Branden Schwartz
Software Engineer at TVA
Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
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Branden Schwartz is a solutions architect and developer whose experience with the Microsoft stack predates the .NET framework. He is active in the developer community as one of the organizers of the Chattanooga Area .NET User Group, the local PASS user group and SQL Saturday event, and the Scenic City Summit conference. Away from the keyboard, he is a proud godfather and bibliophile, gamer and film enthusiast, husband and cat caretaker.
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An IoT Case Study in Building Cool Stuff with C++, Python, and C#
For developers who are used to learning new frameworks and refining deployment pipelines, working on hardware and Internet of Things devices can be equal parts exciting and daunting. Moving from a typical development environment to the reduced processing power, limited RAM, and other constraints of development boards and physical devices can present a number of new challenges to programmers who aren't used to assembling the devices that their code runs on.
In this talk we'll use a remote vibration sensor for industrial equipment as a case study and talk through the project from concept to execution and look at the polyglot development approach that went into making some really cool tech.
The Challenge of the Voodoo Monkey: Surviving as a Developer in Corporate Realspace
In the business world, tech workers seem to be placed on the extreme ends a spectrum from unskilled keypuncher to practitioner of black magic that mere mortals can never understand though the truth lies somewhere in between. Facing those misconceptions can be difficult enough on their own, but for the countless developers working for companies in businesses other than software there are a variety of different problem domains to master, budgets to be justified, Senior Executive Assistant Vice Presidents to present to, and TPS reports to be filed. How can you satisfy the requirements of the work environment while keeping your skills sharp, learning new languages, getting ahead, or sometimes dodging enough restructuring efforts to simply stay employed? Good news! Other devs who have gone before have found some useful patterns and definite antipatterns for navigating the swirling waters of the corporate world and will make sure you get another copy of that memo.
Engaging the Community with Sincerity, Kindness, and Gratitude
The world of tech has been plagued by stereotypes of introverted, antisocial developers with minimal people skills for as long as dev teams have existed. In reality, IT is filled with a range of personalities as vibrant and nuanced as any other department. Many of us crave strong connections with our peers and a sense of community. This talk will explore one developer’s decades-long journey of involvement in various forms including his community building efforts. We’ll cover some good practices, things to avoid, and encourage audience participation to discuss different perspectives on the topic.
The Highs and Woes of Innovation on a Small and Highly Effective Team
Is your organization one of the many that is exploring the best way to introduce innovation and R&D efforts into the mix of yet another crud app and third-party software maintenance projects? Are you part of a large enterprise without a formal structure to support any work that doesn’t have concrete deliverables at the end of a predetermined timeline? So am I. This is the story of how a handful of developers formed a new team to address multiple business problems and produce exceptional results in unfamiliar territory while clearing both political and technical hurdles and releasing new features in as little as one day. Along the way, we’ve established patterns and formed habits that help us achieve exponentially more together than alone, be seamlessly accountable to each other (and the business) and make us excited to come to work to see what we’ll accomplish next.
We Can Do Better Than FizzBuzz: A Conversation About Interviewing from Both Sides of the Table
One of the oldest jokes in tech is that our three biggest problems are naming things and off-by-one errors. If that's still true, the fourth major problem might be interviews. With no industry standard approach or format, the ways to conduct and prepare for an interview for a technical position can vary dramatically, to such an extent that a search for "technical interview" books online can return over 1,000 results. This talk will cover the various approaches I've seen from a developer's perspective on both sides of the interviewing table at various points over the course of 20 years and will encourage discussion from the attendees about good, bad, and ugly experiences with different tactics. Participants can expect to leave with exposure to different viewpoints from fellow tech workers, the benefit of lessons learned without having to learn everything through the painful experience of the worst interviews ever, and maybe a couple of book recommendations or a new way to solve FizzBuzz.
Branden Schwartz
Software Engineer at TVA
Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
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