Jeff McKenzie
Practice Director, Software and Application Integration, Star Seven Six
Columbus, Ohio, United States
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Jeff McKenzie has worked in software development for over twenty years, in both freelance and full-time capacities, as a developer, team leader, and director. He enjoys helping others solve problems through technology, whether it's the small business going digital for the first time, or a Fortune 500 company expanding its enterprise. Although he started his career using BASIC on an Atari 800, he took a big detour, getting Biology and English degrees before rediscovering programming, with a new thing called the World Wide Web. He is currently Practice Director, Software and Application Integration, for Star Seven Six (starsevensix.com) in Columbus Ohio.
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Diagrams As Code: Why Friends Don't Let Friends Use Visio
When it comes to building software, diagrams are critical, and too often wrong. Visual designers are time-consuming, and they lose even more efficiency as complexity increases. In this traditional workflow, diagrams are always at least one step behind the latest code commit. When diagrams can be automatically updated and deployed along with the changes they support, this is Diagrams As Code (DaC) in practice.
In this session, you'll learn about DaC from a conceptual and practical perspective, as we review the tooling you can use to match specific use cases and technical roles. We'll look in depth at Mermaid, the JavaScript-based, all-purpose diagramming and charting tool, and Structurizr, a visualization platform designed to support the C4 model of software architecture — a model you can fully adopt for your own projects. Both of these frameworks feature a containerization workflow, which you'll see working with Azure DevOps pipelines and GitHub Actions.
This session is intended as a practical, workflow-focused introduction to Diagrams As Code for a broad technical audience including analysts, developers, and architects. The session is best suited for an intermediate audience, but is accessible to beginners through examples of browser-based and local tooling, with additional depth for more advanced attendees through containerized workflows and CI/CD integration. Mermaid and Structurizr are used as representative examples rather than as the focus of the session, and the emphasis is on treating diagrams as versioned, reviewable, and buildable artifacts that are managed, reviewed, and delivered through the same workflows used for application code. This session has not previously been presented at a public conference.
All of my sessions are designed to encourage audience participation (to the extent possible given the specific venue), with planned discussion points throughout to keep attendees engaged. I am an experienced conference speaker, with prior appearances at events such as CodeMash, Stir Trek, Code PaLOUsa, CodeStock, Beer City Code, and Pittsburgh Tech Fest. The focus of my sessions is on practical instruction combined with an engaging, audience-centered delivery style. No special technical requirements beyond standard presentation capabilities.
Get Some UI In Your CI
Are you ready for some trivia? We'll start with a few easy questions about browser testing and behavior-driven development, using tools like Playwright, Selenium, Behave, and Reqnroll. Then together we'll incrementally improve some sample UI tests, showing the equal importance of both design and mechanics in a maintainable UI test stack. Next, we'll ask some trivia questions through a browser and check our answers by running automated UI/BDD tests implemented in both Python and .NET. Finally, you'll learn how to run these solutions locally through Jenkins pipelines, and in the cloud via Azure DevOps and GitHub, on hosted build agents and runners on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In this session, you'll see how to design, build, and configure maintainable UI tests as part of a practical continuous integration workflow, across multiple platforms and operating systems.
The intended audience of this talk has some experience with browser testing and is looking to move to the next level of maintainable, scalable, UI test automation. Experience with UI testing, BDD, and/or DevOps is helpful but not required. This session has been presented previously in an earlier version and has been updated for this submission with a newer tech stack.
All of my sessions are designed to encourage audience participation (to the extent possible given the specific venue), with planned discussion points throughout to keep attendees engaged. I am an experienced conference speaker, with prior appearances at events such as CodeMash, Stir Trek, Code PaLOUsa, CodeStock, Beer City Code, and Pittsburgh Tech Fest. The focus of my sessions is on practical instruction combined with an engaging, audience-centered delivery style. No special technical requirements beyond standard presentation capabilities.
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