Dennis Stepp
Software Developer
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Actions
I passionately deliver innovative software solutions that enhance the customer experience and maximize business value. Building upon over eight years of software engineering experience I assist technologists in architecture, automation, design, implementation, testing, and workflow. I continuously broaden my skills through game development, conference speaking, and networking within the software development community.
Area of Expertise
Topics
System Observability Across Your Tech Stack
"Hmmm, this behavior is odd." "What's causing this to happen?" "I have no idea what happens to this request after it's processed."
Does this sound familiar? Did you agonize for months trying to find the answer? Did you just sweep it under the rug for someone else to eventually notice?
In this presentation I will provide you with some helpful tips to instrument and monitor your code bases and key services that power your software. We'll look into monitoring Apache Kafka, Java SpringBoot apps, Python apps, Kubernetes, Postgres, and more with tools such at Prometheus, Graphna, and Loki. We'll also briefly touch on system observability as it relates to the business domain and how that can lead your internal users to discover opportunities for future product offerings.
Let's Get JAMming: An introduction to static site generators.
Static site generators are awesome. In under an hour you can build your blog, project documentation, or even a very basic eCommerce site. We’ll explore the JAMstack and bare bones implementations of these types of sites. We'll build a couple of sites with different site generators and show off automated deployment with GitHub hooks and Netlify CDN.
Slurm: Toxic Company Cultures and How to Survive Them
Believe it or not, a Futurama episode and my experiences have led me to create the SLURM, which I believe will help you navigate toxic waters of a company's culture. In this talk I provide tips for Sensing the environment, Learning the telltale signs of negative and dangerous behaviors, Understanding how to cope and combat disruptive processes, Refactoring the norms and continuously improving, and when it's time to Move on. Let's open up the floor for a serious conversation about what I think is the single most important aspect of any company: culture.
Enemy State Machines: Developing Reusable Components to Quickly Construct Mutations of Enemies
Developing enemies for video games can be a daunting task if you've never done it before, even in 2D. Taking the time to create modular behaviors upfront seemingly will slow down your development efforts up front but will be testable, debuggable, and configurable in the latter stages. In this session, we will look at and discuss some tightly coupled enemy behaviors and see how we can refactor them to loosely coupled systems that will help level up your game. We will be using the Unity engine but the same patterns are applicable in any engine or even to business domains.
Impress Your Boss by Sitting on Your @$$: Automating Builds and Deployments
I’m lazy and you can be too! Here’s a secret: Automation is simple. It may seem daunting in the beginning but the truth is you already know how to automate your build and deployment of your applications even if you are manually intervening at each step. Why not just do all this work once and be done with it? Let us demystify how to polish our build and deployment processes to ease the pain we feel in our development operations. Whether your working on a monolith or distributed system we'll discuss techniques and tools like Gradle, Helm, and Flux to organize our scripts for building, deploying, and releasing services to a Kubernetes cluster.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top