Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR
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Schedule: Software Methodologies from Ideation to Deployment sessions

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9:00am–12:30pm Monday, July 15, 2019
Care and feeding of a healthy job hunt
Location: Portland 255
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
VM Brasseur (Juniper Networks)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 12 ratings)
From unresponsive recruiters to pointless interview questions, a job hunt can be a demoralizing and dehumanizing process. VM (Vicky) Brasseur walks you through how to make it more productive and less stressful. Read more.
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9:00am–12:30pm Tuesday, July 16, 2019
From monolith to microservices: Design, build, deploy, learn
Location: Portland 256
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Elmer Thomas (Twilio SendGrid), Craig Dennis (Twilio)
Average rating: **...
(2.62, 13 ratings)
Elmer Thomas and Craig Dennis take you through designing, building, and deploying a Python-powered application within a microservices architecture deployed to AWS. Read more.
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11:00am–11:40am Wednesday, July 17, 2019
The philosophy of versions
Location: Portland 255
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Adam Harvey (New Relic)
Average rating: ****.
(4.27, 15 ratings)
Versioning is hard. In 2015, the PHP project released version 7.0 of the PHP language, but first, the developers had to understand what the scope of the version would be and what they were willing to break. Adam Harvey walks you through what they learned. Read more.
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11:50am–12:30pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Integrating security into modern software development: A workflow study
Location: Portland 255
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Lucas Charles (GitLab)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 25 ratings)
Application security testing has been around for a long time, yet successful attacks continue despite significant investments in application security. Shift left isn’t enough for modern software development that needs integrated and automated continuous security testing. Lucas Charles looks at three key considerations to get you there. Read more.
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1:45pm–2:25pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Loops must die
Location: Portland 255
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Marco Emrich (codecentric)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 18 ratings)
A good developer will always try to enlarge their toolbox and get to know new or better tools for specific situations, but it's also helpful to free yourself from mental ballast now and then to get rid of one or another stone wedge. For most developers, a classic loop is such a stone wedge. Marco Emrich dives into why you shouldn't program loops anymore. Read more.
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2:35pm–3:15pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Refactoring and readability
Location: Portland 255
Bruce Gray (Gray & Associates)
Average rating: ****.
(4.52, 23 ratings)
Quality literature isn't produced by just writing; it's in the rewriting that excellence is achieved. This is also true with code. Robert Gray shines a spotlight on the mind-set and mechanics of refactoring and explains why it's key to improving readability and code quality. Read more.
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4:15pm–4:55pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Get thicker data naturally with computational anthropology
Location: Portland 255
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Augustina Ragwitz (IBM)
Average rating: ***..
(3.25, 8 ratings)
Software is a computational model of human behavior, yet human inquiry isn't part of STEM professional development. Anthropology, described by Alfred Kroeber as "the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanitarian of the sciences," has a long relationship with computational analysis. Augustina Ragwitz explores what you can learn from this approach to computation. Read more.
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5:05pm–5:45pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Unlocking your serverless functions with OpenFaaS for AI chatbot projects
Location: Portland 255
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Sergio Mendez (Universidad San Carlos de Guatemala)
Average rating: *....
(1.33, 3 ratings)
Sergio Mendez examines critical challenges when implementing AI chatbots and explains how Movistar designed an open source serverless architecture using OpenFaaS on top of Kubernetes and other complementary technologies like NoSQL, brokers to deploy Telegram AI chatbots. Sergio then compares these technologies to "vendor lock-in" services offered by major cloud providers. Read more.
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11:00am–11:40am Thursday, July 18, 2019
Code review skills for emotionally intelligent developers
Location: Portland 256
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Nina Zakharenko (Microsoft)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 26 ratings)
As teams and projects grow, code review becomes increasingly important to support the maintainability of complex code bases. Nina Zakharenko dives deep into writing consistent code, linting and analysis tools, and common code gotchas. If you're not sure what a style guide is or how it can help you, join in to find out. Read more.
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11:50am–12:30pm Thursday, July 18, 2019
RDD: Retention-driven development
Location: Portland 256
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Kristen Gallagher (Edify)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 4 ratings)
It’s typical for company onboarding to gloss over the team-specific and technical information you need to truly get started in a new role. Kristen Gallagher explains how to apply the concept of test-driven development to onboarding—in other words, retention-driven development, a new, durable way to build and maintain technical employee onboarding programs. Read more.
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1:45pm–2:25pm Thursday, July 18, 2019
Empowering early-career developers
Location: Portland 256
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Mercedes Bernard (Tandem)
Average rating: ***..
(3.92, 13 ratings)
The first step in growing your less-experienced developers into team-leading senior devs is to empower them. Mercedes Bernard walks you through creating a process tailored to your specific team to share ownership and empower your early-career developers so they grow into successful senior team members. Read more.
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2:35pm–3:15pm Thursday, July 18, 2019
Evolutionary systems for software
Location: Portland 256
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Aaron Longwell (US State Dept, Afghanistan)
Average rating: ****.
(4.83, 6 ratings)
Modern software systems and companies are starting to resemble ecosystems more than engines, and yet we keep trying to design and manage our work like engineers. Aaron Longwell looks to nature for inspiration instead. Read more.
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4:15pm–4:55pm Thursday, July 18, 2019
Code generation: Principles and challenges
Location: Portland 256
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Luke Sneeringer (Google)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 3 ratings)
Code generation is a useful approach for building, maintaining, and distributing code based on the specification of an API, reducing error and enabling automatic updates as the API interface changes. It also allows you to expand your reach at a lower cost and get more code into open source for developers. Luke Sneeringer outlines how to create targeted, maintainable code generation for APIs. Read more.
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5:05pm–5:45pm Thursday, July 18, 2019
Implementing cross-functional code reviews
Location: Portland 256
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Margaret Fero (Degreed)
Average rating: ****.
(4.88, 8 ratings)
While nearly every development team uses some form of code review, code reviews are frequently used only among developers. While other developers are a valuable audience for your code, the perspective of nondevelopers adds value as well. Margaret Fero explores the benefits of cross-functional code reviews, the risks of implementing this type of process, and how to mitigate those risks. Read more.