December 4-6, 2017
Vancouver, Canada

Top 20 sessions

In his book describing the GTD time management system, David Allen promotes the "Art of Stress-Free Productivity". After too many New Year's Resolutions and too much procrastination, it is time for implementation. You will realise it is not just another collection of self-motivation techniques, but an actionable set of rules to regain control over your life and your to-do list again. This is an intro that's hoping to get you hooked!
HTML & CSS CSS is becoming more and more powerful and nowadays it allows a lot of possibilities. This talk compiles examples of more advanced tips and techniques to add to your CSS skills. Have you ever wanted to curve text around a floated image? Or maybe style broken images? How about using attribute selectors more effectively? Then this talk is for you.
AccessibilityHTML & CSS Developers often have to make decisions that will affect the usability of the finished site: choosing appropriate input types, maximizing performance, and including accessibility features. Learn to think like a user and uncover usability problems that might not be apparent at first glance. Hear some tips to make your site more usable and accessible. User experience isn't just for designers to think about.
HTML & CSS In this session, you'll learn the correct way to write the HTML for a form to make sure it is accessible, understandable, and shows up correctly in the browser. You'll learn how to validate form data and provide useful error messages. You'll see some tricks for using CSS to make your forms look great on the screen. And you'll find out what you need to do to make sure your forms work correctly and are easy to use on mobile devices.
HTML & CSS Public APIs have been waning in popularity these last few years; now most companies are phasing them out. Yet, data is POWER. And come to think of it, the entire data available online IS available to you with enough will and effort. In this presentation I will show how to scrape the internet; practically any site using JSoup, OkHttp and Threads.

I will also cover anti-scraping strategies we face and how to circumvent them.
JavaScriptNode.js For all the power and flexibility JavaScript offers, maintaining even a medium sized JavaScript project can be a nightmare. In addition, IDEs offer limited support during development as it's hard to determine object types. TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, brings strong typing, robust module management, and enhanced tooling while emitting cross-platform JavaScript. And, if you know JavaScript, you can get up and running in 45 minutes.
JavaScriptNode.js Asynchronicity is fundamental to JS and a huge benefit for apps and APIs, but developers have had to struggle with difficult to follow logic and code that quickly becomes unmaintainable. Promises were a stepping stone, but they don't solve the problem themselves. This session will cover an intro to Promises, and then how we can use them to build better asynchronous workflows with generators and async/await.
Databases Convert your entire database structure into a graph using reverse engineering on the database (foreign keys, indexes, etc). Why? The process opens up a whole world of possibilities from automating API exposure, Faceted Search, CRUD panel automation as well. It takes away at least 1/2 of the workload off compared to traditional back-ends. I will walk you through the process AND show the benefits. Potential unveiling of a framework called Backrub!
ArchitecturePHP Design patterns are conceptual solutions to solve common redundant problems in software engineering. However, learning them is not easy as litterature or tutorials on the Internet often introduce them with theorical examples. This talk gives you a slightly different approach by introducing design patterns with practical code samples to solve real world problems. The talk focuses on the Factory Method, Decorator and Composite patterns.
JavaScriptNode.js JavaScript is growing up and browser vendors are on board! But many developers are stuck in the year 2000. This session will show attendees some of the more compelling and practical changes in ES6/2015. We'll talk about new variable declaration types and scopes, default function args, object deconstruction, template strings, "classes", and more. This will be a quick tour, but with practical examples that every developer should have.
Security Are you worried that your REST API may be the next victim of an attack by ruthless hackers? Don't fret. Utilizing the same standards implemented by OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, you can secure your REST API. JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) is the core of a truly secure standards-based REST API. Let me show you how to ensure the data sent too and received from your API is as safe and secure as is reasonably possible.
JavaScript Syntax Tree is an underlying structure of a programming language. These structures can be used for understanding, transforming, formatting, linting or minifying code. In this talk, you will learn about working with syntax trees. You will also learn how to apply this knowledge in practice with some live examples.
Databases Only 2% of developers have formal training in structured query language, relational theory, or even simple sets. Yet, they use a database to store data and wonder why their queries are so slow. This session covers what really happened when you submit a query, why you can not visually tell a poor query from a good one, how to skip the 'N+1" problems, and more. Do not be a slave to slow queries! Learn to become a minor database deity!
ArchitectureJavaScript Developing cutting edge experiences for IoT is challenging. With hundreds of new IoT products added every year, developers need a better way to build front-ends for constantly evolving backends and products, but how? At Comcast we’re working on solving this problem with Web Components. Come learn more about what web components, why they are great for micro services, and critical for mobile development.
DevOpsPerformance "With microservices every outage is like a murder mystery" is a common complaint. But it doesn't have to be! This talk gives an overview on how to monitor applications. We dive into system metrics, application logs, uptime monitoring, application metrics, and request tracing. Putting all the pieces together, so you get and keep an overview of all the moving parts in a complex system.
Machine learning Do you have data you need to analyze to find patterns or make predictions? Sure you can learn R and Python and create your own neural networks, but let’s face it, we coders are basically lazy. We don’t want to write more code than necessary! In this session I will show you how to use Azure Machine Learning Studio, a drag and drop tool you can use to execute machine learning experiments and deploy trained models as web services
Architecture You’ve mapped it out in Visio, put in place all the caching and gateways possible, flip the switch…and nothing. Your beautiful microservice architecture fell on its face! In this experience report, we’ll look at a failed microservice implementation and how we fixed it, from the ground up.
JavaScript Being a developer of a third-party script means not only that you battle browser discrepancies and bugs, but also non-conforming code that exists on the page. We have spent countless hours debugging issues, only to learn that the culprit was an overwritten method or property that behaves differently than its original native. I will share with you the tools and methods we use to identify and workaround these party crashers.
ArchitectureDevOps Are you ready to continuously deploy every commit to production 25 times a day? No?

We all know it's not quite that easy. You can't take an existing house-of-cards monolith and just start treating it like a unicorn, as much as everyone would like to.

This session focuses on practical ways developers can make inroads towards a better DevOps story for existing software. From architecture, process, deployment pipelines, and even culture.
ArchitectureDevOps You've toiled hard on your code, tested it locally, and you're confident it's ready to go. But for some teams, it can take months or even years before you see it in production! With a great deployment pipeline and some clever architecture, there's a better way.

In this session, I'll walk through the realities of a no-touch deployment pipeline that you can trust all the way to production.

Vancouver 2017 sponsored by