Sessions

 

Session Speaker Info

2017 State of DevOps: Where We Are Now and Where We Are Headed

This session will explore the state of DevOps as uncovered in DZone's latest industry research conducted for its annual Guide to DevOps publication, from key research findings to a discussion of practical use cases. We will cover how nearly 500 enterprise developers reported their organizations have adopted DevOps, what their pain points are, what tools they use, and how they’ve finally made real headway to implementing Continuous Delivery throughout their organizations.

Matt Schmidt

As President, Matt leads DZone's media business unit, responsible for DZone.com, a popular website and publisher for the global software developer community. Matt's tenure at DZone immediately after college, where he earned a dual BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. Over the past decade he and his partner, Rick Ross, have grown DZone.com to attract a global audience of technology professionals. Matt is also the architect of DZone's developer community software, AnswerHub. Since its release in 2011, he has played an integral role in growing the platform and signing major enterprise customers like LinkedIn, eBay, GE, and more.

6 Minute Mobile Apps with NativeScript: A Race Against Time

How many cross-platform mobile apps can you write in an hour? It turns out it's a lot, especially if you're using NativeScript. NativeScript is a free and open-source platform for writing professional, cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript. With its unique approach, NativeScript has positioned itself as the Node.js of mobile development - write once, run on multiple platforms, with native performance. In this session, you'll learn how to get started with NativeScript and be inspired to explore the world of cross-platform mobile app development using JavaScript.

Mike Branstein

Mike is a developer and leader, who is passionate about systems architecture, application lifecycle management, mobile app development with NativeScript, and technology. Mike loves teaching his two boys about science and technology, while incorporating logic, development, and electronics into weekend projects and daily play. Mike blogs with his brother, Nick Branstein at https://brosteins.com, where they are known as “the Brosteins”. Together they are co-authors of NativeScript In Action, a book focused on teaching developers how to create professional mobile apps for iOS and Android using JavaScript and TypeScript.

A Gentle Introduction to Functional JavaScript

Functional Programming is available in many programming languages today. You probably know that FP is possible in JavaScript - but did you know that writing FP style JavaScript will lead to cleaner, more maintainable code? In this session, we'll explore writing FP style JavaScript and cover the basics, and intermediate techniques. We'll do a functional refactor and explain the reasoning along the way. We'll use mostly basic JavaScript and the underscore library for code examples to demonstrate Functional Programming in a simple to understand, and more practical, way.

Pratik Patel

Pratik Patel is the CTO of Atlanta based TripLingo (http://www.triplingo.com/). He has also spoken at various conferences and participates in several local tech groups and startup groups. He's in the startup world now and hacks iOS, Android, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Rails, and ..... well everything except Perl.

API First Design - Building SaaS Software Applications

Application Programming Interface aka API is a norm nowadays as delivering applications is not just about building a pretty user interface with 'something underneath' it to execute business logic. Applications in the modern era is about customization and integration to build an ecosystem. Think about Facebook Developer Platform or iOS or Google Developer Platform, the thing common in them is a robust and user friendly API system, which makes their products popular, usable and profitable. This session will introduce what 'API First' Design is all about, then get into it's emergence and then eventually get into design, build, deployment and acceptance strategies of APIs to prove this is not just for startups. At the end of the session you will learn on 'API First' design concepts, guidelines & tools to build and deploy them and the most important of all - mechanisms to have a feedback loop of API acceptance in order to improve it further.

Sabyasachi Gupta

Sabyasachi Gupta aka Saby has been working in the software industry for all his career. Saby has performed multiple roles - starting as a Software Engineer and then managing projects to architecting startup products and leading and managing high performance agile product teams. He has experience in multiple business domains like healthcare, media, airline, financial to name a few. Saby was one of the initial adopters of 'Api First' design, big data technologies and microservices architecture during his technical leadership role at Myspace - a pioneer in social networking. He believe building SMART (Scalable, Measurable, Available & Agile, Reliable & Testable) software is non-trivial and hence wants to do his part of cascading his experience of building SMART software. In his current role he is leading the technical architecture of few big data products @ Zaloni, located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

An Accessible Guide to Accessibility

ARIA? WCAG? JAWS? Making web apps accessible is often thought of as the scary, arcane territory of voodoo doctors. But it doesn't have to be this way. With the right mindset and adherence to a few simple principles, anyone can build accessible web content. Come learn how to make augment your app with semantic helpers for assistive technologies, design with disabled users in mind, and test the way that real users will experience your app.

Nick Heiner

Nick is a senior software engineer at the United States Digital Service (https://www.usds.gov/). Prior to that, he worked at Opower, Google, and Microsoft, and graduated from Cornell. He has contributed to open source projects like Eslint, Bower, Foundation, and Chai. He writes about technology and politics on Medium (https://medium.com/@nickheiner).

Best Practices Are Best, Except When They're Not

A code-review of sorts where we go over some of the real-world situations when things just don't go the way the Stack Overflow Gods say they should. We'll look at the pros and cons of solutions in these situations and the lessons hopefully learned along the way. Description of target audience: Developers that write apps in the real world, that have deadlines, and have to solve real problems that don't always fit nicely in a box. Assumed knowledge for the topic: Intermediate level of ColdFusion (or similar language) and some experience with OOP (but by no means will you need to be an expert...in fact, if you call yourself an 'expert' you'll probably think this talk is beneath you...and if that's the case, I'd encourage you to attend even moreso. ;) Objective of the topic: We all see lots of "well I would never do it THAT way" comments on blog posts, mailing lists, and the all-mighty Stack Overflow. But what about when you HAVE to do it that way? Let's look at some of these situations and talk about different solutions that might not be the most elegant, but solved the problem, and helped us learn something for making the next version of our app better. Main takeaways: When is it BETTER to have errors emailed to the team instead of stored in a logging tool (Yes, there is a time for this). Can you do things like add Bootstrap to an old table-based web app? (Yes, there are still some of these out in the wild.) And what happens when you do so? An explanation of technical debt and why it's important. Some real code situations where incurring a little technical debt was necessary. Some lessons learned when these situations have presented themselves, so we can improve things in the future.

Nolan Erck

Nolan Erck has been developing software for 19 years. Starting in the video game industry working on titles for Maxis and LucasArts, then advancing to web development in 1999, his list of credits includes Grim Fandango, StarWars Rogue Squadron, SimPark, SimSafari as well as high-traffic websites for clients. Nolan manages the SacInteractive User Group, teaches classes on aspects of software development, and regularly gives presentations at conferences and user groups across the country.When he's not consulting or talking about himself in the third person, Nolan can usually be found working on one of several music projects.

Big Data made Easy with a Spark

In this practical (almost hands-on) session, we will see how we can use Java and Apache Spark to connect to existing databases and Open Data, ingest data, and run our very first Machine Learning algorithm! We will demystify the "magic" behind Big Data analytics and jump into a pragmatic way to build our use-case. Audience: Software engineers who want to learn about Apache Spark. Java knowledge is desirable but not required. Key Takeaways: Basics about Apache Spark – 20%. Walking through a complete scenario – 80%.

Jean Georges Perrin

Jean Georges Perrin "jgp" is passionate about software engineering and all things data, small and big data. His latest endeavors bring him in the Apache ecosystem, with a definite penchant for Spark and more and more Data Science. He is proud to have been the first in France to be recognized as an IBM Champion, and to have been awarded the honor for his ninth consecutive year. Jean Georges shares his more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry as a presenter and participant at conferences and through publishing articles in print and online media. His blog is visible at http://jgp.net. When he is not immersed in IT, which he loves, he enjoys exploring his adopted region of North Carolina with his kids. #Knowledge = ?? ( ? (#SmallData, #BigData), #DataScience) & #Software. #IBMChampion x9. #KeepLearning. @ http://jgp.net

Building Mobile Apps with Framework 7 and Vue.js

In this presentation we'll introduce Vue.js, setup a webpack build, extoll the virtues of its reactive data binding and composable interface all while building an Instagram like app. Using Framework 7 to provide the basic UI for Android and iOS for those of us, like myself, who are CSS challenged. Vue.js is a library for building interactive web interfaces. The goal of Vue.js is to provide the benefits of reactive data binding and composable view components with an API that is as simple as possible. Framework7 - is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS & Android native look and feel. It is also an indispensable prototyping apps tool to show working app prototype as soon as possible in case you need to.

Simon MacDonald

Simon has over twenty years of development experience and has worked on a variety of projects including object oriented databases, police communication systems, speech recognition and unified messaging. His current focus is contributing to the open source PhoneGap project to enable developers to create cross platform mobile applications using Web technologies. Simon’s been building web applications since the days they were written using shell scripts and he still has nightmares about those dark days.

Building a Mobile App People Want to Use

Did you know the average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first three days? Getting a user to install an app is only the first step. Come learn how to create a great mobile user experience that will have your users coming back for more. We'll talk about the reasons people delete apps, and how not to fall into those traps. We'll also discuss best practices for building intuitive, delightful mobile interfaces.

Sylvia Pellicore

Sylvia Pellicore is the Web Accessibility Advisor for BCBSNC, making sure their sites and tools work for users of all ability levels. When she is not planning events for the local chapter of Girl Develop It, she likes to run, rock climb, and knit increasingly elaborate scarves.

Building a Progressive Web App - a Practical Example

In this talk, I'll cover the basics of building a PWA, but I'll end (well, the second portion anyway) with building a real app using PWA technologies - a replacement for the NCDevCon web site specifically targeted for folks attending the conference.

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden is a developer advocate for IBM. His work focuses on LoopBack, API Connect, serverless, hybrid mobile development, Node.js, HTML5, and web standards in general. He's a published author and presents at conferences and user groups on a variety of topics. Raymond can be reached at his blog (www.raymondcamden.com), @raymondcamden on Twitter, or via email at raymondcamden@gmail.com.

Cross-Platform Mobile Development Using Open Source Tools

Native SDKs are never a bad choice for delivering the best possible experience on mobile devices, but not every app needs that level of performance. Cross-platform mobile development frameworks like Apache Cordova, Ionic, NativeScript, React Native, give developers more flexibility in how they deliver their mobile apps and leverage existing web development skills. In this session, you’ll learn about leading approaches for building cross-platform mobile apps using these tools.

John Wargo

John is a professional software developer, writer, presenter, father, husband, and Geek. For the last 10 years, he’s focused on enterprise mobility and building mobile apps. He’s an author of 6 books on mobile development, and has been a contributor to the open-source Apache Cordova project. He loves tinkering with IoT, building and writing about projects for Arduino, Particle Photon, Raspberry Pi, Tessel 2, and more. He's currently a Program Manager at Microsoft working on Visual Studio Mobile Center.

Dev'ing with Alexa: Learning the basics of building a skill in Alexa

In this talk, we will outline the core concepts and workflow of the Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) and how to take a skill from concept to reality using your existing skills as a web developer. (We will be using Node.js & C# for illustration but, knowledge should carry over to other languages\platforms) From this session you will learn: 1. The workflow of a basic Alexa skill 2. Incorporating an existing API with Alexa (Twilio) to make a phone call & text message with Alexa 3. Skill publishing considerations, limitations and taking your newfound Alexa powers to the next level

Terrance Smith

Terrance is the founder of Hacker Ferret Software LLC, a consultancy focused on empowering small businesses and startups through technology. Terrance enlisted as a service member in the US Army in 2004 as a Network & Systems Admin in support of Air Defense Artillery units. After leaving the army, He taught himself how to develop web applications and got his first job as a dev in 2008 and has been programming ever since. He is currently working on a product that uses Alexa to help seniors and their caretakers. He is also a member of the Entreprogrammers "Seal Team" http://entreprogrammers.com/ Terrance's Site: http://hackerferret.com/

Even More HTML5

HTML5 has been finalized but the spec is so big, browser makers have been slow to implement all the features. Still, several new (and useful) things have been making their way into the latest builds of FireFox and Chrome (and those other guys too) that are worth noting. Maybe you can stop relying on so many third-part libraries now. Maybe things that required hacks in CSS before can now be done easily. Let's find out! Target Audience: Front-end developers who are familiar with the "basics" of HTML5 and would like to see what other features HTML5 are mature enough to start using in web applications. Attendees should have prior experience with HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. Assumed Knowledge: This talk assumes the audience is very comfortable with modern HTML and basic JavaScript concepts such as variables, functions, scopes and callbacks. Main takeaways: New JavaScript constructs - const, let, other ES6 features and more! Custom Events in JavaScript New CSS3 constructs - counter, unset, and more! Skip Less or Sass and just drive straight into CSS3 with post-processing.

Nolan Erck

Nolan Erck has been developing software for 19 years. Starting in the video game industry working on titles for Maxis and LucasArts, then advancing to web development in 1999, his list of credits includes Grim Fandango, StarWars Rogue Squadron, SimPark, SimSafari as well as high-traffic websites for clients. Nolan manages the SacInteractive User Group, teaches classes on aspects of software development, and regularly gives presentations at conferences and user groups across the country.When he's not consulting or talking about himself in the third person, Nolan can usually be found working on one of several music projects.

Evolution of JS Asynchronicity

Mastering the asynchronous nature of Javascript is key to simplifying your workflow code, whether in the browser or Node.js on the back-end. We'll explore the history of asynchronous processing in Javascript, including using callbacks, deferreds, async lib, promises, generators, and the new await/async features coming in ES2017. If you don't know these terms, you'll walk away with the ability to be more productive in JS and spend less time coding.

Matthew Eash

Matthew Eash is an enterprise architect, lead developer, and data guru. He is currently heading up multiple data and visualization initiatives for a national research lab.

From Legacy to Modern, Techniques to update your Legacy CFML Sites

a. We all have worked on a spaghetti coded site that is old and hard to maintain. This talk will focus on some tips to take that legacy CFML site and make it more modern. I will spend some time going over some thoughts on what to look for in a legacy site which can help you determine if you should refactor or not. We will look at some ways to start mapping out and diagramming your site before you even touch the code. When it is time to view code, we will follow a refactor effort I did and use the techniques we discussed. Once we get through the refactor, I will show some places in the code where we can apply more modern coding techniques such as cfscript, members functions, closures and more.

Dan Fredericks

Been in the Tech field for 14+ years doing mostly ColdFusion on Government Contracts. I live in Northern Virginia, with wife and 2 kids. I have run the NOVACFUG for 4+ yrs. Big Sports nut especially Penn State sports.

Get to grips with GraphQL

In a world where APIs and REST are the way that we can communicate with services, it can become an arduous task to get to the information you need. For example if you look at a single tweet, obtained from Twitter’s API, you will so a stack of information that you don’t need! If only there was a way to query this data to get just what you need. Enter Facebook’s GraphQL language. A language specification that solves the same problem that SQL did for Relational Databases. In this presentation, Mark Drew will go through the fundamentals of the Query Language, structure, use cases and how we can get started with consuming and creating GraphQL endpoints.

Mark Drew

Mark has been programming the web since 1996. His career has concentrated on eCommerce, Content Management and Application Scalability. He runs CMD, a Web Development Consultancy that helps clients all round the world develop, deploy and deliver high end applications.

How to Run a High Functioning Team

We're all familiar with the rituals that make up daily life in the software world: standup, backlogs, sprint planning, 1:1s, retros, code review, etc. But even if everyone is following the same general patterns, not all teams are equal. What's the difference between high functioning teams that produce great results quarter after quarter, and teams that miss? In this highly-opinionated talk, I'll share lessons from high functioning organizations like Google and Microsoft, mixed remote and co-present teams, a startup maturing into a public company, and the federal government tech space.

Nick Heiner

Nick is a senior software engineer at the United States Digital Service (https://www.usds.gov/). Prior to that, he worked at Opower, Google, and Microsoft, and graduated from Cornell. He has contributed to open source projects like Eslint, Bower, Foundation, and Chai. He writes about technology and politics on Medium (https://medium.com/@nickheiner).

Java Tools Use In Tuning ColdFusion

There are a number of tools which ship with the Oracle Java Virtual Machine (JVM), for tuning and troubleshooting purposes; in this practical session we will see these tools in use whilst load-testing an application. Certainly I would be interested to expand this into a workshop if that opportunity arises.

Mike Brunt

The (literally) great grandfather of ColdFusion. Started developing in ColdFusion in 1996 (CF 1.54), recruited by Allaire in 1999 as a server-side consultant. Mike has worked on every version of ColdFusion, JRun and Spectra since and is still involved in ColdFusion and Java on a day to day basis.

Making Use Of Our Robot Overlords

Automating workflows has been a priority of many development teams in recent years. The more your team can automate their work and integrate the different tools they use, the more they can accomplish. Why have your talented humans do QA when you have even more talented robots? Why spend your time doing the same, old DevOps work when you can build new and exciting intergrations? Come join Brian Thompson from Mindgrub to learn about how you can level up your agency game by building in automation and testing into your workflow. Connect your development life with your favorite apps and services, both inbound and outbound, as well as unify login across services. This will make your life so much better. Topics covered include: The benefits of automating your development workflow How to integrate your favorite services (like GitHub, CircleCI, Slack, etc) with other tools and services Using and creating ready-to-use recipes for common workflows What's on the horizon? Where is this all going?

Brian Thompson

Brian currently run the Web Team at Mindgrub Technologies, a digital services agency in Baltimore specializing in Drupal websites. His life consists of coding, managing my team, having some fun playing video games, and going camping as far away from technology as possible. He's been building, maintaining, and administering websites since 2007 and has gone from intern to lead engineer to director over his tenure. During this time he's launched countless websites and managed the website and servers for high-profile websites such as those used during charity TV benefit concerts with audiences of 2 billion people.

Making your web application easier to reason about with unidirectional data flow

You are tasked with adding a feature or fixing a bug, but as a developer working on that particular piece of code for the first time, it can be difficult to understand. You find yourself opening up many files, reading through lines of code just to determine what is being done, and then finally determining where to make a change. Can you trust that your changes will not have any unpredictable side effects? What if I told you that there's a way for us to increase readability, productivity, predictability and testability? This is what the world of unidirectional data flow with a centralized state management system promises us.

Kenneth Yeung

Kenneth is a software architect at nCino (http://www.ncino.com) and has been developing software for 16 years. He is passionate about software architecture, researching and implementing latest development technologies and making the process of keeping an enterprise-scale application technology stack up to date less painful.

Managing Your SQL Server When You Don't Have A DBA

Not everyone has a full time Database Administrator on staff, and in many cases the responsibility of managing the SQL Server falls on you, the developers. But as long as the backups are running successfully you're good, right? Not exactly. Your databases could be heading for trouble! Without proper tuning and maintenance, your database performance can grind to a halt. Tailored to the "Non-DBA", this session will show you how to configure your Microsoft SQL Server like a DBA would. Discussing server settings, database configurations, and recommended maintenance, you will leave this session with the knowledge and scripts you need to help tune SQL Server to fit your workload, fix some performance problems you may not even realize you're having, and help ensure that your databases are running smoothly.

Eric Cobb

Eric Cobb is a seasoned IT professional with extensive experience in advanced application and database development. After a 14 year programming career as a web and software developer Eric moved into the world of databases, earning his Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE): Data Platform certification, and now works as a Sr. level Database Administrator in Nashville, TN. Eric regularly presents and blogs about SQL Sever, with a focus on teaching database administration and design concepts to the developer community.

Micro SPA Architecture - The Journey so Far

Micro services have been the fad du-jour for several years on the server-side, and now micro SPAs (Single-Page Applications) are coming into the limelight bringing the same concepts to the front end stack. My team has spent the last couple of years experimenting with micro SPAs, and I will be sharing our experiences so far in this presentation. We will cover some basics of why one may choose a micro SPA architecture over traditional monoliths, some things we have loved about this design pattern, as well as problems to solve. Additionally, we will discuss some of the nuts and bolts of our approach to implementing this design pattern. Those attending should expect to get a good idea of the overarching idea of micro SPA architecture as well as some implementable direction to get started on them yourself.

Jessica Kennedy

Jessica is a software engineer at Inmar, inc. Specializing in front end architecture, specifically around css, she brings over 10 years of full stack experience to the table. Her current role involves working as part of a polyglot team of engineers working full-stack within an ever-evolving ecosystem of technologies.

NodeJS Serverless Backend for your Front-Ends with Apache OpenWhisk

No need to deal managing servers or proxys to enable your front end Apps. Build simple things like a single web form, to a REST API for your mobile web app with a few lines of code. Apache OpenWhisk allows developers to focus on writing value-adding code instead of burning hours on architecture and server management. Write in your preferred language to combine custom code with plug-and-play packages from our rich ecosystem of supporter services, and go live in hours instead of weeks. I will show how to build a Single Page App (SPA) with a Serverless BackEnd to get you started writing NodeJS Serverless functions by the time you leave the talk.

Carlos Santana

Senior Software Architect on Bluemix OpenWhisk. PMC member and committer of Apache Cordova and Apache OpenWhisk involved on leveraging open source technologies within IBM’s Cloud organization. Twitter http://twitter.com/csantanapr GitHub http://github.com/csantanapr

On-Device Mobile App Prototyping Made Easy

Haven't you always wanted to see and feel your mobile app on a device BEFORE you actually write all the code? Maybe you want to create a quick demo or proof of concept. Or maybe you're working out a navigation flow. Either way, there isn't a good solution out there for a developer to quickly put together a functioning interactive prototype on an actual mobile device. In this session, Alex Ziskind will show you how to use JavaScript to create a running prototype with multiple screens and navigation on a mobile device. We'll use the cross platform framework called NativeScript to get this done and it will be easy!

Alex Ziskind

Alex Ziskind is a speaker and trainer. For the last 16 years, Alex has been developing software solutions for the enterprise as well as small startups. In the last 7 years, his Washington DC based company, Nuvious, has been involved in architecting and implementing cloud solutions on an international scale. Since 2015, Alex has been recognized as a Telerik Developer Expert due to his community involvement with NativeScript. You can connect with Alex on Twitter @digitalix and on his blog www.nuvious.com/blog

Power of Simplicity in FW/1 Framework

Framework One has been the choice of many developers for the past several years. Whether you are still on the crossroads of framework dilemma or have been working with FW/1 before, this presentation will show some of the new and advanced features of this framework: subsystems, REST support, skinning, multi-site setup as well as DI/1, AOP/1 and others. Targeting intermediate level of developers this presentation will show ideas for the use of the framework as well as demonstrate commonly used functions.

Masha Edelen

Masha Edelen is a full stack web developer of 16 years, specializing in backend programming utilizing ColdFusion. Running a small web development company, she and her team have been delivering custom web applications to a wide range of clients since 2002. When not in the office working on the next project she loves to travel and spend time with family.

Real World DevOps

The world of DevOps is filled with hype and grand plans. Come learn how to realistically apply DevOps principles where you work today. We’ll talk about what worked, what didn’t, and how we pivoted as we applied DevOps principles in teams large and small. We’ll cover the importance of building an Engineering Excellence culture, how to make meaningful quality gates, conservation of CI jobs, and what we learned working on Continuous Delivery pipelines.

Sam Thomas

Sam Thomas worked for 3 years as sole Developer, DBA, Operations, QA, and Scrum Master on a product in a small company and learned DevOps the hard way. He helped implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery at Fidelity, and is currently focused on Automated Testing.

S-E-“Oh Myyy” : Using Structured, Semantic Data for Stellar Content

Like all things Web, SEO is a wild ride. Ranking criteria changes rapidly as do strategies for optimizing content visibility. As challenging as this is, the goal of both search and content providers is the same: to deliver quality content to Web users. Schema.org is a collaborative effort founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. Its purpose is to create, maintain, and promote structured data schemas for embedding a voculary of metadata into Web markup. This provides a common, rich context for search engine ranking and offers content providers a means to improve content quality - a win win! This session will introduce schema.org structured data as both an SEO tool and a means to improve the organization and provision of content for Web users. Topics will include: 1. An overview into common structured data use cases. 2. Examples of embedding structured content into your markup. 3. Using search engine tooling to validate structured data. 4. Enhancing search result form and function with structured data. 5. Complimenting structured data with HTML5 semantic markup.

Eric Carlisle

As a UI Developer and UX Designer, my passion is for building the user-facing web and the experiences that make it engaging, compelling, and powerful. My core approach is to Keep It Stunningly Simple, a practice that encourages creative innovation while maintaining pragmatic focus. Via this careful balance, outstanding solutions can be created with the highest probability of project success. In my 20+ years as a Web geek, I've worked in several Web production roles. Much of his time has been as a consultant, allowing me to work with a wide variety of commercial, nonprofit, and government markets.

Serverless Application Development

Learn about the various approaches to developing full stack applications with a serverless mindset. From development patterns to deployment. Learn how to manage security, datastores, APIs and more. There will be a heavy focus on AWS, but also information on other providers as well (e.g. Azure, OpenWhisk, etc). On top of that the benefits of using frameworks will be demonstrated as well. This is an intermediate session that assumes basic cloud computing knowledge.

Adrian Pomilio

Adrian Pomilio is a UI Architect and Director of Shared Services for Mapp Digital in Raleigh NC. Adrian has been designing/architecting enterprise applications in the B2B and B2C space for many years. With a heavy focus on front-end technologies JavaScript is at the forefront of his coding adventures. Currently he is heavily focusing on serverless and IOT architecture when he is not spending his free time with his two sons.

Setting up and managing Continuous Integration

Building applications is hard. Building on a remote server, automatically, efficiently and in a reproducible manner is even harder, but the benefits are amazing. With CI, you can automatically build, test, lint, and deploy your app with a single commit. But that's DevOps' job! Maybe, but chances are as a developer, you will at least once be called upon to set up this kind of process, and blindly stumbling through it is not fun. In this session I will go over setting up Jenkins, Travis, or CircleCI, and ways to integrate your whole project and process into CI. I will also go through what tools for web, javascript or mobile apps are useful in a CI process (think Docker/Vagrant), and how to integrate them.

Trevor Brindle

Hey, I'm Trevor. I've been working in Mobile for about 5 years at Siemens Energy, freelance and with my currently employer, Market America/Shop.com. I specialize in Hybrid JS frameworks (Cordova & React Native), continuous integration, testing and standardization. I have spoken about building and deploying apps at both Dev.objective() and NCDevCon.

Stop JavaScripting like it's 1999

JavaScript is moving fast. Last year’s best practices are quickly becoming today’s anti-patterns as we experience fundamental shifts in the language. With so many outdated learning resources out there, it's hard to know if we're doing things right. In this talk, Hunter Loftis will introduce us to the new rules of modern JavaScript. Whether you're a new developer trying to learn modern best practices or a veteran looking to break old habits, 2017 is your opportunity to level up! Topics: • Callback-free async patterns • Understanding Promises • Functional Patterns (map, reduce & friends) • Writing readable functions & objects • Error handling • Simplified build and dependency systems All the examples and concepts will be applicable to both browser and Node.js and environments. After this session, you’ll be able to read and write the shorter, simpler code of modern JS. Hope to see you there!

Hunter Loftis

Hunter spent the last three years running Heroku’s Node.js platform and is currently the engineering manager for Heroku’s languages team. He enjoys building, talking about, and thinking about games, physics engines, graphics, and microservices in JavaScript, C#, and Go. He's presented at ForwardJS, Nodevember, JSConf EU, and other development events. You can find his work on the Heroku Engineering Blog and at PlayfulJS.

Taking Application Design to the Next Level with MVC

Are you still developing procedural-style ColdFusion applications? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Have you begun feeling the pain of dealing with tangled code messes filled with includes, custom tags, and random components? The most common cure is embracing the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. There are several excellent and powerful community-supported MVC frameworks available (FW/1, ColdBox, CFWheels) to make life easier. Come to this session and learn: • What the MVC design pattern is and what problems it solves, • How FW/1’s convention-based approach can bring structure to an application, • What dependency injection is and how it simplifies the “model” portion of applications, • How to progressively refactor real-world procedural code into MVC-style code We will walk through a simple procedural application and then see how the same application can be structured as an MVC application using FW/1 (and a little bit of Coldbox too). This session will help anyone with a moderate skill level in ColdFusion, and at least some familiarity with object-oriented programming concepts.

Carl Von Stetten

I have been working as a Geographic Information System (GIS) Analyst with Central San in California for 17 years, and have developed and maintained a number of internal ColdFusion-based GIS applications for our staff. I am well-versed in Microsoft SQL Server and Esri ArcGIS technologies. I managed the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) for several years, and am currently an Adobe Community Professional for ColdFusion.

Taking Chatbots by Storm

Some say 2017 is the year of chatbots, the coming of age of AI and NLP. We will go beyond the hype and talk about real world usecases within financial services where AI and chatbots have an important role to play. We will have a code walkthrough and demo of a common financial service usecase using voice & text chatbot, using tools like Amazon Alexa and api.ai. This will cover the aspects of intent design, security and performance. We will then build an AI prediction model using the BigML tool. You will walk away with an overall understanding of chatbots & tools to build them.

Soumya Kota

Soumya is a Software Engineer at Fidelity Investments who specializes in working on front end and middle tier applications. She joined Fidelity Investments immediately after graduation from NC State with a Bachelors in Computer Science. She is experienced in Java, Node.js, and Angular.js. Soumya is passionate about encouraging women to become technologists. She likes to spend her free time at work promoting culture change so that her fellow colleagues are enjoying their jobs. Outside of work, Soumya loves to play and watch DOTA2, spend time with her dog, and watch the newest Netflix show.

The Ultimate Guide to Building the Worst Product

Let's face it. There's a gap between what developers care about and what users care about. In this session we'll explore what happens when we ignore this simple fact. We'll discuss what UX is and why the user's experience matters, how to think like your users, and some new rules we can all get behind. After all, UX is more than just about visual design, but also about making sure systems are set up in a way that makes them easy for people to actually use.

Alisa Herr

Alisa is a multi-disciplinarian who loves flexing her skills in strategy, data analysis, empathy, design, and web development. In 2016, she established Unity as a digital agency for community-focused businesses. A North Carolinian to the bone, Alisa is from the Triangle, has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Appalachian State University, a master’s degree in library and information science from UNC Chapel Hill, and ardently defends her preference for Lexington style bbq. She is a mom, wife, public speaker, open source evangelist, and serves on the community board of AIGA Raleigh as the chair of the Women Lead Initiative.

Using StrongLoop to Rapidly Build APIs

In this session, I'll discuss how to use StrongLoop (and LoopBack) to rapidly prototype APIs in Node.js applications. I'll demonstrate how to create REST APIs, how to configure security, and show an example of using them in a mobile application.

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden is a developer advocate for IBM. His work focuses on LoopBack, serverless, hybrid mobile development, Node.js, HTML5, and web standards in general. He's a published author and presents at conferences and user groups on a variety of topics. Raymond can be reached at his blog (www.raymondcamden.com), @raymondcamden on Twitter, or via email at raymondcamden@gmail.com.

Visualizing Data in Realtime with WebSocket and D3

With the advent of Internet of Things it is becoming increasingly important for us as developers to understand how to use data coming in from a streaming data source to give constant feedback to our customers. This becoming a more critical point as we look to provide our users with constant feedback on the status of their automobiles, their devices, and any other product that is wirelessly connected to their home. Just as important as providing access to this data is doing do with a design that clearly demonstrates what the value is of the data. You can provide access to the raw data which, depending on the user, may or may not be valuable. Most likely what you are going to want to do is present the data in a visual context. Your data should be shown in a way that: - Clearly indicates if there is a problem that needs to be addressed - Is unambiguous. The presentation of the data shouldn’t mislead the user - Is more than just decoration. It should be providing the user with some actionable information (even if that action is “All Systems Operational”) What are you going to walk away with: - An understanding of how to attach to data from a streaming data source via web sockets - Create aggregations of this data using D3 and JavaScript array prototype functions - Bind data dynamically to a data visualization

Brian Greig

I am a developer in Charlotte, NC working on third party integrations and digital analytics. I have a passion for programming, data, network security, cryptography, and artificial intelligence. I spend the better part of my days outside of work making the most of my time with my wife and two sons

W3C Content Security Policy & HTTP Headers for Security

Would you like a way to improve the security of your web application without having to change any code but just add several HTTP headers. In this session, David takes you through existing HTTP headers that can be used to improve security with modern web browsers. He also goes in depth on W3C Content Security Policy which makes it much more difficult to exploit Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) by explicitly telling the broswer where it can load resources. Main Points: * HTTP Headers for security * X-Frame-Options * X-XSS-Protection * X-Content-Type-Options * HTTP Strict Transport Security * W3C Content Security Policy Target Audience: Developers and system/web administrators Assumed Knowledge: Understanding of what an HTTP Header is

David Epler

David Epler is a Full Stack Security Engineer at InVisionApp squashing security bugs and issues. He also works with outside penetration testers through the bug bounty programs that InVisionApp uses.

What's new in CF 10, 11, and 2016 that you may have missed?

Are you moving up to CF2016, or maybe 11? In doing so, are you skipping over 11, or perhaps even 10, in that move? Shops often drag their feet upgrading from one version of CF to another and may well skip multiple releases in the process, so that they may not have paid attention to what was new in the release(s) skipped. Can you name the top 5 or 10 features/changes in these three most recent releases? In this presentation, veteran CFer Charlie Arehart will help fill these gaps for you, highlighting the top features of 10, 11, and 2016, along with some hidden gems. (Whereas his classic “hidden gems” talks have gone deep to uncover a few dozen features per release, this talk will necessarily focus on just some key ones.) With demos and resources for learning more, you’ll be in a better position to take full advantage of your new CF installation.

Charlie Arehart

A veteran server troubleshooter who's worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting).

Writing Secure Code

The session will cover the latest techniques and standards in writing secure code. I will use real life examples I encountered during security reviews and incorporate lessons learned the hard way. While most developers focus on building functionality that will make their applications great, security is often regarded as an afterthought. This session will discuss an overall approach to building secure applications, with a specific focus on code and the role of the developer. This session is meant for intermediate and advanced developers interested building more secure applications.

Shlomy Gantz

Shlomy Gantz is a veteran developer with over 20 years of experience, an extensive background in application development, security and project management. He currently works as Delivery Manager for Twin Technologies, working primarily with large public sector organizations. Shlomy has been a long time contributor to the community, an Adobe Community Professional, as well as founder and manager of several user groups. He has presented in over 20 conferences and user groups including Adobe Max, CFUnited and WebManiacs.

Writing better code with Comment Driven Development

Understanding and improving code written by others is something that every developer must be able to do. Often, this process is harder than it has to be because explaining your code through comments and documentation is often seen as tedious or as something that has very little purpose. By intent-focused comments rather than process-driven comments, developers can write code that is a pleasure to understand and user. In this talk, we will discuss a technique to create better, more understandable code through purposeful comments.

Sean Doherty

Sean Doherty is the Chief Software Architect at CrossComm. He has a BS/MS in Computer Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence from WPI. Sean has programmed in over 12 languages (always a growing total) and oversees code quality across CrossComm’s iOS, Android, web and AR/VR projects.

send.Better() - Giving Email a REST

Your application sends emails; they might be alerts, confirmations, reports, surveys, newsletters, support-related, or invoices. The process of setting up, maintaining, and troubleshooting these emails generally alternates between boring and frustrating; developers are happy to move on to richer, more modern portions of their applications. It really doesn't have to be like this. AWS SES might be the best known of the transactional email services, but that doesn't mean it's the best. Mailgun, Sendgrid, Postmark, and Sparkpost all provide compelling email-as-a-service offerings, built around developer-focused REST APIs. The offerings and features varying slightly from one provider to the next; which is the best for you? As usual, the answer is that it depends, but I'll help you find out. We're going to cover: * The benefits provided by using a transactional email service * A pragmatic, use-driven comparison of the major players in the space * Pitfalls, considerations, and tips when configuring your DNS records and integrating a transactional email service with your application * Interacting with the actual APIs, and showing how easy they are to use, even with CFML We'll be approaching this from a CFML perspective, but the examination of the services and their APIs will be applicable to any language. So let's dive in and see easy it is to send better emails, get detailed reporting, access logging that doesn't make you want to pull your hair out, and take advantage of advanced features, such as webhooks, transactional templates, and inbound email rules.

Matthew Clemente

I'm a Founding Partner with Season 4, LLC, a team of designers, programmers, and writers working in the legal industry. After studying English, I took the road less traveled and one day realized, much to my surprise, that I had become a developer. I've been building with ColdFusion since MX 7, and the community has been amazing from the start. I'm a husband, father, and always trying to be better. You can find me on Twitter (@mjclemente84), Github (@mjclemente) and I blog, time permitting, at the cleverly named blog.mattclemente.com.

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