O'Reilly Ignite San Jose 2017

Ignite San Jose is open to all Fluent and Velocity conference attendees.

If you had five minutes on stage, what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Would you pitch a project? Launch a website? Teach a hack? We’ll find out at this year’s O’Reilly Ignite San Jose.

General schedule:

• Reception: 5:00pm–5:30pm
• Presentations: 5:30pm–6:30pm

Presentation schedule

The known yet unknown decision maker: Why our users get confused
David Fox (LookZook)

Ever wonder why users can’t find your sign-up or buy button on your page? Maybe you’ve watched someone new to gaming struggle and get confused by things you never even noticed. Why do we keep pushing doors that need to be pulled? David explains that these are all due to perceived affordance—what a user thinks an object can do. David covers the four categories of perceived affordances, giving examples of where we succeed or fail in using them, and explains why we need to take them into account when designing anything people interface with.

From exploitation to ECMAScript
Laura Hackney (AnnieCannons)

Laura offers an overview of AnnieCannons, which supports survivors of human trafficking with a three-part program—training survivors in concrete and lucrative technology skills, connecting skilled students to client projects that allow them to earn solid incomes without facing the barriers of traditional tech companies, and supporting the development of student-driven technology solutions that fight gender-based violence and trafficking through a product-based learning model. Economic power is the key to truly ending human trafficking and supporting the individuals most vulnerable in our communities. By empowering survivors to earn an income that makes them comfortable and instilling the tech business, finance, and development skills they need to build their own solutions, AnnieCannons fights trafficking and discrimination from the inside out.

New rules of engagement for product quality: Testing as a service in a DevOps culture
Anne Ustach

Traditional testing has generally meant a siloed activity, charged with ensuring shippable product quality. It has been synonymous with words like release blocker and ship stopper and looked upon as a required time drain in the product deployment lifecycle. Anne explains why without the proper process and cultural thinking in place, testing is still thought of as a blocker to shipping code and shares how SignalFx has used testing as a service to treat testing as yet another microservice, create a micro test harness, and use monitoring and alerting as a testing tool.

Humans versus microwaves: How to keep your cloud secure
Diego Lapiduz (Pivotal)

Diego shares practical tips on how automation can help you improve your security (and compliance) posture. He then explains how to enable your system to have automatic dependency updates with an immutable configuration in “cloud” environments and how to create an environment of trust and verification by using tools provided by GitHub, Slack, and Keybase.

How NOT to chaos
Kolton Andrus (Gremlin)

While failure is not new, the emerging discipline of chaos engineering is. The concept of failure testing is a bit scary. Kolton outlines all the things NOT to do so you can avoid common pitfalls and mistakes by learning from other people’s failures.

Why so angry, Soo?
Soo Choi

Attending conferences and speaking in public left Soo in a state of anxiousness, exhaustion, and anger. Thanks to the awesome DevOps community, she’s come out the other side. Soo shares her personal adventures as women attending conferences and speaking in public, dealing with the undercurrents of condescension, harassment, and unconscious bias. We need to talk about these experiences in safe environments without the pressure of finding a solution. Soo wants to start a dialogue. You in?

WTF is a graph database
Ben Zvan (Target)

Once upon a time, people needed to store data so they could remember it later. Every day they would tell each other the data in an oral history or write it down in cuneiform, which no one can read. One day, computerized databases were created, giving people more and more reasons to mine their data for information via relationships. As a result, relational databases have been getting slower and less efficient at searching and indexing relational data. Finally, the graph database was invented and started treating relationships as first-class citizens. Ben explains WTF a graph database is.

What’s in a ===?
Rachel Green (1991)

Rachel offers a comparison of the implementation and use of the === operator in five languages—JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, and Kotlin—sheds light on why a language may not employ a feature, and sparks a larger discussion on philosophies and choices in programming language design.

The one question everyone wants to ask but never does
John Fox (LookZook)

John is intrigued by really good questions, but there is one that cuts to the heart of matters and separates pretenders from contenders: What happens after I say yes? John explains why this question is the only one worth putting to memory. Ask this question of a serious relationship partner, and you’ll know if you’re dealing with someone who’s really serious or just hanging out and hanging on, saving yourself from disappointment and regret. Ask it of a potential employer, and you’ll know if they’re just winging it or have a plan for you and your career success. Or turn it around, and ask this question of your own company for a highly effective way to reduce customer churn.

Pioneers, settlers, and town planners of Catan
Bridget Kromhout (Pivotal)

No critique of bimodal IT is complete without a board game analogy; here’s Bridget’s. What if Wardley maps were hex-based? In the game Settlers of Catan, players vie for longest road, largest army, and resource monopolies on the game board. But when the Cities and Knights expansion is added to the game, suddenly there are multiple paths to victory. In Accidental Empires, a history of Silicon Valley, Robert X. Cringely talks about commandos, infantry, and police. Simon Wardley talks about pioneers, settlers, and town planners. Whatever the language, the concept remains the same: some innovate, others turn the innovations into products, and still, others make products into commodities. Bridget explains mapping of the enterprise IT journey by way of board games, with whimsical asides.