Simplicity: The Key to Software Success

In a world dominated by cutting-edge technologies and complex systems, it is easy to overlook the power of simplicity in software development. This talk aims to shed light on the undeniable benefits of writing or rewriting software to be simple instead of complex. By exploring real-world examples, and practical strategies we will uncover how simplicity can be a game-changer for developers, businesses, and end-users alike. Join us to understand why simple software always wins and discover the key principles to harness its potential.

Key Takeaways:

1. Understanding the value of simplicity: We will explore why simplicity is essential and the benefits it brings to developers, businesses, and end-users. By examining case studies, we will demonstrate how simple software solutions have outperformed their complex counterparts in various domains.

2. Principles for simplicity-driven development: Discover a set of principles and best practices that can guide developers in writing or rewriting software with simplicity as a core principle. Learn how to prioritize clarity, modularity, and ease of use to create elegant and efficient solutions.

3. Improved productivity and maintainability: Complex software often leads to confusion, longer development cycles, and increased maintenance costs. We will discuss how simplicity can streamline development, enhance code readability, and promote collaboration, resulting in higher productivity and easier maintenance.

4. Enhanced user experience: User satisfaction is crucial for the success of any software product. By focusing on simplicity, we can create intuitive interfaces, reduce learning curves, and deliver a seamless user experience. We will explore the correlation between simplicity and user satisfaction, along with practical strategies for achieving it.

5. Cost-effective solutions: Complexity often comes with a hefty price tag. Through examples and real-world scenarios, we will demonstrate how simplicity can lead to cost savings in terms of development efforts, training, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance.

Enabling Developers to Get More Done

Are you blocked by manual processes, inefficiencies, and knowledge silos? Are developers happy or frustrated? Join me and we’ll explore some of the ways you can enable developers to do their best work and improve the developer experience through a focus on tools, processes, and collaboration.

With the increased cloud adoption, smaller autonomous development teams, and microservices we need a way to ensure consistency and productivity. In this talk we’ll explore topics like: boilerplate templates, development environments, CI/CD, code reviews, and effective documentation.

If you’re a developer trying to improve your work day-to-day or an engineering leader trying to empower your teams, this talk has something for you.

Thriving in a Connected World: Building, Growing, and Supporting a Distributed Tech Organization

In the wake of a global shift towards remote work, managing distributed teams has become a critical skill for tech leaders. As the CTO of a growing organization, this talk will unravel the journey of building and nurturing a globally dispersed workforce.

In “Thriving in a Connected World: My Journey with Global Teams,” I will share my personal story of leading a company with team members all around the world. I’ll talk about the challenges we faced and the successes we achieved. You’ll hear about the tools that helped us stay connected and productive, and the practices that built strong team relationships. This session is filled with real-life stories and practical advice to help you manage and excel with a remote team. Join me to learn how to turn the challenges of working with a global team into your greatest strengths.

Key Takeaways:

Clear Communication: Easy ways to keep everyone in the loop.
Building Trust: How to make sure your team feels connected and trusted.
Helpful Tools: Discover tools that make working together easier.
Cultural Sensitivity: Tips for understanding and valuing different cultures.
Tracking Success: How to see if your team is doing well without being overbearing.
Onboarding: How to welcome new team members and get them up to speed quickly.

Denied! Securing your Application with Better User Authorization

As our applications grow in complexity, application security needs to change to keep pace. Using real-world examples we will explore new implementations for user authorization and authentication. We’ll go beyond the basics of determining if a user is logged in, and discuss using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for authentication. By examining security vulnerabilities lurking in most web applications we can demonstrate strategies to implement new security patterns using today's hottest JavaScript frameworks (Angular, React, Vue). You’ll find unique ways to differentiate users by roles or security groups, changing the user experience. We’ll discuss ways to control a user’s access down to a single data point by moving our authorization model to the component level.

Key areas to be covered:

- JSON Web Token (JWT) best practices
- Route and Component level authorization
- Role based user access
- Vulnerabilities in modern web apps

Your Tests are Lying To You

Do your tests keep you up at night? In this talk we’ll remove the mystery and fear around testing by understanding what makes a great test. Through real world examples we’ll explore ways to improve your overall test coverage by identifying key areas in your application, unique edge cases and more. We’ll use some uncommon tools and approaches like mutation testing to literally test our tests and produce a much better test result. I’ll show you ways to tests that actually matter. You will be able to spot a good test from bad and which type of test to use for each scenario.

This talk is for anyone interested in improving their knowledge around testing.