal is advocating, embracing, and integrating beginners into the project. This team should focus on implementing roadmaps and personal guides with an inclusive and accessible approach to address the challenges first-timers face when joining or contributing to the project.
As a Layer5 MeshMate, I will be sharing practical tips on how to better onboard newcomers and be inclusive to beginners using the Layer5 community (which I am part of) as a case study.
Stage 3
Our discussion will include a presentation on how TypeScript with React JS is trending, adopted, scalable, and challenging to learn. Specific areas of discussion will be focused on:
- Include adoption statistics
- Pros and Cons
- Current experience of Typescript Implementation at TCF Bank
- Getting Past the Learning Curve
- Partnering synergies between TCF and Fulcrum engineering teams
The goal is to enlighten the audience to typical challenges of implementing TypeScript with React as well as the benefit to an organization once the learning curve is over. Our presentation will outline the roadmap to a successful adoption, highlight why companies adopt it, pros and cons, and the keys to utilizing the right types of partnerships to execute on the technical difficulty.
Stage 4
What is neuroaesthetics and how influential is it in our daily lives? This presentation will break down the fundamental theories and psychology behind how our brains process aesthetically pleasing/displeasing stimuli, how this process affects out evaluations and judgements of the stimuli, and how we can use this information to optimize UX designs and digital products for any user!
Stage 5
Back in 2019, I started working as the Community Manager for Mautic - the world's first Open Source Marketing Automation platform - after being a long term contributor, and in May 2020 I stepped up to lead the project.
I used to think that it would be incredible to be paid to work full time for Open Source, and I still do!
But - and there's always a but! - when your passion becomes your profession there are also a lot of challenges and hurdles along the way.
How do you keep that passion alive when it has become something you have to do, rather than something you choose to do when you want? How do you maintain separation between your working life and your personal life, if your passion was contributing to the project that you are now paid to work on?
In this talk I will speak frankly and openly about some of the challenges I have faced, and share suggestions for how I am working with them on a daily basis.
Stage 6
Have you ever wondered, “How do I model my schema for my application?” It’s one of the most common questions devs have pertaining to MongoDB. And the answer is, it depends. This is because document databases have a rich vocabulary that is capable of expressing data relationships in more nuanced ways than SQL. There are many things to consider when picking a schema. Is your app read or write heavy? What data is frequently accessed together? What are your performance considerations? How will your data set grow and scale?
In this talk, we will discuss the basics of data modeling using real world examples. You will learn common methodologies and vocabulary you can use when designing your database schema on your application.
Stage 7
In March 2019 the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency slapped a historic $7 million penalty on the Water Gremlin company; for releasing excessive amounts of carcinogenic industrial solvents into the air. For 17 years, surrounding neighborhoods were unknowingly exposed to this airborne substance at levels 12 times higher than considered safe. With air quality sensors now relatively common in highly urbanized areas; how could this go unnoticed for so long?
In this talk we’ll discuss an approach whereby human sensors collect discrete observations with the Fulcrum field data collection app. Simultaneously, the device communicates with a variety of nearby sensors; Flow by Plume Labs measuring air quality, SensorLog measuring sound pollution and Campbell Scientific devices monitoring transportation infrastructure. Analytics are performed directly on the device, combing human observations and raw sensor data into immediately actionable insights.
Fulcrum has two powerful open source features which transform the smartphone into an easily programmable edge computing device and a platform for real-time data analytics. By leveraging these features any application developed in Fulcrum can perform advanced GIS operations and communicate with nearby sensors in real-time.
We’ll show how this approach is applied using three real-world scenarios; smart cities and healthy environments, transportation infrastructure and mining operations. We’ll demonstrate the value of context-driven data collection and situational human judgment which cannot (as of yet) be replaced. We will wrap up our discussion with a few thoughts on TensorFlow Lite, an open-source deep learning framework for on-device inference.
10:00 to 10:45
Stage 1
Everyone is moving to OSS to control their Cloud Native infrastructure, and the pandemic has only accelerated that move. We'll cover one of the fundamental questions regarding all your Cloud Native components: should you rent, buy, or build them yourself?
First, we'll cover the three approaches. We'll use a housing analogy to explain what each means (such as, do I want to be limited to the rentals on offer now, buy that condo, or build a house with my bare hands, etc?). We'll discuss each approach, its strengths and weaknesses, and how factors like your organization's size can dictate the appropriate choice.
Decision logic: We'll move on to how you can make the right decision and what you need to know as a manager. Based on the questions we're asked every day by senior execs, VPs, and chief architects, we'll look at the top three questions managers need to ask, and how to follow the logic your answers trigger to get to your scenario's right solution.
We'll also cover:
Foundational systems: The best options for different-sized businesses and the potential cost savings.
Ecosystem considerations: What's the best approach for many of the critical components from monitoring, payment processing, and CICD and look at key questions such as containerization.
Stage 2
Our presentation explains how our school addressed its COVID-19 induced digital equity problems through the use of open source software and recycled computers. This enabled us to provide over 300 computers for students in need for distance/hybrid learning at home at a cost of less than $6,000. This closed our digital divide, providing necessary technology for all. This game changing work was performed by the Aspen Academy Penguin Corps, our school’s middle school Linux club. This club gives students a hands-on service learning experience and teaches them “in demand” technology skills.
This session will be a group presentation including me and several of my Penguin Corps students. The outline of our session is:
A. Introduction and History
B. Activities of the Club
C. Diversity and Inclusion in the Penguin Corps
D. Our School’s Response to COVID-19
E. Why start a Linux Club
F. How to Get Started
G. Q & A
Stage 3
Styling and formatting can be a very intimidating task - especially with the copious amount of libraries and possibilities out in the world. SCSS and Flexbox can quickly integrate into your React App and make styling and formatting more accessible and hopefully, more fun!
Stage 4
There’s an average of 27,000 people using the internet for the first time… every hour. These people are geographically dispersed across established and emerging nations. They come from a variety of backgrounds, languages and cultures. New users are less likely to have reliable internet and might only use your product on a phone.
Now add in "traditional" accessibility. Up to 20% of your audience will have a permanent physical or mental impairment. At any time an additional 10% of your audience will have a temporary impairment (like a broken arm).
As a designer-of-things (UX, dev or otherwise), it can feel impossible to create for the seven billion people on Earth. Accessibility. Internationalization. Localization. Where do you start?
We’ll focus on the best way to make a big impact, and build a plan for iterative inclusive design.
Stage 5
Frameworks like spring, micronaut, ratpack, or kafka streams can make business applications quicker to develop, but they often do so at the cost of flexibility and simplicity. The modern “web framework” can be traced back to ruby on rails and was popularized in part by presentations like “How to build a blog in 15 minutes” in 2005. These frameworks are still often optimized for RESTful http applications backed by a relational datastore - which although still important -are not the majority of the work that many of us do here at Target. Working with messaging systems like Kafka or using GraphQL are often afterthoughts. You can build your own applications using best-of-breed libraries with a small amount of glue code that will give you complete control and a greater understanding of your own applications.
Stage 7
AI (more specifically, machine learning) plays a huge role in our day to day lives. As a musician, I wanted to delve deeper into the current state of music composition using machine learning. This talk will start with an overview of AI Music Composition, followed by a walk-through of my attempts to collaboratively compose a song with machine learning models. Along the way, we'll delve a bit deeper into the specific types of models used for music composition.
11:00 to 11:45
Stage 1
KSQL, a modern-day streaming SQL engine for Apache Kafka, serves as the easiest way to enable continuous, interactive queries without requiring any Java or Python knowledge. Now all Apache Kafka users can gain insight into data—whether you’re a developer or member of an operations team.
This session will help you go from understanding KSQL to using it effectively. It will cover the ins and outs behind how KSQL works so that you can accomplish monitoring, security and anomaly detection, online data integration, application development, streaming ETL and more.
Stage 2
Featuring local women in tech, Stephanie will lead a panel discussion of successful women from different fields within the tech industry. You will hear them share their own stories about working in or breaking barriers in the industry. Additionally, we will open up the conversation for questions from the audience.
Stage 3
Reactive programming is the new standard for building scalable, efficient, high throughput applications. Project Reactor is the foundation of Spring's end-to-end support for reactive programming, from the WebFlux module for handling HTTP requests to R2DBC, the module for reactive relational database access.
Reactive programming can initially be difficult to understand. This talk is designed for experienced Spring developers who are looking to use Spring's support for reactive programming via Reactor. The talk discusses basic reactive programming concepts and moves on to Reactor's foundational ideas, using the assembly line analogy and associated diagrams to clearly explain Reactor's most important concepts.
Stage 4
If organizations are to stay relevant and continue to create value they will need to embrace the importance of utilizing user insights and design as their primary decision making tool or risk cannibalization of market and opportunity by the next generation of progressive, design lead companies.
In this talk we will take a look at experience design's journey from infancy to maturity; going from a nice to have, to a need to have, and finally to a must have mindset.
Stage 5
2020 was barely in the rear-view mirror when we had our first open source license change drama play out when Elastic announced that it would no longer be licensing the source code in Elasticsearch and Kibana under the Apache 2.0 license but would instead be dual licensing it under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License. Elastic pointed the finger at AWS claiming that the license change was aimed at companies like AWS who used the products for their own purposes without collaborating with Elastic. AWS claimed the moral high ground by pointing out that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software and forking the project to continue to make it available under the Apache license. Open source advocates took sides. But neither AWS’s use of the code in its hosted offering nor Elastic’s decision to relicense the code violated their license for the software. AWS was not legally restricted under the Apache license from making the software available as a service. Elastic was not legally required to continue to make their distribution available under the Apache license. What is amazing is that no lawyers were required to resolve the dispute because there was no license violation claim (Elastic has argued that there are trademark issues involved). The arguments from each side were basically that the other side was not acting ethically. While Elastic’s decision is a disruption, the resulting announcement by AWS and others that they would fork the project to maintain its availability under the Apache license is actually a validation of the open source license model. What does this and similar cases tell us about the future of open source development, projects and businesses?
Stage 6
C.H. Robinson is a 115 year-old company undergoing a transformation. Its thousands of customers desire new technology products to execute complex logistics and supply chain needs. Therefore, C.H. Robinson is tasked with evolving existing relationships while transforming internal and external business processes. Here, we present an overview of how data science is being leveraged to uplift the underlying logistics and supply chain technology and highlight a case study on how this has been executed at an enterprise-scale to provide better real-time visibility to our customer's supply chain at C.H. Robinson.
Stage 7
Software QA is an important toolset in a software professionals collection. We’ll talk about unit tests and automated testing, the developer and tester roles, and why you should be writing unit tests and how to get started with it. Code examples and demos are in C#.
12:00 to 1:00 - Lunch/Breakout Sessions
1:00 to 1:45
Stage 1
Use Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes to manage Kubernetes clusters across Google Cloud Platform and Azure without running a single Kubectl command! In this session Steve Buchanan will take you into the world of GitOps. He will show you how to deploy applications and configuration to GKE clusters and AKS clusters from a GitHub repository. Explore how we can use this new operating model for Kubernetes and cloud native apps to declaratively describe and ensure the state of our applications and Kubernetes environments.s
Stage 2
According to Github reports last year, A certain number of African countries have been listed amount top contributors to open source and also users of Github. Countries like, Nigeria, Morocco, Ghana were all listed. In this talk, I’ll talk about how open source is shaping the future of software development in Africa, very important communities supporting open source in Africa, and key players supporting open source in Africa. I’ll also suggest better ways companies in more developed countries around the globe can support Open Source development and Software in Africa.
Stage 3
WebAssembly (Wasm) presents an innovative way to extend infrastructure by dynamically injecting custom code into the processing path and running it in a safe, embedded VM. This custom code can then alter the behavior of processing to implement security, operations, and process best practices. Custom code can be written in any number of languages and opens the door for reuse and leveraging existing skill sets. One of the most powerful usecases for Wasm is on the request path between applications. Using cloud-native API infrastructure like service mesh and ingress/edge gateways, not only can we get big wins around observability and security, but we can customize the behavior of the network to fit organizational security and operational policies. In this talk we introduce Wasm and explore how we can leverage Envoy-based infrastructure to build powerful networking that spans clusters, zones, and geographies. We also show how to get started and how organizations are leveraging Wasm today in production.
Stage 4
Carousels are weird. They come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, contain complex content, can change their state automatically (or through some mix of user controls), and even come with fancy features like infinite scrolling and animations. Best of all, there is no standardized way to build them, so they’re all a little (or a lot) different!
All this variation and inconsistency can make carousels at least a little bit annoying for all of us, but it can also make them a complete show-stopper for people who use assistive technologies. At Accessible360 we’ve analyzed and helped fix hundreds of inaccessible carousels, and we’ve come up with a collection of technical necessities and usability insights, tested and approved by our diverse team of Accessibility Engineers, that you can use to build better, more accessible carousels today!
Stage 5
Optum Functions is an on premises Multitenant Serverless Platform which supports Stateless, Event Driven, Request Based Compute Workloads. This session will cover how Optum operationalized serverless platform with k8, istio and knative; the challenges and how we addressed the various aspects of managed service offerings like multitenancy, self-service, security, observability and cross data center resiliency.
Stage 6
“The number of visitors to a website by country is an example of data. Finding out that traffic from the U.S. is increasing while that from Australia is decreasing is meaningful information.”
In this deep dive we will cover several approaches to turn data into actionable, meaningful information using the Elastic stack. We will cover both foundational and advanced techniques for performing analytics on data such as how to build visualizations and dashboards, and drill downs between dashboards to pivot from a broad dashboard to more specific dashboards with the context of your investigation. We will also learn techniques used by security practitioners, but very applicable to observability data, such as event normalization which allows for searching across all your data sources, and event correlation which looks for collections of events in the data, such as when 10 500 http response codes in 2 minutes per api is observed, or sequences of events like if a user password change is not followed by a user login in 15 minutes for that user. Thinking about events as collections of data allows you to focus on the important signals in the data at a higher level to make sense of a potentially overwhelming amount of data.
Stage 7
Signs and Signals are all around us, they influence how we perceive and feel about the systems we interact with on a daily basis. Many of these signals are loud, or strong, a production outage, an angry customer, or a missed deadline. But there’s more to signals than just the ones we see or hear when something goes bang. Actively searching for and understanding Weak Signals is the key to creating the most productive Chaos Engineering experiments. Weak Signals are small, barely noticeable, indications of new emergent behavior in the system. They’re the “tea leaves”, they trigger our gut feelings, and our hunches. In this talk I will dig into the area of Chaos Engineering that I find most interesting, how do you decide what to experiment on?
2:00 to 2:45
Stage 1
Though tracing technologies are not necessarily a new concept—only in recent years, they gained enough traction to become one of the dimensions required by observability stacks. Part of this traction belongs to the standards created to aid developers dealing with telemetry data in their applications. The new-kid-on-the-block in terms of an API standard is OpenTelemetry—an observability framework for cloud-native software.
OpenTelemetry provides a rich set of capabilities to handle logs, metrics, and traces in applications, but each programming language's support is different. This talk will present in a "for the rest of us" style how to instrument applications written in Java to send the telemetry data for a backend using the architecture that developers will often use while dealing with OpenTelemetry.
Stage 2
For the last 10 years I have been working in or on teams who mob. Typically 3 to 5 people per computer. Over this time we have seen a large spike in productivity, quality, and scalability. At the same time we effectively minimized silos and created an ecosystem for development that was sustainable and humane.
Stage 3
You know you have to have a great experience when you develop your apps, right? The greatest experience for your user's centers around their data. That’s why developing a great set of Web APIs is so important. Using ASP.NET Core Web API is a modern cross-platform framework for the modern web. ASP.NET Core Web API can be run on Windows and Linux using all the modern web servers. The secret to it all is knowing how to architect your Web APIs for the best experience.
Using the architecture in this talk allows your APIs specifically to work better due to:
• Designing the API for communications with the consumer of the API
• Allowing a clear decoupling of the API endpoints, Data Access (Synthetic or Production), and finally the Data Domain classes.
• The API Endpoints (Controllers) have no knowledge or responsibility of Data Domain and behind it Data Access
• Because of the decoupling and separation of responsibilities testing can be done easily and without issues.
• Data Access segments of the architecture can easily be switched out without impacting the Domain or API Endpoints.
By using this architecture not only does the development story become easier but your end users get a much more stable API set to consume. The talk will explain and get you started on using these concepts with your ASP.NET Core 5 Web API solutions.
Stage 4
Customers are the ultimate measure of product success. Their loyalty to your product or brand is key in building and maintaining market share. This is why Jennifer Bonine believes that understanding customer needs and being the voice of the customer is critical for us in the technology and innovation space. Join Jennifer as she shows how to empathize with your customers and provide a solution that puts them first. Design thinking is a human-centered process for creative problem-solving that focuses on the people you're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and processes. Learn how the design thinking methodology, along with the usage of data and analytics, can transform the results of quality assurance and testing in your teams using open source tools and implementing it in a matter of hours. You'll learn the attributes required for transformation and leveraging design thinking and tapping into the "gut brain", examples of what is possible when this model is utilized, and an actionable strategy to implement in your teams when you return to work. Implementing these strategies have save numerous teams and companies hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in re-design and re-work.
Stage 5
Most organizations considering open source and open core solutions understand they need to rigorously evaluate the software’s licensing terms and gauge the long-term health of its community and ecosystem. What still happens less frequently – but is just as crucial to these risk assessments – is developing a thorough understanding of the business models governing the commercial organizations attached to each solution being considered. You must discern the underlying motivations of the vendors or managed service providers you depend on to deliver or support open source software (as well as those vendors with strong influence over its development and maintenance). By acutely understanding these incentives, you can identify if, where, and how they may map to possible risks to your enterprise’s adoption and ongoing open source implementation. Don’t limit the assessment to licenses and community health.
This session will discuss specifics on what you need to look for and consider when vetting open source solutions as offered by:
-- Businesses using OSS as the foundation of their own intellectual property.
-- Businesses that maintain total control offer the OSS they offer.
-- Major cloud providers.
-- Managed service providers.
Stage 6
Data lakes have provided an impetus of moving data and processor-centric applications to the cloud. They have not provided the cost-reduction or the flexibility promised in regards to democratization of data. This discussion will focus on how many organizations are moving forward, realizing the need for data to be able to hydrate multiple platforms and multiple formats and velocities. In addition, the ability to quickly find and use these data sources are a critical need in enablement of rapid consumer adoption.
Stage 7
This talk is geared for engineers who think they might want to try management or are new to management. It's not meant to dissuade, but to inform of how being an engineering manager is quite different from being an engineer. It will include some of the things I wish that I'd known before moving into management and some words of wisdom for aspiring managers.
3:00 to 3:45
Stage 1
How nice would it be to be able to remember everyone’s name? What if you could just walk into a room and know everyone’s Twitter handle? What if you could give them a score to decide if you should have a conversation with them or not? Kubernetes is a great tool that is being used more and more for deploying applications, and it can also be used in the context of machine learning. In this talk, the speaker will demonstrate how to use NodeJs, a touch of machine learning and a sprinkle of Kubernetes to recognize people in a crowd. This talk is about the various technologies that were used for this demo inspired by the Black Mirror show. It’s about the tech... and also why you shouldn't build it.
Stage 2
This isn't your typical case study, this is the reality of open source: One hundred percent of organizations use varying degrees of OSS, yet we still focus on one particular package or layer when it comes to sharing best practices. The reality is, when we get stuck, it's the configuration and operational interrelationships between packages that matter.
This session takes open source support data across multiple organizations to examine three different scenarios that represent the most common issues we see today (in fact, 80% of the cases we see are due to configuration and package interrelationship issues). Justin Reock covers e-commerce, mobile PaaS, and high performance computing examples to illustrate top problems and solutions for stack selection, infrastructure implementation, and production troubleshooting.
If you use or are planning to use Apache web server, ActiveMQ, CentOS, Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx, OpenSSL, Puppet, or PHP, these stories cover how most organizations use them. Even if you're not using these specific packages, the information presented here also applies to other technologies.
Stage 3
The introduction of a new programming language is a significant undertaking with long-term implications - a choice not to be taken lightly.
Our main business is not system programming, yet we decided to bet on Rust. Why? How?
During the talk we will walk through our adoption story: from the first CLIs and cheeky projects to a Rust-backed new product line, with Rust-specific job openings.
We'll share our expectations, our challenges, our doubts, the mistakes we made and the lessons we learned as we ramped up our usage.
If you are looking to embark on a similar journey, even if for a different language, this talk is for you.
Stage 4
As a software developer, it’s easy to forget sometimes that not everyone knows how to build software.
It’s also easy to forget that our problems are not the only problems that an organization is facing.
Dealing with people who don’t understand technology can be challenging for technologists. In this talk, we’ll show you how to set the stage for successful business partnerships. We’ll cover:
* Ways to make technology more approachable for non-technical people
* The importance of “Mental Models” in understanding how the world works
* The reason empathy works and how to build your empathy muscle
* How you can make everyone the hero of their own story (while, of course, making you the hero of your own)
Stage 5
Hey! Hey! HEY!
The world around us exists as a collection of events - things that happen and data points that we take in and process and decide what to do about (or NOT do about), all the time, every day. So...why shouldn't the systems we interact with be structured in the same way?
In this session, we will explain event-driven architecture, and why it's different from traditional monolith and also microservice architecture. We'll explain the pros and cons, and go over some of the open source technology that's currently out there to implement systems in this more customer-centric way.
Stage 6
It’s like picking a flavor of ice cream. You have your go-to databases, your favorites, the ones you know and love. But are they always the right choice for every task? And, the reality is you’re going to be working across five or six anyway. So how to choose? Instead of fitting the workload to the database, you fit the database to the workload. Is your workload mostly reads? Writes? Or a mixture? And what kinds of reads, linear scans, random reads? Do you need a database for transactioning or for durability? We’ll walk through the many open source options and map workloads to the right database that can make or break the success of your next project.
Stage 7
DataMiner is an home grown application that centralizes data analytics while enabling reusability, promotes collaboration, and helps embed common engineering fundamentals into the analytical journey. This presentation will focus on how we've built DataMiner leveraging frameworks like Java Spring Boot, tools like Jupyter Notebook and Rstudio, and done some while seeing 300% user growth in less than 1 year.