This talk discusses the basics of natural language processing and a few deep learning techniques that help to solve problems of Natural Language processing.

Sri Harsha is a Cyber Forensic Enthusiast with great experience in Machine Learning, Backend Programming, and good at maintaining complex and critical systems. On a mission of creating an AI-Powered environment by fostering the interactions between students, developers, startupers, and professionals interested in AI. He is currently leading the AI RnD Team at AutomationEdge and also associated with Intel as a Software Innovator. He has trained 20000+ students and 2500+ faculty and professionals through meetups and workshops across the globe in AI and CyberSecurity.

This presentation is mostly demo and open dialogue I like to learn along-side the attendees.

Michael Jordan is a software consultant based in the Twin Cities. Most of his time is spent helping Data Science teams at Medtronic scale their solutions. He also advises startups and nonprofits on how to make smart technology decisions that are economical and sustainable long-term. When he's not working he enjoys training for triathlons and hanging out with his family.

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.

Adam Israel is the National Director of Delivery for Fulcrum's On Shore and Near Shore software development teams. In this role, Adam oversees and empowers amazing teams of Agile Development professionals both in the United States and in South America. In addition to his internal responsibilities, Adam operates as a senior quality and relationship manager with Fulcrum clients across the United States.

Scott Affeldt is responsible for the development and engineering practice on TCF's Digital Banking Platform. This includes driving development efforts to allow TCF customers to bank where, how, and when they want in support of the product vision. Scott has been at TCF for over 4 years and previously spent over 16 years at Target in the Twin Cities.

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!

I'm a UX researcher from the Twin Cities who's relentless intrinsic motivation has led me to explore a variety of fields including fine art, psychology, culinary therapy and obviously UX. My curiosities about art therapy and human interaction with technology has recently led me to study neuroaesthetics and creativity; an emerging interdisciplinary field that simultaneously satisfies my right and left brain thinking.

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.

Ruth is an Open Source evangelist with over 18 years of experience using and contributing to many different projects. Having served on the Community Leadership Team of the Joomla! project and built a full-service digital agency, she now works as the Mautic Project Lead at Acquia, supporting the community who build and maintain the world’s first Open Source Marketing Automation platform. Ruth is a lover of cats, a keen runner and is based in the East of England.

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.

Joe Karlsson is a software engineer turned Developer Advocate at MongoDB. He comes from the frozen tundra of Minneapolis, Minnesota (and yes, it does get really cold here, and no, not everyone here has the accent from the movie, Fargo 😝). Joe has been primarily a Node and JavaScript engineer. He has been writing, teaching, and talking about code his entire career. Sharing what he knows and continuing to learn about programming is truly the thing he loves doing the most.   Joe is the co-creator of open source software, including bechdel.io, a web app that tells you if a movie script passes the Bechdel Test or not. In his free time, he is usually drinking Gin and Tonics, eating at a new restaurant, or tinkering on a new art project or open source project

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.

Paul is an experienced technology leader in business-driven solutions, geospatial product development and IoT data analytics. As a strong voice for RESPEC engineering and science-based business units he provides product roadmap development, data analytics guidance and Agile mentoring to enhance collaborative development throughout the company. Paul has been developing and working with open source software for over 30 years.

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.

James Hunt leads the research and design arm of Stark & Wayne, finding best-of-breed software solutions to customer problems and pain points, and transforming them into packaged, executable best practices. James has spent his entire career building lasting tooling for the Dev/Ops space, evangelizing open source, and advocating for customers.

Brian Seguin brings success to the company’s day-to-day business operations, contracting, and partnerships. His experience managing controls teams for multi-billion dollar trading desks is where he forged a blend of high-tech and business skills. As a strong supporter of the Cloud Foundry Community, he believes open source technologies can facilitate very positive changes for the high-tech and business worlds.

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

Stu Keroff is a social studies and technology teacher at Aspen Academy in Savage. He is the founder of the first two middle school Linux clubs in Minnesota: the Community School of Excellence Asian Penguins and the Aspen Academy Penguin Corps. He has written several articles on school-based Linux clubs and is the author of “The Linux Club Guide” at www.linuxclubguide.com.

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!

I'm a software developer based in Minneapolis|Saint Paul, and am passionate about making the Twin Cities and Midwest tech community more diverse and accessible to all. Along with that, I am also interested in communication, the meanings and motivations behind what we say, and how all that can bring us together (or, push us apart).

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.

Ash Dzick is a seasoned UX professional who is passionate about building immersive and usable experiences across traditional and emerging technologies. As the Director of User Experience for MRS, she focuses on strategies and research for MRS' no-code platform for life insurance.

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.

Kyle has been a lead engineer at Target since 2017. He has mostly worked on the JVM during his 15+ year career as a software engineer. Kyle lives in Saint Paul with his wife and 2 daughters and spends his spare time (which does not exist) woodworking, baking bread and reading Brandon Sanderson novels.

For a language that was famously created in only two weeks, JavaScript is incredibly vast and continues to evolve. With tons of features available it is impossible to know them all. In this talk, I will be covering 10 features that are incredibly useful, but are barely known in the JavaScript programmer community. This talk is geared towards moderate to experience JavaScript developers looking to improve their coding skills. By the end of the session you will have new tools to streamline and improve your codebase.

James Luterek is a seasoned ecommerce professional with over a decade of experience across software development, architecture, marketing, and analytics. Since graduating from the State University of New York with a bachelor’s in computer science and mathematics, James has worked in a large variety of roles from programmer, project lead, manager, director, solution architect and currently senior engineer. With a wide range of interests, James has presented marketing topics at Bronto Summit, technology talks at All Things Open, and ecommerce in the cloud content at Google DevFest. While comfortable speaking to an audience or discussing technology at a high level, he feels at home with an open IDE writing code. Today, James is busy drinking copious amounts of caffeine and helping enterprise clients maximize their commercetools implementation through code, workshops, data modeling, and advice on cloud architecture.

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.

Leif is a husband, father, and Software Engineer residing in the Twin Cities, with over 15 years in the industry. His areas of interest in software include: streaming data applications and machine learning. When not working, Leif enjoys composing and playing music and spending time outdoors with his family and friends.

Kafka delivers real-time events at scale, and with libraries like KStreams, Java developers are able to transform those events. In this talk we introduce ksqlDB, which offers a SQL interface on top of KStreams to enable continuous, interactive queries without requiring any Java or Python knowledge. ksqlDB enables all Apache Kafka consumers to route messages and perform both stateful and stateless transformations to unlock new data insights. With ksqlDB, your data in motion is as accessible as the stale records traditionally locked away in a relational database.

In this session, after a brief introduction to Apache Kafka, we'll dive into using ksqlDB to manage data streams pulled - in real time - from the Minneapolis air traffic control system. During this journey, you'll learn the ins and outs behind how ksqlDB works and introduce patterns applicable more broadly in common high-volume use cases like log monitoring, insurance, financial services, and consumer retail.

Keith is an active developer working with all things streaming especially Apache Kafka, most recently at the data in motion company Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka.

Featuring local women in tech, Kate 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.

Kate Kupcho is the Lead Talent Acquisition Partner at Code42 and leads recruitment for all things technology and security related. Kate has been in the Talent Acquisition space for the last 15 years where she’s held a variety of roles leading recruiting initiatives. Kate is passionate about finding the right talent for each unique role where engineers can thrive and organizations can scale!

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.

Ryan Asleson is an experienced technology professional with a broad spectrum of experience across a wide variety of technologies, including front end web, mobile using the native Android SDK and Titanium, to server side using Spring Framework. Ryan co-authored two books: Foundations of Ajax (Apress, 2005) and Pro Ajax and Java Frameworks (Apress, 2006).

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.

Adrian is Head of Experience Design at SDG, where he leads the team responsible for imagining, implementing and supporting best-in-class digital experiences for fortune 500 and enterprise customers. Adrian has worked in a leadership capacity across many different verticals and problem spaces; everything from large public health agency, to hyper innovative product startups. He's keenly interested on exploring the possibilities and limitations of solving problems for humans through the use of technology.

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?

I’m a recovering software attorney. I began in environmental law, moved to real estate, and then migrated to software. I spent almost 20 years as in-house and General Counsel for a software company that licensed developer tools and components, and offered open source services and support all while acquiring and being acquired by other software companies. Looking for a new challenge, I’m now a co-founder of a startup in a Sales and Marketing role, and seeing things from the other side.

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.

Alex loves envisioning how technology can transform age-old industries. As a data scientist, he believes harnessing and analyzing old and new sources of data at-scale unlocks disruptive opportunities. Whether it is through using next-generation sequencing to revolutionize healthcare or artificial intelligence to modernize supply chains. Today he is a Principal Data Scientist at C.H. Robinson, leading a team of developers and scientists tasked with using machine learning coupled to a cutting edge technology stack built on top of troves of supply chain data to provide real-time predictive signals to execute customer supply chains. He thoroughly enjoys formulating a data science problem so he can throw gradient boosted trees at it and has a love/hate relationship with SQL.

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#.

Mark is a software developer, father of three, and technology enthusiast. He is also the President of Techmasters, a technology themed local chapter of ToastMasters International.

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

Steve Buchanan is a Director, & Midwest Containers Services Lead on a Cloud Transformation/DevOps team with a large consulting firm. He is a 9-time Microsoft MVP, Pluralsight author, and the author of six technical books. He has presented at tech events, including Midwest Management Summit (MMS), Microsoft Ignite, BITCon, Experts Live Europe, OSCON, Inside Azure management, and user groups. Steve is currently focused on transforming the position of IT into a strategic partner of the business and driver of digital transformation through ITSM, DevOps, and CloudOps. He stays active in the technical community and enjoys blogging about his adventures in the world of IT at www.buchatech.com.

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.

Shedrack Akintayo is a Developer Advocate and Software Developer from Lagos, Nigeria, who has love for community building, open source, creating content and software for the next billion users. As a technical writer and speaker, he shares his knowledge about JavaScript, React, and building APIs. Shedrack is passionate about learning, growing and he helps local developer communities to plan and organise events.

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.

Christian Posta (@christianposta) is Global Field CTO at Solo.io, and well known in the cloud-native community for being an author (Istio in Action, Manning, Microservices for Java Developers, O’Reilly 2016), blogger, speaker, open-source enthusiast and contributor to various open-source projects in the service mesh and cloud-native ecosystem. Christian has spent time at both enterprises as well as web-scale companies and now helps companies create and deploy large-scale, cloud-native, resilient, distributed architectures. He enjoys mentoring, training and leading teams to be successful with distributed systems concepts, microservices, devops, and cloud-native application design.

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!

Aaron Page is a Senior Accessibility Engineer and Team Lead at Accessible360, where he helps test client websites and mobile apps for WCAG conformance, provide remediation support, and lead workshops and training sessions. Born with congenital glaucoma, Aaron lost his remaining vision in 2008 and has been a native screen reader user ever since.

Jason Webb is a Developer Advocate at Accessible360, where he helps dev teams understand and fix complex accessibility issues through personalized support and developer-oriented documentation. He has previously worked as a front-end and UI developer and now works to get people excited about accessibility through workshops, talks, documentation, open-source projects, and more.

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.

Janani is a Distinguished Engineer at Optum and leads the Optum Functions Platform. She is an open source advocate and has onboarded various new technologies for enterprise adoption; Serverless, Distributed SQL and Chaos Engineering.

“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.

Michael Heldebrant has been using open source technologies for over 2 decades. He currently works for Elastic as a Solutions Architect. He started with open source in support of his Ph.D research in Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Michael continues his passion for getting the answers that matter to you from questions asked of your data at Elastic.

Neil Desai has over two decades of information security experience. In past roles, he built Security Operations Centers (SOCs) and architected defensible and monitorable infrastructures for Fortune 500 US financial institutions.

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?

Andy Fleener is a Humanist and a New View Safety Nerd who believes software is as much about the people developing and operating it as it is the people using it. He is the Senior Platform Operations Manager at SportsEngine where he’s been building and running SAAS software for youth and amateur sports organizations since 2011. He’s been helping put on 900 person conferences as devopsdays Minneapolis Organizer since 2017. And a contributor to the O’Reily Chaos Engineering book.

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.

Ricardo is Principal Developer Advocate 🥑 at Elastic—the company behind the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash) where he does community advocacy for North America. With +20 years of experience he may have learned a thing or two about Distributed Systems, Databases, Streaming Data, and Big Data. Before Elastic he did work for other vendors such as Confluent, Oracle, and Red Hat, and for different consulting firms. These days Ricardo spends most of his time making developers fall in love with technology. While not working he loves barbecuing in his backyard with his family and friends, where he gets the chance to talk about anything that is not IT related. He lives in North Carolina, USA with his wife and son. Follow Ricardo on Twitter: @riferrei

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.

I'm Chris Lucian, the director of software development at Hunter Industries, a founder of mob programming, co-host of the Mob Mentality show and international keynote speaker. I am passionate about the advancement of software craftsmanship and machine learning. I seek the continuous improvement of myself, my family, my company, and my community. I believe that we can explore the unexplored potential in all things when looking at our processes with automation and creativity in mind. Growing up I learned a lot about both the important of Psychological Safety and what it can look like when it does not exist. I was fortunate enough to go to a project based middle school where I learned the importance of public speaking, research, technology and delivering my work quickly and frequently. I worked full time when going to university for both my masters and bachelors and in doing so I learned the importance of time management and deliberate deep work. In my career I have found that all of these skills are important to be effective. When I'm have a moment of free time, I spend it gaming or reading sci-fi and fantasy. I wrote my masters thesis on Computer Vision, Evolutionary Algorithms, and Machine Learning.

I’m Oscar Villarreal, a software developer at IBM where I work to provide interfaces for tracking assets company wide. My career began at Hunter Industries where I was first exposed to mob programming and TDD which helped me discover what development could be. As a junior developer, I have a thirst for knowledge and am constantly looking for new opportunities to make an impact in my career and community. My passions are varied, from physics to cooking and being a maker, focusing on working with my hands and turning my thoughts into reality, always wanting to push the limits of what I can do.

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.

Chris Woodruff AKA Woody is the Team Leader of Developer Relations at Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, which is based in Detroit, Michigan. He's an experienced developer, architect, data expert, speaker, trainer and world-class geek. He's spoken throughout the World at major technical conferences on topics ranging from various new technologies to software architectures and data. He is a proven mentor that enjoys helping, educating, and supporting other developers to gain knowledge through his speaking, writing, and online content. When not sitting in front of a computer, Woody spends time with his family, enjoys traveling, and finding rare bourbon. You can read more about Woody’s interests, hobbies and views of technology on his blog at http://chriswoodruff.com and follow him on Twitter at @cwoodruff.

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.

Jennifer Bonine is the CEO of AI Appstore, Inc., and was the first female Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) platform tech CEO. The company is pioneering a groundbreaking business model that is fully engaged in the sustainable development goals (“SDGs”) cultivated by the United Nations. Respected as a gifted speaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, Jennifer Bonine addresses the AI industry nationally and internationally, most recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos and for CNNMoney Switzerland. She has held executive level positions leading teams for Oracle and Target and is a founding board member of the United States bid for a Minnesota World Expo 2027. Jennifer is a 2020 Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal Women in Business honoree, Elevate 2021 top Storyteller Honoree, a founding sponsor and member of IVOW AI's Women in History Data Ideation Challenge, and an executive board member of Chad Greenway’s Lead the Way foundation. She is a member of Million Dollar Women, Digital Economist Council member, Sponsor of the Tech Series for the Twin Cities Film Festival, member and sponsor of TeamWomen, and is a council member of DreamTank, an organization designed to champion young entrepreneurs. Recently named one of the Top 30 Leaders to Watch in 2020 by Silicon Review, Jennifer Bonine was featured at the UN’s AI for Good summit. Jennifer is also developing a series of books to educate children about the power of AI and machine learning. Jennifer is also launching in collaboration with Sony Music artist Dave McElroy the "Origin Stories" podcast series.

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.

Anil Inamdar is VP & Head of Data Solutions at Instaclustr. Anil has 20+ years of experience in data and analytics roles. Joining Instaclustr in 2019, he works with organizations to drive successful digital transformations via the right cultural, operational, architectural, and technological roadmaps. Anil lives and works in the Bay Area.

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.

James is a Distinguished Engineer at Medtronic, focusing on information architecture and impacts on both transactional and analytical solutions. He has 30+ years of industry experience with the majority spent in analytics and data. A former DBA and platform administrator, he also understands the impact of these tech stacks for both on-prem and cloud implementations. He also understands both the successes and failures of implementation of these architectures and impact on organizational effectiveness.

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.

Erik has been an engineer across many disciplines: rich client, back end, front end, full stack, even some infrastructure and build tool development. He's been an engineering manager for over five years

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.

Joel Lord is passionate about the web and technology in general. He likes to learn new things, but most of all, he wants to share his discoveries. He does so by traveling at various conferences all across the globe. He graduated from college in computer programming in the last millennium. Apart from a little break to get his BSc in computational astrophysics, he was always in the industry. As a developer advocate with Red Hat OpenShift, he meets with developers to help them make the web better by using best practices around Kubernetes. During his free time, he is usually found stargazing in a camping site somewhere or brewing a fresh batch of beer in his garage.

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.

Justin Reock is the chief architect at OpenLogic. He has over 20 years of experience working in various software roles and is an outspoken free software evangelist, delivering enterprise solutions, technical leadership, and community education on databases, architectures, and integration projects.

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.

Luca Palmieri is a Lead Engineer at TrueLayer. He is an active contributor to the Rust OSS ecosystem (ndarray, ndarray-stats, linfa, tracing-bunyan-formatter, wiremock, cargo-chef), with projects spanning from ML to backend development and developer tooling. He is the author of Zero To Production, a book on backend development and enterprise software in Rust.

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)

Hello! My name is Tim Bornholdt, and I'm an entrepreneur, developer, and podcaster. I'm a co-founder and partner at The Jed Mahonis Group. We specialize in helping business improve their processes and increase their bottom line through automation and custom mobile software. Some of our clients include Great Clips, Green Mill, Profile by Sanford Health, and USA CUP. As a software developer, I specialize in delivering custom mobile software with an emphasis on the back end. I've been building websites since I was in first grade, so I have a lot of experience with what works on the Internet. I'm currently focusing on improving my skills around Ruby on Rails and SwiftUI. As a podcaster, I host a show called Constant Variables (https://constantvariables.co), where we explain how mobile app development works to people who don't like technical jargon. I also work on a show with Olympian Carrie Tollefson called C Tolle Run (https://ctollerun.com). We get to interview elite athletes and other famous people who happen to be runners. Before I started JMG, I wanted a career in commercial and online video production. I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to create videos for several organizations including Pepsi, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Unilever, and the Metropolitan Council.

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.

Josh has been in IT for 15 years, as a developer, lead dev, tech lead, architect, and enterprise architect. He's worked on big teams, small teams, and been on a team of one. In the process of all of this, he's learned a ton, and he loves to mentor and share that information. He also loves strategy – laying out plans and figuring out dependencies, which order to do things in. Included in this is a deep love of the complicated business + people + culture + tech (especially tech that makes people's lives easier) of IT strategy.

Laine has been a developer, a technical lead, a stay at home mom, and an IT architect – and that last was a broad enough title that it let her do both technical things AND cultural things. She realized then that that was her most favorite place to be, in that in-between place of technology + culture. She also learned that enabling people and organizations is HARD work, and that explaining that in-between place can help.

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.

Co-founder and CTO at Resurface Labs, Rob's built all kinds of databases, and is always on the lookout for the best open source projects to solve hard problems. Years at Intel, Dell, and Quest Software, framed his passion for customer input, and to find elegant ways to architect and build scalable software.

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.

Previous 5 years have been focused on building platforms focused around data discoverability and exploration at Target. When not at Target, I enjoy the outdoors and playing with my 2 children.

Passionate about driving adoption for ad-hoc analytics, and data driven insights. Empowering analysts to communicate better with data, and business teams to leverage data more for their day-to-day operations.