© Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap

Most Active Speaker

Jennifer Wadella

Jennifer Wadella

VP of Frontend Engineering, Bitovi

Kansas City, Missouri, United States

Often described as a force of nature, Jennifer is a visionary leader with a proven track record in management excellence and leading software teams to successful execution of business goals.

With deep roots in frontend engineering Jennifer is still widely regarded as an expert in the Angular space despite her growing tenure in non-coding management roles. Jennifer combines years of experience in developing JavaScript applications through interfacing with users, stakeholders and business executives with a keen eye on the current development landscape & trends to craft strategic vision and lead teams to sustainable growth that contributes to company success.

Jennifer is passionate about developer communities, and shares her expertise in frontend development, engineering management, maximizing productivity, and community building across the world as a widely sought-after public speaker. She is also the founder of Kansas City Women in Technology, a non-profit that has taught thousands of women and girls in the Kansas City area to code, and helped women enter tech careers.

Awards

  • Most Active Speaker 2023

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Angular
  • AngularJS
  • Frontend
  • Leadership
  • process
  • Enterprise Software
  • RxJS
  • Enterprise Apps With Angular
  • Front End Development
  • Frontend Architecture
  • microfrontends

Supporting an Old-Fashioned AngularJS App in a Modern TypeScript World

You don't want to say this out loud at parties, but you're still supporting a legacy AngularJS app and are struggling to stay current with modern techniques. We've all been there and it's going to be ok! In this talk you'll learn how to take advantage of TypeScript and reactive programming with RxJS, but in the context of an AngularJS application 'cause AngularJS devs need love too!

Shifting Left: How to Build a Culture of Testing

Modern testing tooling has brought swift and sustainable ways to have better test infrastructure, but many companies hesitate to adopt & are stifled by their testing vs. engineering silos. Let's discuss how to break down silos, embrace modern tooling like Cypress, improve devX for everyone involved, and get teams excited about testing.

Reactive Programming Crash Course (for Angular Baes)

JavaScript can be a scary place where we create and change variables at will and while code can be written very quickly, it can be side-effect prone and hard to debug & maintain down the line. In this talk we’ll explore the concepts of imperative vs. declarative code, and do a live demo of Reactive Programming using RxJS in Angular.

No matter what the JavaScript framework flavor of choice is, a good understanding of reactive programming and state management helps us write better code that is more closely tied to business logic, is easier to read, easier to debug, and easier to scale.

Level Up: Guide to Becoming a Lead Angular Developer

Looking to grow as an Angular Developer, but not sure how? This talk will guide you through key Angular areas you need to understand, give you strategies for making an impact on your projects, and highlight ways to champion yourself for promotions and lead opportunities.

I Want to Believe: Making Angular Apps More Performant with Scully

If you’re looking for ways to improve performance of your Angular applications, look no further than Scully. Scully is the JAMstack tool the Angular community has been craving to make pre-rendering and serving static pages a breeze, with a great supporting community and a variety of plugins to meet any application setups needs. This talk will teach you about JAMstack concepts and how to get started with Scully to make your Angular applications more performant today.

Hacking your work life __ balance to take over the world.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, so how do some people seem accomplish so much more? It’s time to learn to hack your work life __ balance to have more time to pursue your passion projects, spend more time with those you love, while keeping your work ethic strong. Let’s take over the world!

Future-Proof Your Company by Effectively Scaling Engineering Teams

The current market for hiring senior developers is brutal, and there's no foreseeable relief. The pool of experienced, senior-level engineers is shrinking rapidly, and sometimes even winning the salary bidding war isn't enough to acquire the skills your company needs to move product forward. The demand simply outweighs any institution's ability to produce hit-the-ground-running ready developers. If companies want to be successful in the future they need to start building the workforce they want to see. Creating a sustainable model that ensures your engineering teams will be able to scale to deliver your company's product must include growth strategies beyond just what you can hire. This talk will cover how to interview better, how to spot skill gaps in current team members, how to build sustainable mentoring processes that don't overburden the current team, and how to create a long-term growth environment.

Cultivating Productivity: The Definitive Guide to Building a Thriving Engineering Culture

Having a thriving engineering culture isn't a matter of chance; it comes from a deliberate effort. Effective culture-building demands insightful management, vision, problem-solving abilities, and strong interpersonal skills. In this talk, I'll guide you through the process of cultivating a productive engineering culture. Whether you're a new manager looking for a blueprint or an experienced one seeking fresh insights, you'll leave with actionable checklists, proven strategies, and real-world examples to empower your team.

A Developer's Guide to Surviving Sh*t Project Management

Project management is supposed to help us build software more efficiently, so why does it often feel like more of a hinderance? Do we really need SCRUM anyway? This talk is a pragmatic survival guide to help developers on projects with terrible project management. If you've ever been told by a Project Manager you can't do something because "it will effect the burndown chart" and yeeting said PM into the sun isn't an option - this talk will provide you efficient work-around strategies so you can spend more time doing what you love - writing code - and less time in frustrating, repetitive, and unproductive meetings.

Become an Accessibility BFF with your new friend Pa11y!

Like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen, Pa11y is an accessibility tester’s BFF. You already have a million issues on your plate, so how do you find a way to get started on accessibility testing? Pa11y to the rescue! Pa11y is a lightweight JS a11y testing tool with some serious “it” factor. This talk will explain what pa11y does and does not cover, review examples of both command line and scripted usage, dive into the pa11y web service and show how to best accessorize a Pa11y setup with your current testing process. Bonus content: how to convince the rest of your team and business why accessibility is totally worth prioritizing and how getting started with low-hanging fruit can vastly glamorize your product. Now you can take on creating a more accessible product like S & B take on the Upper East Side. XOXO Accessibility Girl 💋

Angular Magic with Angular Schematics

Learn how to take advantage of writing Angular Schematics to boost your teams productivity. This talk will explain the usage of schematics, present use cases for writing custom schematics, and a walk through of a real world custom schematic scenario.

There are no snow days when you work remote.

Do you think you have what it takes to work remote? Better yet, does your company or the place you’re interviewing with have what it takes to support remote workers? Consider this your guide to deciding if you’re in the right place to start working remote, and if you are - how to survive this huge work-style change and implement rules, patterns, and boundaries to help you be successful.

There’s been a huge push towards working remote lately - but is it the best choice for everyone? With different personalities and different work styles, developers may or may not be a great fit for a remote-work lifestyle. This talk will explore how to decide when working remotely is a good fit for someone personally, and how to figure out it their current or potential employer is capable of supporting remote work in a way that allows employees to be successful. The meat of this talk will be HOW to make #remotelife work for you by discussing strategies, best practices, and boundary-setting + changing thought patterns to make remote work successful and fulfilling

Onboard New Developers Faster with Custom Snippets!

Onboarding developers to new projects can be a time consuming process, especially if there's not dedicated documentation explaining the ins & outs of your codebase or the brilliant design system your team created. You can help ease this process by creating code snippets of your project's custom components for new team members to use! Learn how to build and share custom snippets in VS Code, Sublime, and Atom and spend less time with onboarding woes!

Indiana Jones and the Hidden Secrets of the Forms API

You may know basic Angular forms, but what hidden secrets will you unlock when importing the ReactiveForms Module? Come on an architectural adventure where we explore hidden gems of the Angular Forms API and learn how to use them to save humanity from scary, messily-written code.

The Problems Micro Frontends Won't Solve That No One Wants to Talk About

Everyone wants to ship more software faster, and following the lead of the MicroServices craze the front-end community has begun to reach for Micro Frontends as a silver bullet solution. Micro Frontends promise large teams the ability to independently ship pieces of applications without code collisions, bug creation, that can be team-agnostic, and with Webpack 5 leaning in to offer Module Federation, this seems to be the way of the future.

But what problems aren't solved by Micro Frontends? There is a large gap in what large complex teams need to ship better software and what Micro Frontends are able to provide ... and that gap is the basis of this talk. We'll discuss what Micro Frontends are, approaches and tools to using this architecture pattern, and discuss the consequences that arise that no on seems to want to talk about.

NDC Sydney 2024 Sessionize Event

February 2024 Sydney, Australia

NDC London 2024 Sessionize Event

January 2024 London, United Kingdom

DeveloperWeek Enterprise 2023 Sessionize Event

November 2023

DevReach 2023 Sessionize Event

October 2023 Sofia, Bulgaria

Frontmania 2023 Sessionize Event

October 2023 Utrecht, The Netherlands

Techorama Netherlands 2023 Sessionize Event

October 2023 Utrecht, The Netherlands

Copenhagen Developers Festival 2023 Sessionize Event

August 2023 Copenhagen, Denmark

KCDC 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

ng-conf 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023 Salt Lake City, Utah, United States

DevSum 2023 Sessionize Event

May 2023 Stockholm, Sweden

Angular Tiny Conf. - Shemu 2023 Sessionize Event

April 2023

Connectaha 2023 Sessionize Event

April 2023 Omaha, Nebraska, United States

DeveloperWeek Enterprise 2022 Sessionize Event

November 2022

NDC Oslo 2022 Sessionize Event

September 2022 Oslo, Norway

KCDC 2022 Sessionize Event

August 2022 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

dev up 2022 Sessionize Event

June 2022 St. Louis, Missouri, United States

NDC London 2022 Sessionize Event

May 2022 London, United Kingdom

NDC Porto 2022 Sessionize Event

April 2022 Porto, Portugal

NDC Oslo 2021 Sessionize Event

November 2021 Oslo, Norway

Build Stuff 2021 Lithuania Sessionize Event

November 2021 Vilnius, Lithuania

KCDC 2021 Sessionize Event

September 2021 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

DevFest Live Sessionize Event

May 2021

Techorama 2021 Spring Edition Sessionize Event

May 2021 Antwerpen, Belgium

Build Stuff 2020 Lithuania Sessionize Event

November 2020

Momentum 2020 Sessionize Event

October 2020 Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

Tech Con '20 Sessionize Event

September 2020 Detroit, Michigan, United States

SciFiDevCon Sessionize Event

July 2020

Techorama 2020 BE Sessionize Event

May 2020 Antwerpen, Belgium

CodeStock 2020 Sessionize Event

April 2020 Knoxville, Tennessee, United States

Devintersection, AngleBrackets, AngularMix Spring 2020 Sessionize Event

April 2020 Orlando, Florida, United States

Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas & Austin 2020 Sessionize Event

March 2020 Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Swetugg 2020 Sessionize Event

February 2020 Stockholm, Sweden

NDC London 2020 Sessionize Event

January 2020 London, United Kingdom

CodeMash 2020 Sessionize Event

January 2020 Sandusky, Ohio, United States

Devintersection, AngleBrackets, AngularMix Sessionize Event

November 2019 Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

NDC Sydney 2019 Sessionize Event

October 2019 Sydney, Australia

Code PaLOUsa 2019 Sessionize Event

August 2019 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

KCDC 2019 Sessionize Event

July 2019 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

RevolutionConf 2019 Sessionize Event

June 2019 Virginia Beach, Virginia, United States

Techorama Belgium 2019 Sessionize Event

May 2019 Antwerpen, Belgium

CodeStock 2019 Sessionize Event

April 2019 Knoxville, Tennessee, United States

NDC Porto 2019 Sessionize Event

February 2019 Porto, Portugal

NDC London 2019 Sessionize Event

January 2019 London, United Kingdom

CodeMash 2019 Sessionize Event

January 2019 Sandusky, Ohio, United States

dev up Conference 2018 Sessionize Event

October 2018 St. Louis, Missouri, United States

NDC Sydney 2018 Sessionize Event

September 2018 Sydney, Australia

KCDC 2018 Sessionize Event

July 2018

NDC Oslo 2018 Sessionize Event

June 2018

WeAreDevelopers 2018 Sessionize Event

May 2018

NDC London 2018 Sessionize Event

January 2018

Codemash

Talks:
Jewelbots: How to Get More Girls Coding!
Making Accessibility Testing Suck Less: An Intro to Pa11y.

January 2018

Jennifer Wadella

VP of Frontend Engineering, Bitovi

Kansas City, Missouri, United States