Schedule
Download the scheduleMinding the Gap in Digital Transformation
Room: Auditorium
Digital Transformation means many things to many people and is an often-abused term. This presentation isn’t about platforms, mobile, or even technology. It’s about understanding your users and customers and solving the problems they can’t even articulate yet. Doing that is how you will transform your business and disrupt your competition.
During this presentation, we’ll discuss how to stop building the wrong software, how to close the expectation gap with users, and how to create a culture that embraces change. We’ll use some keen and often overlooked stories of market disruption along with some first-hand examples to illustrate how you can implement these principles for your own success.
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Key Takeaways:
- Stop building solutions and start solving user problems
- Appreciate the gap between what users want and what you deliver
- Recognize the limits of user input
- Understand how the best interface is no interface
- Learn how to reframe the challenge for the long term
Unraveling UX
Room: 153A&B
Everywhere you turn someone is talking about User Experience (UX) and how it is the key to building successful digital applications and products. Join Brett Wallis as he discusses User Centered Design and explains his time tested approach to gaining insight into your customers. Learn about developing personas, triaging your UX needs, and conducting successful customer interviews. Come with your own insights and questions as we Unravel UX.
VR/AR: Impacts to IT Culture and Application Development
Room: 155A&B
VR/AR will change the how people interact with the internet. This talk will delve into how these technologies will impact and change how we think about application development, as well as, how a development organization must change to meet the cultural changes that VR/AR will bring.
Beginning Azure
Room: 150
The cloud is here! Are you ready? Microsoft, Amazon and others are all vying for your cloud attention. In this session, we will review the different types of cloud platforms available and what they mean to you. We will pay close attention to Microsoft’s Azure platform that offers two hosting solutions. What are these hosting options and what are the differences between them? Most importantly, how do I get started with all of this cloud business? Let’s put SQL Server into the cloud!
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DesignOps and You. Succeeding as a modern design team...
Room: 153A&B
Good design is vital to our growth as companies. But how do we ensure success with all the other thought and work shifts happening in the workplace?
Join the conversation as we take a high-level look at Design Ops as an emerging concept that seeks to improve the value of the design investment. Along the way we’ll explore one or two elements in some detail along with some of the tools and instrumentation needed for modern design teams to succeed.
Warning. This one comes with a prerequisite. Please Google DesignOps and bring one idea to share with your co-participants.
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Old School IOT from Heavy Duty Trucking Industry
Room: 155A&B
Heavy Duty Trucking had a need to track vehicle location, safety, health and performance way before there was an internet. Come learn about patterns and technology that emerged from automotive industry to collect and analyze vehicle data. These techniques are now available to everyone in solutions like Microsoft’s IOT platform.
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Xamarin… Cross Platform Mobile Development in IOS, Android & UWP
Room: 150
Bring your laptops and learn how to code Xamarin for mobile apps.
IT Leadership Culture Shift For the Digital Age
Room: Auditorium
Organizations are going through transformation as they modernize and remaster their business for the digital age. Some companies are falling behind not due to questions of technology but due to organizational culture. A panel of IT leaders discusses what IT leaders can do to establish the right culture, engage the C-suite, and maximize the business impact they and their organizations make.
Moderated by Richard Starets
Predictive Analytics applied in Sales
Room: 153A&B
The cultural impact of implementing advanced analytics within a sales organization. A journey of two analytic projects inside a well established industry: Truck Manufacturing.
Migrating to Microservice Databases: From Relational Monolith to Distributed Data
Room: 155A&B
In a Microservices architecture with multiple moving parts we can’t allow that a single complement downtime breaks down the entire system. Dealing with stateless code is easy, but it gets much harder when we have to deal with persistent state. In this scenario, zero downtime migrations are paramount to guarantee integrity and consistency.
Within all the Microservices characteristics, undoubtedly the one that creates more perplexity is the “one database per Microservice”. However, very few teams have the privilege of starting something from scratch: most of the times they have a legacy database that will survive any new implementation.
In legacy systems you traditionally have a model that adopts transactions and CRUD. Now we must reassess some of these concepts. In this talk we’ll discuss consistency, CRUD and CQRS, Event Sourcing, and how these techniques relate to each other in many different integration strategies for databases. We’ll explore Views, Materialized Views, Mirror Tables, Event Sourcing, Data Virtualization, Change Data Capture, and how these strategies enable you to build up a Microservices architecture from a legacy monolithic relational database.
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Introduction to JavaScript
Room: 150
Want to learn the basics of the most used programming language in the world? Dive into the syntax, intricacies, use cases and ecosystem of this versatile web development language.
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Lunch
Room: Atrium
Please pick up your boxed lunch and browse the Showcase in the Atrium.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Room: Atrium
Angela Yochem is the chief digital officer at Novant Health. In this new role, she will develop the strategic vision for how Novant Health can engage with patients through technology and improve their healthcare experience. She is currently the chief information officer and executive vice president of digital channels at Rent-A-Center in Plano, Texas.
The Digital Woman – The vital role of women in the Digital Age
Room: Auditorium
The digital economy benefits from female leadership skills. It is widely accepted that gender balance delivers better business performance. Andrea Rice leads a panel which will discuss how female leadership can be critical in the digital age and what we all can do to eliminate gender bias.
Moderated by Andrea Rice.
Building Practical Blockchain Applications with FlureeDB
Room: 153A&B
Blockchain is a technology touted by many as disruptive, but understood and used effectively by few. While blockchain yields an impressive and exciting list of potential benefits to business applications and business processes, current obstacles such as cost, complexity, and lack of resources hinder tangible implementation. Brian will discuss blockchain and introduce FlureeDB, the world’s first ACID-compliant blockchain database.
Agenda:
- An overview of Blockchain
- What is it, how does it work, and what are its benefits to modern day applications?
- The Blockchain application stack blueprint
- Introduction to FlureeDB, a graph-style blockchain database with ACID compliance
- Demonstration of query, blockchain transactions, and Schema with FlureeDB live code
Planning...Lost in Agile
Room: 155A&B
While the Agile Manifesto and its principles guide us to deliver software in small increments and be accepting of change, it does not say “stop planning ahead”. Many teams continue to only focus on the next sprint without a clear understanding of how the work will impact the longer term vision of the product. Many teams also do nothing to help product managers and management plan ahead. This session will focus on how teams can do better long term planning without sacrificing the core agile principles, and by doing so, deliver higher value and have fun doing it.
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Open Forum
Room: 150
Share your thoughts for the day. A lot of topics were discussed during the day; share what you thought was most impactful and which you disagreed with. Bring up topics that weren’t addressed during the day of which you would like to hear others opinions.
This is your session to share opinions and hear what others think.
Succeeding with DevOps: The Culture of Code
Room: Auditorium
Because DevOps shifts the focus of software development to a collaboration between development, operations, and testing, there isn’t really a single tool that your company can implement and be brought into best practices. Instead, it involves deploying a complete cultural shift in the approach towards software development.
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Taking Chatbots by Storm
Room: 155A&B
Some say 2018 will be 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 and test chatbot, using tools like Amazon Alexa and api.ai. This will cover the aspects of intent design, security and performance.
Coffee Talk: Crypto Currency an Engineer's View
Room: 150
Join Paul Dumas who will interview Matthew Blatchley and Brian Sappey about the crypto currency world. They are not celebrities, but they know crypto, they trade, one day-trades, and they have even built tools to support crypto enthusiasts, they are hard-core engineers, and good guys.
What CyberSecurity Issues should we be losing sleep over in 2018 and how can we get a good night’s rest?
Room: Auditorium
A panel of cyber security leaders discuss the cultural changes we need to make to safeguard our systems in the Digital age.
Moderated by James Guido
The Democratization and Dangers of Data Science
Room: 153A&B
Recent advances, such as the abundance of training and open source tools, and the many on-line communities devoted to data science, give more individuals the opportunity to learn and apply data science tools and technologies than ever before. This leads to the creation of the “Citizen Data Scientist,” someone not trained deeply in the rigors of data science, but who can apply the techniques to create models and provide actionable insights. This talk will not only highlight that opportunity, but also includes a cautionary note that using those tools is more than just applying algorithms to data.
Diversity in Technology and Entrepreneurship: Why it matters & practical steps.
Room: 155A&B
It’s 2018. There is now social awareness about the lack of diversity in our workplaces, and the repercussions there in. People are standing up and saying, “No more.”
So, now what?
In this presentation, Hannah will focus on: Some of the watershed moments of 2017; get behind the headlines and talk about the implications for the technology/entertainment industries. Explore data on diversity; why it makes sense to a company’s bottom line and impacts on family life. Outline practical steps to make changes in the workplace.
The Dockerization of .NET
Room: 150
Are you migrating to DevOps but you’re not using Docker? Are you thinking of making this move without Docker? Learn why you need to rethink that decision. If you are using .NET, Docker is the best way to package that code for deployment. If you have ever heard, “Well, it worked on MY machine!” then most likely you have encountered someone who skipped this crucial step. If you’re working without Docker, you could be staying up all night to finish deployment. What’s worse, if something goes wrong, you will be tied up with troubleshooting to solve the issue.
Key Takeaways:
- An understanding of Docker and why to use it
- The basics of how Docker works
- Background on .NET Core and how it works with Docker
- Challenges to using Docker, including pros and cons
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