Speaker

Jay Harris

Jay Harris

Problem Solver at Arana Software

Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Jay is a speaker, software consultant, and owner of Arana Software. He has been developing on the web since 1995, when the Blink tag lured him away from Visual Basic 3, and has been awarded as a Microsoft Regional Director, ASPInsider, and Microsoft MVP. Recognizing that the greatest application performance bottleneck is a developer’s time, Jay’s continuing quest is for frameworks, modules, tools, and practices that make developers stronger, fitter, happier, and more productive.

Jay resides in Las Vegas, USA. Follow him on Twitter at @jayharris.

Awards

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Web Development
  • Software Development
  • Entrepreneur
  • Speaker
  • DevOps
  • Azure

Chasing Squirrels: Keeping Up with New Technologies

New software languages, libraries, and platforms are released at an exhausting pace. Many—perhaps most—are just fruitless distractions that we will never grasp, like developer puppies chasing technology squirrels. How do you know which ones to pursue? How do you know which ones will be beneficial? The truth is it doesn't matter. And I'll tell you why.

Previously delivered as the keynote of Code PaLOUsa, (Louisville, United States) and Prairie Dev Con (Winnipeg, Canada).

A Pain in the UI

We see the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, but we forget to see the human. Beyond the ridiculous password requirements, copy-paste overrides, and spam-preventing Turing tests, it is story time for the made mistakes and lessons learned from the pain in the UI.

Celebrate Your Expert: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

If you were asked “In what areas are you an expert,” how would you answer? Would you answer at all? If your friends, colleagues, and peers were asked about your expertise, would the answer change? That word ‘expert’ gets in our way. Our self-modesty blocks self-assessment of our talents. It damages our self-worth. It leads to imposter syndrome. Break out of the cycle. Learn to acknowledge, accept, and own your talents. Let’s celebrate our expert.

Anxiety-Free Databases for .NET Core

Do you have anxiety regarding your database? Every time you touch it, does something break? Do you lack confidence that it matches your application's expectations? Learn about libraries and tools that can help you with database migrations, database validation, and integration testing for your relational database. Have confidence in your database and your ability to change it.

Design for Non-Designers from a Non-Designer

Elegant design requires talent, but talent is not a prerequisite for avoiding bad design. If you lack artistic touch and prefer rules and logic over the ethereal art form, the fundamental tenets of composition can enable you to apply Design as a programming paradigm. Spend an hour with a coder learning the logic of design—hacking pixels instead of bits—and free yourself of your excuse for horrible designs.

Previous Feedback:

“Best talk of the @codecampnyc day...fantastic stuff!”
 ~Barry May (http://bit.ly/2lPD06O)

“@jayharris just gave the best presentation I attended all day. Not to disparage any of the others. He just crushed it. #codecampnyc”
 ~Andrew J. Dittman (http://bit.ly/2joRKeh)

“Energy filled talk about design for #NonDesigners w/ @jayharris was excellent! Need to go make a few changes to my website.”
 ~Kandace Gordon (http://bit.ly/2kqkxAY)

Learning Objectives:

• An understanding of the fundamentals of design.
• An introduction to implementing type and color.
• An introduction to designing for accessibility.

Topics:

• Fundamentals of composition and design
• Examples of implementing fundamentals
• Fundamentals for implementing type.
• Fundamentals for choosing and implementing color palettes.
• Fundamentals for designing for accessibility and color blindness.

Accessibility for the Benefit of Everyone

Whether typing on your phone with one hand, taking a call in a crowded room, or talking to Siri through an intoxicated slur, impairments are every-day common. Learn how Application Accessibility aids the entire user base, and how to implement it in your applications.

Session focuses on several easy and effective ways to integrate Accessibility into our web applications based on WCAG.

Easier PDFs with Adobe PDF Services API

PDFs are hard. Generating, managing, and manipulating PDFs always is a pain within our development cycles even though they are always a part of our requirements. Rather than using yet-another one-off library to build our PDFs, we can go straight to the creator: Adobe. Learn to use the Adobe PDF Services API as a complete toolkit for PDF creation, optimization, OCR, and security without the burden of cumbersome installations, licenses, or libraries.

Learn to use the Adobe PDF Services API as a complete toolkit for PDF creation, optimization, OCR, and security without burdening your application with cumbersome installations, licenses, or libraries.

KCDC 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

DevSum 2023 Sessionize Event

May 2023 Stockholm, Sweden

Code PaLOUsa 2022 Sessionize Event

August 2022 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

dev up 2022 Sessionize Event

June 2022 St. Louis, Missouri, United States

DevSum 2022 Sessionize Event

May 2022 Stockholm, Sweden

KCDC 2021 Sessionize Event

September 2021 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

Music City Tech 2021 Sessionize Event

September 2021

Code PaLOUsa 2020 Sessionize Event

August 2020 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

KCDC 2019 Sessionize Event

July 2019 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

NDC Oslo 2019 Sessionize Event

June 2019 Oslo, Norway

NDC Minnesota 2019 Sessionize Event

May 2019 Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States

Stir Trek 2019 Sessionize Event

April 2019 Columbus, Ohio, United States

CodeMash 2019 Sessionize Event

January 2019 Sandusky, Ohio, United States

KCDC 2018 Sessionize Event

July 2018

Kalamazoo X Conference

It’s amazing how much time people will spend learning the latest “shiny” tool or technology, but when it comes to their lives, the soft skills, they spend almost no time trying to improve. It’s something we’re trying to fix with the X Conference.

The Kalamazoo X Conference is a conference more for the heart than the head. Passion, humor and tears. It’s the amazing power of Story and Storytelling in communications between humans. It’s a place to think, collaborate, create and be uncomfortable.

April 2018 Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States

Desert Code Camp 2017.1

October 2017 Chandler, Arizona, United States

Detroit.Code() 2017

July 2017 Detroit, Michigan, United States

Code PaLOUsa 2017

Opening Keynote: Chasing Squirrels

June 2017 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

Jay Harris

Problem Solver at Arana Software

Las Vegas, Nevada, United States