Scaling your product for Africa

About the talk

Developing a product is fun, these products connect us, and accepting payment across countries is one of many ways to scale a product.
This session will concentrate on showing developers how to integrate multiple African payments flows (such as MPESA, MOBILE MONEY, CARD, USSD and more) into products via One API.

About the speaker

I am an African Tech Educator. I am particularly hyped on Fintech and education in Africa. I am currently working with flutterwave on developing and enhancing payment systems, as well as contribute to developing and maintaining developer communities in Africa.

Microfrontends as a solution to legacy JavaScript

About the talk

The only certainty in JavaScript is change. There is a new, cool framework popping up seemingly every week. jQuery, Knockout, AngularJS: all were once the darlings of the web, now relegated to the scrapheap of legacy. One day you will abandon your current favourite framework too, as it slowly falls out of fashion. How then do you choose an appropriate JavaScript framework? How do you make sure that the next framework is the one? Better still, how can you work with your favourite framework today, while still working within your legacy application?

What if you don’t have to choose the right framework? What if legacy never got in your way? Join me as I show you how you can take lessons from MicroServices and use them to let you work with new, exciting frameworks even in applications based on older, legacy, technology (no microservices required)

About the speaker

A professional geek, William works for Particular Software writing amazing software like NServiceBus. Passionate about the web and security, he is engaged in a sordid love affair with JavaScript and spends most of his free time trying to convince others of its beauty and elegance.

When not behind his laptop hacking away, this amateur beer enthusiast can often be found playing board games or drinking cold-brew coffee.

Fonts on the web: past, present and future

About the talk

It doesn't seem so long ago that front-end developers were employing all manner of techniques to use more than just the set of fonts installed on the user's computer. Now we have @font-face, OpenType features, WOFF (a font format specifically optimised for the web), and variable fonts. These developments allow us to create rich typographic experiences. But these experiences come with a performance cost: web pages become bigger and heavier. That means slower pages and more data to load.

This talk will cover the intersection of beautiful web typography and performance. We'll discuss the history of fonts on the web, how to enable rich typographic features, and how to load web fonts efficiently. We will cover typography and how it affects reading, a history of @font-face in the browser, Open type font features - like ligatures, lining numbers, stylistic sets - and how to use them, font loading strategies for optimal performance, and the future of web typography, variable fonts.

Audience level: All

About the speaker

Justin Slack is head of design, user experience, and front-end development at NML, a specialist financial services software development company. He is fluent in HTML and CSS, and slightly obsessive about typography, web standards, and user experience. He is co-founder and organiser of the Cape Town front-end developer Meetup group that has held monthly talks and workshops since 2013.

Mentoring and growing stronger teams using Agile techniques

About the talk

We use time boxed cycles, shorter feedback cycles and small defined outcomes to run software projects. Why not use this approach to mentor and grow staff?

Why do we subject our teams to a sterile and delayed feedback KPA / KPI approach in the tech industry, an industry that is growing and experiencing rapid change?

These are all questions that puzzled me.

Four years ago I started mentoring team members using an agile approach which was refined over time and with each iteration, it is now an accepted and valued practice on all my teams.

This is my story.

In this talk I'll unpack;

* The agile mentoring approach and the mentoring life cycle * The different personas and people patterns adopted in agile mentoring * The tools used to manage the process * The career framework applied * Lessons learned

Join me as I share a fresh approach to mentoring team members which ultimately results in;

* Higher job satisfaction and less burn-out among employees * More confident teams with focused learning outcomes * Higher staff retention

About the speaker

Chris is a software architect with 20+ years’ experience, committed to evolutionary and constant learning, often tinkering with new tools, technologies, techniques and architectures. He is passionate about quality software and great architecture while forging the growth of this generation of software developers. Chris enjoys sharing his learnings, often accompanied by good beer. Chris can be found either overseeing the architecture at Kaleidocode, mentoring on the Kaleidocode apprenticeship program, or working hands-on with his team.

Pink Hardhats and other Anomalies

About the talk

Did you know, a diverse team is 35% more likely to produce above-average results? From the science behind why diversity boosts performance, to why being the only woman in your project team is more of a problem than you might think, this talk takes a closer look at the realities of inequality in our industry, how each one of us has a role to play in the solution and what we should be doing to move our industry forward.

If you’ve ever wondered about how we improve diversity in software engineering, or if you’ve never wondered, then this is the right room for you.

About the speaker

Twenty years in the industry, fifteen of which as a hiring manager, seven at board level, four as a reformed unicorn (you’ll have to attend to hear that story) has given Claire a fairly well-rounded view of where we’re still going wrong with equality in software engineering and made her an enthusiastic champion of improving gender parity in STEM education. She once built a LEGO Death Star.

Why everything you learned about CI/CD is wrong

About the talk

You know CI/CD is important, but you're not quite sure what they are or how to improve these practices. While nearly every software team has a CI server, many are skipping important practices that are key to unlocking high performance. Let's step back to explore the conceptual underpinnings of CI/CD, then connect practices with tools. We'll examine: Detect - Safety begins with finding errors before they become problems Deliver - Measure progress in terms of delivering working software Communicate - Quality and improvement as everyone's responsibility.

When the right practices are applied, you'll wonder how you could have lived life before!

About the speaker

Ian Buchanan is a Principal Solutions Engineer for DevOps at Atlassian where he focuses on the emerging DevOps community and the application of Jira, Bitbucket, and Bamboo for better continuous integration and continuous delivery. While Ian Buchanan has broad and deep experience with both Java and .NET, he is best known as a champion of lean and agile practices in large enterprises. During his career, he has successfully managed enterprise software development tools in all phases of their lifecycle, from cradle to grave. He has driven organisation-wide process improvement with results of greater productivity, higher quality, and improved customer satisfaction. He has built multi-national agile teams that value self-direction and self-organisation. When not speaking or coding, you are likely to find Ian indulging his passions in parsers, meta-programming, and domain-specific languages.

Cloud Shootout!

About the talk

How often have you had to advise a client which cloud provider to use? Our usual answer, as developers, is "It doesn't make much of a difference". That said, we've had a bundle of scenarios where there are subtle differences between the providers that can make a big impact.

So we're putting the 3 big cloud giants (AWS, GCloud and Azure) against each other! We want to learn which cloud provider can do it (a) the cheapest (b) with the most ease (c) the best performance (d) with the best debugging and support. So that next time a client asks us "which one?", we can give an empirical answer

About the speaker

Jade Abbott is a Senior Software Developer and Data Scientist at Retro Rabbit. Since 2013, she's built software for every field from social upliftment to banking, working on projects throughout Africa. She's worked at every end of software (with a particular preference for backend) and considers herself a polyglot. Since then, her focus has shifted to her lifelong passion - AI and data science. In the past 2 years, training deep learning models to perform a variety of NLP tasks for real-life systems. She has recently completed her MSc in Swarm Robotics and as a published researcher has presented her research locally and abroad.

Apache Kafka from the trenches: a practical guide

About the talk

If you’re a regular conference visitor, you’ll probably have attended at least one talk about Apache Kafka. Mostly you get all the good stuff about the product itself, the high-level architecture and maybe some examples of a message-driven “Hello World”. But what does it really take to start using Kafka in your Java application? What do the API’s look like? What will it take for you to be able to send or consume a message? In this session, I’ll try to show as much of the reality of integrating with Kafka as possible in the form of some live coding. I’ll start from scratch and show you everything you have to do to make it work, both in Spring and in standard Java.

About the speaker

Jaap is a Java developer and architect for jstack with more than 10 years of experience in Java development in various environments. He's passionate about Java and Open Source technology and likes to combine architectural work with hands-on development. He loves sharing knowledge and experience with colleagues and like-minded people. Outside IT he loves playing board-games with friends and colleagues.

Building a next generation web application

About the talk

Offline capabilities are not normally associated with web applications, but the latest advancements in web technologies enable the development of a web application that can function regardless of the network state. In this talk, I’ll show you how we created a truly offline-first progressive web application by using modern web technologies such as Service Workers and IndexedDB.

You will learn what progressive web applications are, which characteristics make them behave and feel like mobile applications and why we chose to develop one for our client. I’ll also show you some of the techniques we used to ensure optimal performance regardless of the amount of data that was stored, what the network conditions were like, and what device it was running on. We will also cover some of the sync mechanisms that made the application fully functional even in the most remote areas of South Africa. Lastly, we will have a look at the upcoming advancements in web technologies and how this will further enhance the development of next-generation web applications.

This talk is applicable to audiences of all levels.

About the speaker

Madene is a software engineer at Entelect with 4 years of experience in the world of Software Engineering. She enjoys practising her craft with various languages and frameworks such as Angular, C#, Java and many more. She enjoys giving back to the community and has been involved with various initiatives such as GirlCode and Entelect Challenge. She is currently developing an enterprise web application aimed at assisting sales representatives in the agricultural industry that have customers in areas with poor network coverage.

Fast but not furious: debugging user interaction performance issues

About the talk

Perceived performance is not only about fast page loads and delivering the content as early as possible. It is also about all the interactions happening on an already loaded page. Even some of the most popular UI patterns can be a cause of frustration. Understanding what is happening under the browser’s hood can help you delight users with a smooth experience and avoid potential performance issues. Let’s demystify the rendering process and look into possible optimisations in order to achieve the best experience after the initial page load.

About the speaker

Anna works as a Front-end Developer and Designer at Lunar Logic, the no-management software house based in Kraków, Poland. She is always trying to find ways to make people fall in love with coding and has a long history of organizing coding workshops for WebMuses and Rails Girls. In her spare time, she is skateboarding, travelling and reading sci-fi and fantasy books.

Modern application services with OpenShift

About the talk

By adopting modern application development practices, companies transform the way applications are built and delivered to delight customers and outpace competitors. In this talk, we describe how you can deliver and maintain high-quality, innovative applications faster than ever, with solutions that increase developer productivity and operational efficiency. We will look at how to develop and deliver cloud-native applications faster with application services, microservices, containers, APIs, and more.

About the speaker

Phillip is an accomplished Software developer and architect offering experience in creating systems in various industries, ranging from banking, insurance, rewards programs, retail and mobile. He has extensive experience in full stack development and prefers to be active in all parts of the SDLC. From conceptualizing to running in production. Phillip has a passion for clean code and evolutionary architecture and loves Java, Linux and Open source.

Burnout - A Burning Issue

About the talk

Do you ever feel that the fire inside you has burned out?

Burnout is a prevalent issue among IT professionals. A recent Blind survey shows that an average of 57% of employees from 30 tech companies reported burnout.

People in the IT profession are especially prone to burnout due to high job demands manifesting in a variety of forms, such as high mental and emotional load and frequent irregular working hours or excessive amounts of overtime. This in combination with environmental factors such as trust in leadership, alignment in values and communication all contributes to factors that can lead to burnout.

Some of the dangers of burnout are that it is not always easily identifiable and may not necessarily be limited to jobs requiring long working hours. Additionally, a person may not always be aware that he or she is experiencing it. With one of us have spent 15 years working in the IT industry and the other being a registered Industrial Psychologist, we as a couple have personally experienced and had to deal with the impact of burnout more than once in our lives.

We, Tanya and Riaan, would like to share our experiences as well as equip the audience with some tools for identifying, understanding, preventing and dealing with burnout.

About Tanya

Tanya is a registered Industrial and Organisational Psychologist with over 13 years’ experience in Human Resources and 5 years’ experience in the field of Industrial Psychology.

She worked in different industries including banking, investments, stockbroking, retirement fund administration, manufacturing, retail and short-term insurance. During her career, she developed a passion for the IT industry and community. She has extensive experience in dealing with employees, line managers and people in senior management.

She enjoys facilitating change on an individual, team and organisational level. Her "why" is to make the workplace a better place for everyone.

About Riaan

Riaan has been working in the IT industry for the last 15 years in a variety of industries and has fulfilled roles ranging from designated keyboard cleaner to Solutions Architect. Riaan has a passion to improve the safety-related aspects of Software Development for the benefit of everyone who is touched by this practice.

Testing your tests’ quality - Introduction to Mutation Testing

About the talk

Unit Tests measure the quality and effectiveness of your production code. But ever wondered how effective and relevant your tests are? Meet Mutation Testing: Bugs, so-called Mutants, wrong return values, for example, are automatically inserted into your code to test whether your tests fail - if they do, the mutant dies, if they pass, the mutant survives. The higher the percentage of mutants killed, the more effective your tests are. In this talk, I will introduce the attendees to this relatively simple, but ingenious way of checking that your tests will spot malfunctioning code, and show some live mutation testing in different languages.

About the speaker

Felix is a 17 y/o Software Engineer from Germany. Besides school, he helps companies all around the world building their technical infrastructure as a part-time Frontend Consultant for TNG Technology Consulting. In his free time, he is an active Open Source contributor and the co-creator of the JavaScript snippet collection 30-seconds-of-code and a platform for tech interviewees called 30-seconds-of-interviews. He currently also maintains react-perf-devtool. When not coding, you can find him talking or reading about it, as well as advocating for Youth in Tech and organizing CSSFrankfurt. He also loves travelling, especially with his girlfriend, and playing basketball and frisbee, as well as hanging out with friends. Like many young people, he also loves going to parties! So far, he has done mostly JavaScript stuff at Runtastic, GEZE and TNG Technology Consulting.

Building a self-loading Arduino-powered Wi-Fi-controlled catapult for office warfare through simulation driven design

About the talk

Welcome to 2019: You Twitch-stream your ironing, your car thinks it is smarter than you, and catapults have Wi-Fi!

We’re going to go through using game-engine physics simulations (because ALGORITHMS!) to design and optimize a small self-loading desk catapult design, then CAD’ing it for 3D printing, and finally hooking it up to an Arduino to control from a phone over Wi-Fi.

This isn’t your grandfathers' catapult! (Unless you give it to him, I guess?)

About the speaker

Matt Cavanagh is a developer from Durban who hates writing bios in the third person. He started a company called roguecode making Windows apps, but then decided to be poor was a better idea so went into game development. He’s done talks at conferences like DevConf, and TechEd (when Microsoft still knew SA existed).

From Monolith To Microservices

About the talk

Level: Intermediate. In this talk, We will focus on how to split up an old enterprise application which has become a monolith into microservices. We will examine the pros and cons of doing so and also the best design practices and architecture decisions that will ensure this process is a success.

We will mainly explore how to identify services in your monolithic application, identify seams in your monolith. We will also investigate how to decouple microservices from monoliths and the best practices when doing so. We will also focus on microservices development and DevOps such as scalability, load-balancing monitoring and reliability.

We will be examining how to extract a monolith application using example PHP microservices that were pulled out of a larger legacy PHP application. I will also investigate some war stories on how Superbalist achieved this and the lessons learned along the way.

At the end of the talk, you will know better how to refactor your monolith and improve your own architecture.

About the speaker

Liam Norman is a software engineer at superbalist.com and organiser of the PHP Cape Town user group. With experience working on monolithic systems, SOA systems, smaller SPA systems as well as API's. He has a passion for TDD, Laravel, CI/CD, and API Development. When not coding late into the night, he can be seen hiking table mountain or dabbling with anything code related.

Infrastructure as Code on Azure AKS

About the talk

This talk will be about the experiences and lessons learned when Netstar built an on-prem Kubernetes cluster and the lessons learnt when migrating that cluster to Azure Kubernetes Services.

About the speaker

Quintin's been a developer for 20 years in the banking and telematics industries. He's developed multiple high transaction volume systems in C#, .NET and more recently Scala and R. When he's not coding he's spending time with his family and enjoys reading.

Moving from sedan to sports car – Building for Software Performance

About the talk

In this age of instant gratification - having software that is fast and responsive is non-negotiable. Thankfully with a few decent designs and testing techniques, we can achieve this.

People don’t look to use the most innovative or advanced software, they want to use the most responsive. We expect things to happen now or even sooner and as a result, it’s become increasingly important to have software that not only performance rapidly, but scales appropriately. However, to build software that is high performing, you need to put systems in place that can help you easily identify your performance bottlenecks and respond to them appropriately.

In this session we will look at optimal coding considerations, the different approaches to load and performance testing and how you can apply these in different software solutions.

About the speaker

A man of many talents, but no sense how to use them. Craig could be out saving the world but would prefer to make software instead. Craig has a passion for software design, but more importantly software quality and designing systems that can achieve this in a technically diverse and constantly evolving world.

When not playing with software he can often be found writing, designing board games or running long distances for no apparent reason.

Zen and the Art of Developer Maintenance

About the talk

So many aspects make up being the best developer you can be yet we tend to focus almost exclusively on the obvious ones like learning the next library, framework or methodologies. Here we will explore some critical practices you may be missing that will not only improve your craft but your life.
Our industry moves fast, there are new libraries and frameworks created every day, not to mention all the updates and features added to the ones we already use and love. There is a constant drive to deliver more, to increase velocity, to meet and exceed deadlines. We celebrate the culture of “being totally swamped” and wear it as a badge of honour. Impostor syndrome is real and can make us feel like we have to keep up with everything and it’s just simply not possible to do so. We don’t let this simple fact stop us from trying and we make bad trade-offs that are actually detrimental, leaving a trail of destruction through our bodies, our minds and sometimes even our family and friends.
What if I told you that the world you live in is a prison for your mind, that it doesn’t have to be that way? As The Oracle told Neo, you will have to make a choice. There are techniques that will allow you to lead a better life, some you may already know but just don’t practice and some may be more esoteric. In this talk I will be distilling the years of self-help research and practice that I have personally gone through to show you how you can improve the quality of your life, not just to make you a better, more effective developer but a happier more grounded person. Naturally, as we are all in the tech field, I will be showing you some really awesome tech solutions to help you on your journey.

Some of the topics we will be looking at are:

• Essentialism - Lets you focus on doing less, but better
• Purpose, vision and goals - To guide where you should focus your energy
• Stoicism - Because life is often fraught with hardships
• The habit loop and the power of rituals - because 40-95% of what we do is automatic
• Boundaries - Because being a people pleaser is a surefire way to make yourself miserable
• Mindfulness - lets you be actively present in your life
• Nutrition, Exercise and Sleep - cliché but for a reason
• Getting things Done® - Once you have stripped away the non-essential, you still need a system to help you do it

About the speaker

Ryan Kotzen is an aspiring stoic, essentialist, polymath, polyglot software engineer, and armchair philosopher. Ryan is a believer in constantly evolving and evaluating what you are doing, utilising concepts from lean, kaizen, XP and the agile manifesto to name a few. Ryan has a passion for coaching and learning from other people. When not developing software, Ryan likes to spend his time airbrushing, geeking out on a geeky movie/series/book, playing Kerbal Space Program and all aspects of the Warhammer 40k hobby.

Using AI for facial recognition to understand emotion, gender and age

About the talk

Facial recognition has always been the domain of science fiction. But not anymore. The technology is now available for us to now enter the world of Sci-Fi. Our face is a unique, intimate reflection of who we are. It represents our identity, character, emotions, age. Our brains recognise different faces and their unique characteristics. Our faces are the primary point of contact, especially within the human race. Our emotions and facial expressions are part of every aspect of our lives - how we learn and communicate, how we understand one another, how we interact with each other. Yet in today's world of technology, our face and emotions are mostly absent from our digital interactions. Up until recently, it has been difficult for the average developer to write software that will recognise facial differences, facial aspects and even emotion depicted by facial expression. Can we write software in C# to identify a picture, identify facial objects such as eyes, nose, ears, mouth, hair, etc. and then identify emotion in that picture. The human face can create about 5000 expressions. Can Facial Detection Software understand those expressions and identify the emotion. Technology is now available for us to write software that will recognise and identify faces and facial objects, understand emotion, and predict a proximate age. This talk will explore how we can do that. We will write and demo software that will be able to recognise faces, identify the emotion. Time permitting we will use this to explore Facial Bio-metrics. We will then look at different use cases and see how this technology can be used.

About the speaker

Robert has been in the IT and Development game since the 1980’s. His first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K ram. Robert has developed code in more than 16 different languages and scripts. He has a passion for software development, designing and delivering the right software in time with as little defects as possible. Robert likes to be at the cutting edge of technology. From the very beginning, modifying an IBM Brother XT PC into the fastest PC around to the latest in AI. Robert has seen tech come and go and in most cases forgotten what others have not yet learnt. Robert is a manager and Senior Developer at IQ Business.

Why I decided to ditch dev and dive into UX

About the talk

As a developer, I was fascinated by this concept of usability, a seemingly magical quality that somehow makes a world of difference for the ones that use our product. I spent the first 10 years of my career as a dev, went through a phase as a TDD fanatic, then landed up getting into interaction design and user experience. I was able to teach myself about UX from mostly free resources I found online.

So, what is it like for a software developer to transition their career into doing UX full time? Experience design, like any other discipline in software, is one that can be learned by anyone who is willing to invest the effort. I will share why I decided to quit programming for a career in UX and a few insights about how designers and developers can work together more effectively from a shared understanding.

About the speaker

Chris currently heads up the UX/UI division at DVT, a full-service software consulting firm. He has over 15 years experience in software product development, in roles ranging from full stack web developer to mobile developer to product owner. Around 2016 he decided to switch from a career in dev to concentrate on UX design, to be equipped to narrow the usability gap in the products he's making. Recovering musician and music festival junkie. Tea drinker.

When creating software, what Really Matters?

About the talk

There's no shortage of guidance around the internet on how to become a competent software developer. It's an exciting road to travel. But, what comes after you've reached a level of competence? What's beyond that horizon?

As a programmer in the late ’90s and 2000s, I focused on growing my competence in a pragmatic "what works?" sort of way, and readily adopted ideas that were useful.

For a decade or so after that, as a coach and consultant, I frequently provided context-free general advice that was aligned to innovative ideas that had worked for me in the past but didn't always have a lasting impact for the people and teams I was coaching.

Today, as a technical leader working with teams of developers across the world, I’m growing a deepening understanding of what really matters when creating software.

The 6 key fields I plan to traverse...

1. Narrative - how the world is shaped and we shape our world
2. Reality - how the underlying reality tends to show through
3. Humans - how ultimately, creating software is about humans
4. Systems - that seeing and understanding the patterns and interactions is vital
5. Knowledge - in order to use it well, we need to respect its fundamental properties
6. Flow - knowing how to see and manage transitions over time

My goals for this talk is not to convert people to my viewpoint. I'm not selling anything. I'm hoping to bring some ideas to people who've reached a level of competence in our field, and perhaps some reassurance to those who intuitively see that much of today's industry dogma is just plain wrong.

About the speaker

Over the course of his professional career, Kevin has had the opportunity to work in and observe projects, teams and organisations in vastly different environments, and seen vastly differing levels of success amongst them.

Through extensive coaching, consulting and business ownership experience he grew a deep appreciation for the values, principles and practices that are required for healthy, effective working environments.

Today Kevin has his sleeves rolled back up again and is leading an engineering effort that is creating a groundbreaking fintech product as part of an amazing international team at Jemstep by Invesco.

Lessons learnt implementing a true cross-platform retail application using Xamarin

About the talk

We embarked on a rather daunting journey a couple of years ago to replace our Point of Sale (POS) solution in all our stores. During the project we have overcome many challenges and have learnt amongst other things: how to work better as a team, how to adopt agile processes in a corporate waterfall environment, how to avoid rabbit holes (although this still needs some work), how to architect and design a solution which meets all short and long-term functional and non-functional requirements, etc... and the list goes on...

The focus of this talk, however, is on the lessons we have learnt leveraging great architecture, design patterns, standards and technology to deliver a truly cross-platform, enterprise-ready, world-class retail application. I will briefly cover the high-level requirements for a POS solution which must be flexible, resilient, performant, scalable and secure. The architecture, design and technology we have employed to successfully deliver on these requirements will then be examined in more detail.

The technologies which I will focus on include Xamarin (.NET Core, Android, MVVM, PCL, UWP, WPF), WCF (MSMQ, REST) and Entity Framework (code first and migrations). Then I will also touch on how technologies like Azure and Docker will be leveraged in the very near future.

About the speaker

Wayne Beckley is currently the product lead and solution architect for the new Point of Sale initiative at The Foschini Group (TFG). He has been involved in IT and the retail industry for the last 18 years. Over the course of his career, he has fulfilled several roles including developer, business analyst, project manager, technical lead, line manager, integration architect, development architect and enterprise architect. He derives the most pleasure and energy from architecting and developing solutions and is probably going to stick to this until he retires to his coastal holiday home (which still needs to be purchased). During his time at TFG, he has focused mainly on solutions in the stores and E-Commerce domains which help TFG realise their strategy "to be the leading fashion lifestyle retailer in Africa whilst growing our international footprint". He is passionate about reducing complexity, maximising reuse and leveraging technology efficiently. He also firmly believes that in software development, the root of all evil (and bugs) is not following standards.

Mob Programming and Personality Traits, a controlled experiment

About the talk

For my Masters degree research project, I chose to perform a controlled experiment with a group of volunteer software developers. The experiment was to test the theory that Mob Programming positively affects team communication and learning, compared to working in a self-organised team formation. One requirement of the experiment was for the volunteers to complete a "Big Five" personality traits assessment, to see how they scored against the traits of Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

The data collected from the assessment, along with the answers from the questionnaire at the end of the experiment, provided some valuable, quantitative insight that could be of great value to anyone who works in a software development team.

In this talk, I present the findings of the experiment and what it could mean for you and your team.

About the speaker

Gareth has spoken at various conferences and user groups throughout South Africa on topics ranging from software development to building cluster-computing systems using Raspberry Pi's. He's been working in the software development field for over 20 years, and he's still no good at it.

Where Test-driven development and Infrastructure as code have a love child

About the talk

Where Test-driven development and Infrastructure as code have a love child.

Everything around you is made up of atoms, DNA or code, there is a recipe on how everything is put together, and like most things... as soon as things get created organically it gets messy. With the advent of composable infrastructure or infrastructure as code, we need to focus more on getting reproducible systems as opposed to a patchwork of chaos. Using Test Driven techniques we can create and implement reliable, repeatable infrastructure.

Some slides, lots of memes and of course gorgeous un-canned demos

About the speaker

Karl has been a Linux User since 1999, he loves open source and free software, He is currently a DevOps lead at Obsidian Systems, hates long walks on the beach and I’m happily married with lots of children.

Hacking satellites with Software Defined Radio (SDR)

About the talk

In this, no holds barred down introduction to Software Defined Radio (SDR) you'll learn how you can download data directly from various satellites in low earth orbit with nothing more than a cheap USB dongle and a makeshift antenna.

Our first target will be US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) series weather satellites to give us live image data of what the earth looks like from about 850km overhead.

If you thought your WiFi signal was bad, you haven’t seen anything! SDR USB dongles are cheap, readily available and can listen in on a wide range of the radio spectrum. However, they need a bit of help picking up the 137MHz signal from these satellites, so we’ll be building an antenna capable of picking up these signals.

With that setup, we’ll take you through some of the SDR software needed to analyse and record the signal (SDRSharp, CubicSDR or GQRX). Then we’ll look into how weather satellites encode image and telemetry data, and how you can decode it with a bit of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) software.

Next, we’ll target Russian Meteor M class satellites, and see what we can get out of those with some other techniques.

About the speaker

Gerard holds a Master’s Degree in IT from the University of Pretoria, is a member of [Mensa](mensa.org.za) and has consulted for the likes of Standard Bank, Nedbank, MTN, De Beers & Experian. He’s also worked on both the FNB and Barclays (Absa) mobile banking Apps on the Apple iOS platform.

With over a decade’s experience building information systems in the banking sector, Gerard has created and lead teams for multiple big-budget projects in the UK and South Africa. Gerard is a citizen of both the Netherlands and South Africa.

Programming for Accessibility

About the talk

My life is a hilarious roller coaster of miss-intended programming bugs because at 4 foot tall and 65 kilograms I completely fall off your radar.

What did my scale call me! Why does facial recognition see me as a child? These are all valid questions I often ask myself as I navigate my weird and different world. Have you heard the phrase “You have to be this tall for Micro-services”? well, what about: “You have to be this tall to operate a mobile phone?”. I am finding it harder and harder to reach any button except for “#” and “9”.

Building accessibility into the planning stages of programming can eliminate barriers for participation and create an inclusive environment for people with disabilities. Programming for diversity serves as an unquestionable indicator that your software embraces the diversity of your users and cares about their safety and comfort.

Join me on a fascinating and thought-provoking look at how you can program for accessibility.

About the speaker

Prior to joining Microsoft, Rory worked for a number of South Africa’s large companies as an Integration Architect.

Rory’s focus for the last 7 years has been on research and development (R&D) with a focus on cloud research, consulting and training.

Working in research has allowed him unparalleled insights into industry movements, trends, and news.

Rory is extremely passionate about the programming community and has been critical helping them create a South African flavoured digital disruption strategy.

Rory is an organiser of the Kotlin and Java developer user groups and has led the Johannesburg AWS user group for 2 years.

When not captivating the crowd with his presentations as a technical speaker, he can be found in the front row with a distinguished laugh, infectious enough to break the awkward silence in any audience.

His expertise includes PaaS and Java, and he holds an honours degree in Computer Science.

Married with two children, Rory tries to spend most of his free time with his family and two hyperactive Schnauzers.

From Zero to kind of hero: Getting your Python side project ready for deployment

About the talk

One evening, my little sister asked me for help with her homework at 9pm. She had already asked her classmates on a WhatsApp group, but nobody was able to help as all her peers had the same limited resources available to them. This gave me the idea for Buza (Zulu for “ask”), a platform for high school learners to ask questions that could be answered by volunteer university students in their free time. Buza is the first side project of mine that I’ve ever truly wanted to deploy. After months of coding and adding loads of features, I finally reached out to a senior developer to help me deploy my truck of features. The first thing she said was “A lot of this code will have to be replaced with production-ready code”. These are words you never want to hear.

University Computer Science equipped me with the ability to write code to solve problems, but in industry extra skills were required to build production-ready software. This talk will share the valuable lessons I learned from getting this Django web app production-ready. This will start with how to choose the right tools, framework, environment for your project. I will also cover how to set up testing and continuous integration for your project.

About the speaker

Code name: Lady Sunshine Half marathon runner and python developer

Data Science and Machine Learning Tools for Developers

About the talk

In this talk, we'll dispel the common myth that you need a room full of PhDs to implement data science and machine learning into your software product. We'll present data science and machine learning as another tool that everyone involved with building software should have in their toolbox. We'll talk about the concepts, tools, and resources that a software developer needs to get familiar with, the value that data science and machine learning can bring to a software product, and how to get started doing it yourself.

About the speaker

Helge is a data scientist with 6+ years of experience in the practical implementation of products and services across a multitude of industries including insurance, banking, retail, and human resources. He is currently a data scientist at Offerzen.

A junior's guide to full stack

About the talk

With this talk I would like to discuss what a full stack developer is and how this can lead us to be better at our craft. This is not just a definition, but a dedication and conscious decision for any developer to become good at what they do. For a junior to become involved in all aspects of a team, they have to go through a journey. A journey that involves different technologies, methods and experiences that make people's lives easier with our code. Is this not what programming is all about?

About the speaker

Melissa is an articulate forward thinking IT professional with well-honed social skills, organisational ability, and oodles of charm. She stands out in a crowd (literally) matching her lanky frame and good looks with an ability to multitask, deliver work on time and troubleshoot issues with fractious colleagues and clients. As a very independent person she is able to earn her keep - enhancing her ability to generate returns for her employer and clients. She is always aware of the expectations paying customers have for quality work delivered with minimum fuss. Her quick intellect, sense of humour and natural empathy garner co-operation and support from colleagues and clients alike. She is a forceful personality who likes to make a difference and take the lead.

The Curious Case of the Production Incident

About the talk

Like it or not, things will always go wrong in production. Rouan is going to tell you about the types of issues that you should expect. He’ll show you a range of techniques for finding out quickly that something has gone wrong, including everything from automated alerting to an old-fashioned phone call from a grumpy user.

Rouan will also cover diagnostic tools that can help you figure out what went wrong, talk about how your team could approach issues, and explain the possibility of creating self-healing mechanisms. Lastly, he’ll chat about what you need to ship a fix fast and how the right production monitoring can even help you write less code.

After attending the talk, you’ll see that production issues are learning opportunities. You’ll be ready to spot them, understand them and use them to build better software.

About the speaker

Rouan Wilsenach is a software developer. He has built applications in a variety of technology stacks for companies in the financial services, education, health and media sectors. He’s worked as a consultant and coach, helping teams learn good engineering practices and helping businesses transform the way they build software. He now works remotely for Tes, where he builds full-stack JavaScript microservices to help teachers and schools.

JAMStack aka Serverless

About the talk

The JAMStack is a new way to approach creating a website or web application. In the past if you wanted to get something online, you’d have to spin up a server that was always online. If you wanted to keep costs down that server would have to be small, but that meant you couldn’t handle large traffic. If you wanted to scale cost-effectively, that meant you’d have to use someone else’s platform, which meant you lost some control. JAMStack allows you to create full websites that are fully delivered via CDN, but without losing functionality.

I’ve used JAMStack to create a personal blog, a corporate publishing platform, landing pages and product MVPs. The JAMStack is a very flexible tool that allows you to get your content in front of people, easily. Youre site consists made up entirely of static resources, that can be delivered through a CDN. If you need more processing, you can then offload those to ‘hosted functions’ like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or the like.

In this talk I’ll walk through the details of the JAMStack, creation of a site, how to deploy one and building in features like search and more complex functionality.

About the speaker

Tim Lewis is a full stack developer and a Team Lead at Entelect. Professionally, he's worked in risk management and fraud prevention, the health sector, lectured web design and been a web freelancer. In his free time, he is a UI/UX enthusiast and keeps a keen eye on cyber security. When offline, he is involved in a couple of charities related child protection and education.

Something, something, Data Science

About the talk

Data science is all over the news. The job of data scientist is said to be one of the fastest growing jobs. But what is data science? Is it just another name for Business Intelligence? And how does “Big Data” fit into the picture.

In this talk, I’ll take your through what Data Science is, and what it is not, and then we’ll try and solve some simple Data Science-type problems in R, Python and Azure Machine learning. Simple problems, like image recognition and fraud detection.

About the speaker

Gail is a Database Specialist focusing on database performance tuning and database recovery, with a particular interest in topics such as indexing strategies, execution plans, and writing T-SQL code that performs well and scales gracefully.

Gail holds a Microsoft Certified Master certification for SQL Server 2008 and is a Data Platform MVP. She is a frequent poster on the SQL Server Central forums, a Pluralsight author, writes articles for both SQLServerCentral.com and Simple-Talk.com, and has spoken at SQL Saturdays locally and internationally, SQL Bits, IT/Dev Connections and at the PASS Community Summit.

Gail has been responsible for extending the lifespan of many an application by performance-tuning their databases as well as providing technical guidance on all things SQL Server related.

She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Kotlin for all the Droids

About the talk

This talk will be around Kotlin being a first class language for Android. How it makes Android code much cleaner, better to maintain and introduces many new concepts that Android developers could not do in Java. This talk will be showing Android developers how to take their code to the next level.

About the speaker

P-J, who is based in Johannesburg, is a Mobile developer that develops both Android and iOS apps. Everyone knows that he enjoys trying new and different technologies and being an explorer in the technology world. On a daily basis he works on a banking app, but also maintains some open source projects, apps and blogs about development technologies on Medium.

Adding graphs to your toolbox

About the talk

In this talk, I’ll take a deeper dive into graphing, what it can do, where to use it and where not to. Allowing you to add it to the tools you already have in your toolbox. We’ll take a look at graphs and the tooling in today’s world that allows us to make use of graphs in different ways. I’ll be doing a lot of demo’s along the way. Talk outline:

• What is a graph and where did it come from. Graphs are not a new concept but why should I care about them.
• We’ll take a look at where graphs are used and what types of problems they solve.
• GraphQL: Facebook’s mobile apps have been powered by GraphQL since 2012. A GraphQL spec was open sourced in 2015. We’ll take a look at: how we can describe your data, ask for what you want, get everything you need in a single request, GraphiQL - A powerful developer tool, Evolving you API without versions, Limitations.
• DGraph: A database built for graphs that uses GraphQL for a query language. We’ll take a look at DGraph as a solution and how it moves past some of the limitations mentioned before.

About the speaker

Working in both agile and not-so-agile teams over the past 13 years. With the word agile meaning so many different things Terence strives to bring an attention to the principles and allow teams and individuals to reach beyond their own expectations. Terence appreciates, and shares with listeners, that bringing change to their teams is a moment-to-moment choice and not about positions or titles. Passionate about helping developers grow and share their experiences by helping build a better developer community.

What is a lightning talk?

The Curious Case of Monorepos by Andrew Bestbier

Monorepos are a controversial idea and many think that they are bad practise. However, large companies like Facebook are actively using them to manage their projects. I will build a case for monorepos from first principles and share lessons learned while working on large digital transformations.

About the speaker

Noobs Journey to Pi by Arohan Naidoo

A walk though of my journey as a Business Intelligence developer who wanted to get started with Windows 10 IoT development on a Raspberry Pi 3 with no C# skills. The talk will go through some of the practical challenges and benefits gained from the process.

About the speaker

Arohan is a Business Intelligence developer working at Entelect primarily on the Microsoft BI stack who has an interest in using Big Data and IoT to find insights into ways to improve daily life as well as focused research on using technology to enhance learning.

Habit Driven Design by Nico Botha

Usage of any tech product on a regular basis creates habits among its users. Habits are created spontaneously without the user noticing it. If these habits are not carefully thought out (and the product specifically designed to drive certain habits) user habits can get out of control. This talk will give you some insight into the concept of habit driven design (HDD). How does the products we use daily dictate our habits? Why is it important to design for specific human behavior? Come and challenge yourself as we journey into the world of user habits and software.

About the speaker

Nico is a software engineer at Entelect. In his free time he likes to play around with random tech. During long train rides to work he likes to enrich himself with reading philosophy. He is fascinated by the psychology of user behavior, especially when software is involved. When he grows up he wants to be a writer.

Kubernetes Inside and Out

About the talk

Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for container orchestration today. However beginner-level educational content to learn Kubernetes today is still focused on cluster management through the Kubernetes CLI tool. This can make it harder for novices to visualize the relationship between the commands they’re issuing and what’s happening in the cluster. Incrementally building a Helm Chart provides an easier, more intuitive, and more visual way of learning the key concepts of Kubernetes, while addressing how to manage package releases upfront.

This talk will cover how to incrementally build a Helm Chart for NGINX, and along the way, will cover key Kubernetes concepts. Content will include as many diagrams and visuals as possible to accompany these concepts, and include how to deploy the new NGINX chart from a Kubernetes cluster.

About the speaker

Amy Chen is a software engineer at her Heptio. She is passionate about open source, containers, orchestration tools, Go, and salsa dancing.

In her free time, Amy runs a youtube channel called Amy Codes where she talks about technical and non-technical aspects of being a software engineer. (https://www.youtube.com/AmyCodes). She aims to make the container and infrastructure industry more accessible by sharing her learning process and resources used through her youtube channel.

You can follow her internet shenanigans here: https://www.youtube.com/AmyCodes https://twitter.com/TheAmyCode https://medium.com/@amy https://github.com/amy https://www.instagram.com/theamycode/

Expanding Borders: How to grow beyond just the next popular tech stack.

About the talk

The tech landscape is changing faster than ever, and this trend is only accelerating. How do technical people grow when the world is changing faster than you can finish your next cup of coffee? How does one keep up? What should you learn? Are there things we can focus our learning efforts on besides just the next tech flavour of the month? This talk will explore some areas of learning that technical people might not intentionally consider. These areas focus on higher-level concerns, with slower rates of change, which can help technical people develop into more well-rounded individuals.

About the speaker

Janco is a software craftsman on a lifelong journey of understanding the fundamental nature of software development. He spends most of his time building stuff he hopes will add value to someone’s life, while coaching, mentoring and journeying with fellow software craftspeople.

Android Architecture Components: A testable approach to Android Development

About the talk

Developing Android Apps has notoriously been a difficult task. Previously, Google refrained from giving advice as to how you should go about architecting your Android applications and it has been “left it up to the reader” to decide how. This lead to apps having a lot of bloat in their activities and being really difficult to test. This has now changed since Google I/O 2017 where the new Android Architecture components were introduced. The libraries aim to make developing and maintaining your Android apps a lot easier. In this presentation, Rebecca will present the components and dive into detail around the different types of tests you should write (and where) for your newly architected Android application.

About the speaker

Rebecca Franks the Android Engineering Lead at DVT. She has over 5 years experience in developing Android applications. In March 2016, she was awarded with the status of Google Developer Expert for Android. In her spare time, she works with Book Dash – a Non Profit Organisation – developing an Android app to showcase their free children’s books. She enjoys public speaking and frequently speaks at conferences and local meetups. Her blog has been featured multiple times in Android Weekly . In June 2016, She was selected as part of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans. She has spoken internationally in Switzerland, United States and Kenya and Poland.

A .net standard future for everyone

About the talk

Technology needs to break down bearers to productivity. The future of .net standard has the potential to do so. Having seen the latest strides that Microsoft has been doing with .net standard, it is getting clearer that with the development tools available from Microsoft we as developers can with ease build products that enables developers to target more platforms at a faster pace.

.net standard gives developers a wider access to .net API’s and I will show how this library can rule them all irrespective of the platform. I will also outline how .net standard compares with .net core, .net framework and xamarin

About the speaker

Griffiths Sibeko, a lifelong learner with a grade zero mentality who draws his design inspiration from nature, human interactions and communication patterns.

Learning how to use a computer at the public library at age 11 where the staff was always sceptical that he would break the equipment, he got to excel at using computers and got his first promotion from owning a library card to owning a library staff card. He later then realised his passion to design and develop solutions to help better ways in which people interact with the world around them.

Some of the accolades that Griffiths has achieved include winning the 2014 MTN Best Garage Developer competition, in 2016 Griffiths was featured in Forbes Africa for some of the sacrifices he had to make to pursue a career in software development. Currently Griffiths leads the Windows client team at Zapper.

The Courage to be a Professional Software Developer

About the talk

What does it mean to be a “professional” software developer? It means a lot more than just writing code for money. At Chillisoft we have been discussing what this means over the past few years, and we have even taken it to the point where we have started up a School of Professional Software Development, called DevFluence. We sum up the status of being a professional software developer in this phrase: "The courage to create value for customers, myself and my community." In this talk, I want to explain what we mean by this phrase, and then provide some examples of young developers who are doing this. I also want to talk a bit about DevFluence and how we are trying to spread this ethos while building technical skills in South Africa.

About the speaker

Peter is a software developer that loves to think about the broader aspects facing software developers and the industry itself. Languages and algorithms were his first love in coding, and in the 18 years since beginning a career as a developer his interests have expanded to include business problems and industry-wide challenges in South Africa. He’s a director at Chillisoft, which is a company that believes great software developers can be grown through good mentorship, training and continuous learning.

How we moved 65,000 Microsofties to DevOps with Visual Studio Team Services

About the talk

How do you migrate over 65,000 of the most demanding software engineers from infrastructure built up over decades of high-intensity work into a common engineering system based on modern software development technologies and best practices? This is exactly the challenge faced by Microsoft as they moved to their One Engineering system. Come and hear about how they did it and the lessons they learned along the way.

About the speaker

Willy is a program manager with the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) group. He’s responsible for the ALM | DevOps Ranger community, which provides professional guidance and gap-filling solutions to the developer community. Go directly to him if you need help with missing guidance or features for VSTS. Since the mid-’80s, He’s been striving for simplicity and maintainability in software engineering. Reach him on Twitter at @wpschaub, or the aka.ms/vsarblog, aka.ms/willysblog blogs.

Bots, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive learning

About the talk

Bots, AI and Cognitive learning is going to change the way we life, how we think and how we work. It will also change how we code and how we analyse data. Automated and driverless vehicles are one example of software bots and mechanical robotics interacting. Deep learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) will make it possible to ask virtual bot assistants questions in a natural way and get meaningful answers. Analyzing huge amounts of text, social media posts to understand sentiment and thought process will be a huge advantage to business and even government. Face-recognition and photo-analysis at the hands of the populous makes searching and analyzing digital data easier smarter and more accurate. Lear how we can make use of Bot Frameworks, AI Frameworks and Cognitive Frameworks that are available today to achieve what we might have thought previously impossible or event at the least out of our reach.

About the speaker

I’ve been in the IT and Development game since the 1980’s. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K ram. I’ve developed code in more than 16 different languages and scripts. I have a passion for software development, designing and delivering the right software in time with as little defects as possible. Always sought to look at the most cutting edge of technology. From the very beginning, modifying an IBM Brother XT PC into the fastest PC around. I’ve seen tech come and go and I’ve forgotten somethings others have not yet event learnt. I am a manager and Senior Developer at IQ Business.

Continuously build, test, release, and monitor apps for every platform

About the talk

End-to-end mobile DevOps story that starts by connecting to GitHub, Bitbucket, or VSTS and build your app in the cloud on every commit. Automatically run UI tests on real 2700+ devices. Release to testers and stores. Continue to monitor your production app performance through analytics and crash reporting.

About the speaker

Mohamed has worked in diversified roles ranging from marketing to software engineering for more than 11 years, with 8+ of those being a digital transformation advocate for enterprise mobility, cloud and business intelligence. He’s a Global Black Belt Mobile App Innovation Architect at Microsoft with focus on driving business transformation for customers on advanced Azure technology such as IoT, AI and cloud application development, applied to mobile. He is working closely with customers/partners, providing the thought leadership, guidance, and expertise needed to deliver successful mobile projects.

Reframing your next Single Page App

About the talk

Facebook did something beautiful when they built react. The combination of reactive programming, functional programming and immutable data has truly taken the web by storm.

What does it look like when you’re using a simple programming language, and powerful toolchain, that enshrines these values to build your next react app? What if you don’t need to have these conflicting ideals in one code base?

re-frame is a framework around a wrapper over react and gives developers a simple deterministic way to deliver rich single page applications. Being impressively buzzword compliant, it brings together the best of react, redux, Elm and other ideas that have taken the SPA world by storm. re-frame delivers a data oriented approach to designing and building your next application.

ClojureScript is an implementation of Clojure that targets JavaScript runtimes, both browser and Node. ClojureScript is a dynamic functional language with an impressive toolchain that is the envy of any developer that has seen it, but can’t use it. You get true hot code reloading, advanced optimisations thanks to Google’s Closure Compiler, the safety of immutable data, the flexibility of dynamic typing, and great JavaScript interop, all packaged up in a wonderfully simple experience. ClojureScript does not shy away from the fact that it gets compiled down to JS, instead it offers all the escape hatches you’d ever need to interop seamlessly and build on the work of other developers.

About the speaker

Kenneth is full stack web developer with nearly 20 years under the belt. He's currently enjoying the revitalizing experience of writing Clojure and valuing values. Outside of his day to day, he maintains and contributes to several open source projects, writes on his Open Sourcery blog, co-hosts the ZADevChat podcast and enjoys speaking at local meetups and conferences. He enjoys learning and sharing, meeting and connecting people and being involved.

Secrets of successful mentoring

About the talk

The idea of mentorship is strongest within the software craft community, which values the idea of apprenticeship. But the concepts within the apprenticeship model are valuable to all technical mentors, not just those who hire apprentices. Knowing how to give feedback, having a set of coding exercises, regular planning and estimating are all invaluable skills. In this talk I’ll look at these and other ideas for how to ensure you give your mentees the best chance of success.

About the speaker

Daniel is a software consultant based in London. He's a member of the software craft community and a founder and organizer of Queer Code London. Originally from Ireland, he's been programming computers from a very young age. He started his professional programming career at an enterprise software vendor. Later on he worked in the financial sector before joining 8th Light as a consultant. In addition to leading development teams, he's an agile coach and mentor.

Daniel's focus is on building high-quality software. He's big on TDD and pair programming, and as a generalist he's worked professionally with C++, C#, Java, Ruby and JavaScript, although these days he's a Clojure enthusiast. Coding aside, his passion is on nurturing the technical growth of others around him.

Mining your log files made simple - A Unified Logging Solution

About the talk

Log files hold a vault of useful information for operations as well as business.

Processing your log files could reveal a host of useful information.

• Who uses that brand new web solution you have just deployed?
• Which country are they in?
• What device are they using?
• When your host is under load, what else is happening in the environment?
• That pesky, intermittent error is back! How do you find it?
• Our build server is slow, why?
• Processing application and server log files used to be such a chore. Getting a unified view of all logs required wizard-like skills! But over the past few years simple and easy solutions have emerged. Best of all, they’re free. That’s right, they’re all open source!

Join me for a hands-on presentation, where we’ll pull some useful open source Docker containers and set to work making them weave some magic on our log files.

We’ll cover some Docker Compose basics to get you started with a simple ELK stack (Elastic Search, Log Stash and Kibana), configure some endpoints and setup log shipping (for Linux and Windows) so that we can process log files.

Once we’re processing logs, we’ll look at ways to transform and embellish our log data to add IT operational, as well as business value.

Using our transformed data, we’ll also cover visualising the data using Kibana.

To close out we’ll also consider alternative technologies such as Prometheus and Grafana, and discuss the pros and cons of the different technologies.

Mining log files has never been so simple.

Join me to see how easy it is to get started.

About the speaker

Chris is a software architect with 20+ years’ experience, committed to evolutionary and constant learning, often tinkering with new tools, technologies, techniques and architectures. He is passionate about quality software and great architecture, while forging the growth of this generation of software developers. Chris enjoys sharing his learnings, often accompanied by good beer. Chris can be found either overseeing the architecture at Kaleidocode, mentoring on the Kaleidocode apprenticeship program, or working hands on with his team.

Blockchain is using enough juice to power Joburg

About the talk

What is the cost of our culture's addiction to software? How much fuel is needed to produce enough power to keep that docker container running? I'm no bunny-hugger, but I'll share some of my research and conclusions on a cause many of us don't think about - the environmental impact from our insatiable need for software, and what we as developers can do to help. Don't miss it.

About the speaker

'm a dedicated software developer at DVT and tend to focus on Java \ DevOps during working hours. On weekends I enjoy catching some fresh air by hiking or pottering in the garden. When I'm not getting my hands dirty, I spend my time reflecting on the nature of software and our complex world.

What is a lightning talk?

Create a Worthwhile Internship Programme by André Odendaal

Turn school/college graduates into immediately useful junior developers by using the methods and practices we've been developing for over 4 years at the Microsoft AppFactory. We focus on mentoring experimenting to find the solution; communicating effectively about work progress and blockers; and committing to delivery as part of a team. In this presentation I want to share our practices and how you can use them in your own internship.

About the speaker

Andre Odendaal is a .NET developer and mentor at a skills development hub based in Johannesburg. He's also a hobbyist game developer making 2D and 3D video games as well as board games for fun or educational purposes, some of which have won community praise. Andre has a master's degree in software engineering and provides technical analysis to start-up companies looking to create IT products.

How and why to tell strangers on the Internet about stuff you know by Riaan Nel

This brief talk is about my journey into online course creation, and how anyone can share their skills, reach people all over the world, build their brand, and hopefully make some profit while they’re at it.

I also want to touch on what I’ve learnt about motivation, marketing, and speaking in the process.

About the speaker

Riaan has spent over a decade writing code for everything from ERP software to banking systems. He is a lifelong learner and it's pretty much guaranteed that he'll be signed up to some or other course at any given time. He once tried to start a training company, but realised that he sucks at marketing. Consequently, he kept his day job and now he teaches online programming courses in his spare time (and leaves the marketing to someone else).
He also hangs around elsewhere on the Internet: https://twitter.com/rambling_riaan

Breaking into a wireless networks with Kali Linux by Gerard de Jong

In this talk we’ll explore the Kali Linux toolset and show you how to break into a WPA2 secured wireless access point.

First we’ll take you over how to capture a wireless client’s handshake, then we’ll show you how extract the hashed passphrase and finally how to crack that hash to reveal the passphrase itself.

As a side act we’ll also show you how to jam wireless networks and even target specific users.

You’ll will leave this talk with a deeper understanding of the problems with our current 802.11 WiFi standards, why cracking them is much harder to pull off than you would have thought, and hankering to change your WiFi password then you get home!

About the speaker

Gerard holds a Master’s Degree in IT from the University of Pretoria, is a member of Mensa and has consulted for the likes of Standard Bank, Nedbank, MTN, De Beers & Experian. He’s also worked on both the FNB and Barclays (Absa) mobile banking Apps on the Apple iOS platform.

Gerard’s been speaking on software engineering and best practices topics since 2015. Main engagements include: - Barclays Agora Talks 2015 - TDD (turned into a training video) - IQ Business Internal Master Classes 2015 - Advanced TDD - IQ Business Open Master Classes 2016 - Microservices - IQ Business Internal Master Classes 2016 - Web Security (IQ DefCon) - FNB CodeFest 2017 - Microservices

With over a decade’s experience building information systems in the banking sector, Gerard has created and lead teams for multiple big budget projects in the UK and South Africa. Gerard is a citizen of both the Netherlands and South Africa.

Building Offline Web Apps for the Next Billion Users

About the talk

Users always rely on downloading mobile apps that could serve them when they are offline or have poor internet connections. This is because most mobile apps still offer amazing user experience when there is no connectivity. Unfortunately, users are sensitive of the apps they download so as to keep their resources in check. If your app can’t compete enough with apps Facebook and Whatsapp, it might end up dying out in App stores.

With Service Workers and Manifest JSON files, we can build engaging web app user experience even for offline users. We’re talking notifications, installable, fast, offline usage, complete app-like experience, etc. Now that the support is almost in all browser is the best time to start giving our users fantastic experience as web developers.

About the speaker

Chris is a JavaScript Preacher who’s building the community with developers in developed and under-developed countries. He believes software engineering is the easiest way out of poverty. He’s also an advocate of the Next Billion Users.

Build the Roof First

About the talk

The building metaphor that is so often applied to software development is broken. Why do we need to start with the foundations first? The roof we’re building is virtual, it can float! So why not build it first? Or even better just the part that we need first.

We’re so used to building software from the bottom up that we don’t even realise that it involves an incredible amount of guess work and ultimately results in a lot of hidden waste. In this talk I examine and challenge current thinking about the order in which we build software, thinking which I believe has been perpetuated by the building metaphor we use when we teach new software developers and when we communicate with non-developers in the industry.

About the speaker

Brendon is passionate about writing software, in a sustainable way, that solves real problems. He is an avid TDD’er, loves teaching and spends a lot of his spare time speaking at or running dev focused community events. Lately a lot of his thinking has been around how to be better at writing software with a primary focus on the thought process of the developers themselves.

Project Kerbini - Now with added Explosions

About the talk

Since the dawn of man (And indeed, Kerbalkind), we have looked up at the moon and stars and wondered ... is there cheese out there? Seeing as how modern science has yet to answer this question sufficiently we set out to see for ourselves.

In spaceflight people use physical switches, dials, buttons and readouts to pilot their vessels. In the game Kerbal Space Program you use a mouse and keyboard. In order to get a more authentic experience, we set out to build a KSP Control Board.

As you can see from some of the sample pictures, a few people have managed this before. However most of it is written using C# since that is what the game is written in. Because JavaScript is awesome, we set out to use that instead.

There is a mod for the game called KRPC which allows you to use Google Protocol buffers and WebSockets to communicate with the game remotely. We wrote a node.js module that can be included in any regular app. Using this module, and Johnny-Five we wrote a node.js script that can interface with the Arduino. The Arduino in turn interacts with the various physical switches, buttons, joysticks, sensors and a LCD.

In addition we wrote an auto-pilot script that is capable of doing SpaceX Falcon 9 style return to launch site mission using a script written purely in JavaScript.

The Mk I

The Mk II

About Ryan

Ryan Kotzen is a recovering enterprise developer. Ryan joined Entelect in 2009 fresh out of varsity (UJ) and has been there ever since. He has worked in a wide range of domains including fintech, health, employee and customer loyalty, gamification, event management, and retail. Ryan started his career in .Net and was part of the founding of the start-up Encentivize where he gained a wealth of knowledge about JavaScript and the MEAN stack. As an Engineering coach within Liberty dHub, Ryan has had an opportunity to deliver a mobile app written in React-Native and exercise his automation and DevOps skills, dabbling in Python, Ruby and GO. He has a passion for teaching and coaching others. When not developing software, Ryan likes to spend his time playing Kerbal Space Program and engaging in the Warhammer 40k hobby.

About Jake

After spending some years dabbling and failing in the arts, Jake moved onto studying Electrical Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. Despite the big change in direction, he did well enough to graduate in 2014. By this point he knew he wanted to work with software, and was promptly hired by Entelect where he's been ever since. After spending some time as a .NET developer, Jake started to become interested in JavaScript as more and more of his work required it. Then one day, Ryan (Jake's co-presenter) sent him an image of someone's homemade Kerbal Space Program control board, and said "Hey, we should try something like this, but with JavaScript!". Thus began the work that lead to them presenting this contraption at the JSinSA conference, and now, at DevConf. When not coding, Jake can generally be found looking up at the stars, or playing some space themed computer game.

Neural Networks: A Primer

About the talk

As members of the local technology industry, we are often bombarded with new jargon, new buzzwords, and new concepts from news and developments around the world. Artificial intelligence(AI), machine learning(ML), and neural networks(NN) all fall into that category of buzz words. This talk dives into the concept of neural networks. Neural networks are known as something used in machine learning, but few people understand how they work and the potential power of them. This talk includes how neural networks fit into AI, the historic inspiration, the intuition for how neural networks operate, the mathematical knowledge required for working with neural networks, the use cases for neural networks, and programming tools and frameworks that can assist one in developing machine learning applications using neural networks.

About the speaker

Rishal is currently fulfilling the role of a solutions architect at Entelect. He is involved in ideating, designing and developing solutions for various national and international blue chip clients whilst actively growing thought​ leadership capabilities within the company and tech community. He has a passion for software engineering, digital architecture, mobile development, design thinking methodologies, and artificial intelligence. Rishal founded Prolific Idea in 2015 where innovation is cultivated through research and technology. Prolific Idea has released a collaborative productivity platform, gethivemind.com. Rishal has a keen interest in community involvement and development. He runs the Artificial Intelligence South Africa(AI ZA) monthly hackathons and is an active speaker at user groups and conferences.

Fighting the Previous War (aka: Attacking and Defending in the Era of the Cloud)

About the talk

For years and years, network pen-testers have owned companies and networks with playbooks written in the 90’s. With a good mix of footprinting, scripting and unexpected interdependence, even moderately skilled attackers have been able to reign supreme without ever needing a 0day. How does this change as organizations slip more and more into the cloud? What do rootkits look like and what does lateral movement mean when its between different SaaS products? In 2009 we took an initial stab at answering some of these questions, and now we’re revisiting the topic in light of the huge strides made in cloud services.

We cover a few recent attacks on companies that leveraged cloud services, showing security failures can occur on the boundaries of, rather than solely in, services. We demonstrate easy and novel ways to embed compromise detection capabilities in third party services without requiring support in those services. We show how developers can be attacked with malicious code editor plugins. We tackle the gorilla, Amazon Web Services, revealing a series of attacks that cover reconnaissance, compromise, lateral movement, privilege escalation, persistence and logging disruption. Lastly, we end off describing how to aid compromise detection in cloud services.

About the speaker

Marco Slaviero is the lead researcher and chief dev wrangler at Thinkst. Marco has presented research at security conferences on a range of topics including timing attacks, Python shellcode, sock puppets, honeypots and cloud security. He is rumoured to harbor a personal dislike for figs.

Building Progressive Web Apps with Angular

About the talk

The holy grail of web applications is having them be near-native performance, and to a large degree this has driven the JavaScript revolution. To truly realise that goal we need to embrace native design thinking for our applications, applying it not only to our code but also to our content. Using ideas from Progressive Web Applications and a modern framework such as Angular we can create engaging, fast and available application experiences - the best of both native and web.

This code-oriented talk will show how to practically use select principles of Progressive Web Applications in conjunction with Angular to create fast and compelling web experiences. It will cover the creation of an application shell and go into using service workers for preloading, caching and even offline support.

About the speaker

Mike Geyser is a programmer at BBD in the R&D team, co-organiser of the Jozi.JS meetup group, a frequent technical speaker, and loves the web. He has been hacking on it since Geocities was a thing, and has the keening wail of dialup modem etched into his subconscious. While he is fluent in several ‘golden hammer’ programming languages, he has a long-lived love affair with JavaScript, and cannot see its (many, obvious) flaws. He has worked on lots of interesting enterprise applications, but it is the challenges of the public web that really appeal to him - having spent his formative years building transactional websites. He is always eager to talk about the web platform, but be warned, he is prone to hyperbole.

What is a lightning talk?

Brewing beer using Android Things by Riaan Cornelius

While some home brewers consider automation to somehow make your brewing less “real”, part of the reason I brew is because I get to make stuff (I also happen to like beer).

In this talk I’ll very briefly go through the beer brewing process and explain what requirements I came up with for my project.

Then I’ll give you a very brief introduction into clean architecture before diving into how I used it to make my Android Things project simple, testable and extendable.

Along the way I’ll show you how you can run your IOT project on an emulator to help with debugging as well as testing.

About the speaker

Riaan is Technical Lead who develops mobile apps for Discovery by day and tries to find ridiculously interesting projects to tinker with by night.

His decade of work experience includes setting up an SMS service for USAID in Afghanistan, consulting on a mobile CRM system in Costa Rica and helping out with systems for an SMS campaign during presidential elections in Zambia.

In his spare time he likes to tinker with computer vision, robotics and home automation projects. There has been rumours of an obsession with all things beer related as well. This has led to talks on using Sci-fi interfaces as inspiration, using computer vision to keep physical and electronic scrum boards in sync, getting started with robotics using Javascript and building your own keyboard.

Your job is not to write code by Arjun Khoosal

You may assume that software engineers are hired to write code. But this definition is too narrow to accommodate software engineers who are good at their job. Good in what sense? Well, the only sense that makes sense: good at helping their company succeed. And for a company to succeed, it must solve problems for its users. And so, we have it: good software engineers are good at solving user problems. Slinging code is but one tool to solve these problems. Getting stuck there does not bode well for your users, for your company, and for you.

About the speaker

Arjun loves writing code. So much so that he dropped out of university, to get his fix by founding a startup. That startup became kandua.com - a marketplace for home services that has brought millions of rands to little tradespeople, with investors in 3 countries.

Why shipping pet projects is so important by Simon Stewart

This talk is a continuation of a series of talks I gave several years ago on the “importance of pet projects”. The intention is to encourage experimentation and fun outside of the day-to-day project work without promoting burn out. It will also highlight the potential for exposure - both from a marketing point of view and career.

The idea is not to push people to overwork outside of normal office hours, but instead to show the audience that we all have a fantastic skill and can use that to have fun with exposure being a nice potential side effect.

About the speaker

Organizer of the JavaScript in South Africa conference; founder of Broken Keyboards Software and CodeSkills.

A WiFi-controlled Arduino-powered hand-held potato cannon

About the talk

When you were a kid they called you a scoundrel. But it’s 2017, and technology has progressed far enough that you can be called a tinkerer when you blow stuff up, as long as it has WiFi! We’re going to build a small potato cannon, and control it from a mobile phone, because…science!

About the speaker

Matt Cavanagh is a developer from Durban who hates writing bio’s in third person. He started a company called roguecode making Windows apps, but then decided being poor was a better idea so went into game development. He’s done talks at conferences like DevConf, and TechEd (when Microsoft still knew SA existed).

Augment your reality.

About the talk

Deep Learning has the ability to disrupt and to disrupt fast. The democratization of AI has meant that algorithms and tools are mature enough to make a difference in almost any industry. The uptake of AI to augment our world will depend on the ability to interact with AI services in a familiar way. The recent agreement between Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to integrate Alexa as a service in Cortana, and to integrate Cortana as a service in Alexa is a clear indication that the value is not in the assistant itself, but rather in the ability to connect services with people. I will use the demo to show you an effortless way to interact with a Computer Vision System that is aware of its surroundings using the Google Home Assistant.

I will use the demo to show you a natural way to interact with a Computer Vision System that is aware of its surroundings using the Google Home Assistant.

About the speaker

Building for the bad guys

About the talk

This is a feature presentation starring you the protagonist and the guy in the basement on the chair drinking Redbull and DDoSing your website.

Security has to always be a consideration when building applications. This talk aims to build that constant reminder that early in your application is the best time to think about security.

We will consider some commonly known exploits and how you can safeguard yourself and also some less common ones. We will consider some complex ones and how you may secure yourself.

This talk is for everyone who uses the web and has been designed to remove most complex terms.

About the speaker

Neo Ighodaro is the CTO at Hotels.ng. He is also an Ambassador at Auth0 and the organiser of LaravelNigeria meetup. He is a full-stack software developer with over 12 years of experience.

Microservices suck at the UI - UI Composition techniques to make this better

About the talk

As developers we spend a lot of time structuring our systems just right. We make sure we select the right patterns, use the right combination of acronyms (CQRS + DDD + ES), and do all the right devops so that we can scale up/out/elastically. This adherence to best practices seems to fall apart at the front end though. We have separation on the back end, but on the front end this all needs to come together. How do we stop it from turning into a mess of spaghetti code? How do we prevent simple actions from triggering hundreds of web requests? Join William as he builds a .NET Core Composite UI from scratch.

About the speaker

A professional geek, William works for Particular Software writing amazing software like NServiceBus. Passionate about the web and security, he is engaged in a sordid love affair with JavaScript, and spends most of his free time trying to convince others of it’s beauty and elegance.

When not behind his laptop hacking away, this amateur beer enthusiast can often be found playing boardgames or drinking cold-brew coffee.

Cultivating a Critical Thinking Mindset

About the talk

In this talk, we will introduce critical thinking; what is it and why it’s a critical tool for us as architects and deliverers of solutions? How can we add this to our daily tool box in order to improve our thinking in everyday situations? We will explore some practical steps to help us ask better questions, internalize feedback and make more sound judgements. How do our biases block our understanding , and how do we unlearn these in order to gain clarity of situations? We will also cover logical fallacies and unpack the key elements of an argument and tools that can help us enhance our arguments to optimize for better understanding and results.

About the speaker

With over 15 years of working in the delivery, testing and maintenance of systems, Oz seeks to identify and solve the right problems, while realising value. Oz loves to share experiences and is an advocate for collaboration in teams and organisations. He currently works as a Tester Coach at House of Test South Africa and is a co-organiser of the Joburg Software Testers meetup. He is active in building a community of super testers. A life learner and explorer; he believes thinking is his strongest skill in his bag of many varied tricks. Oz became an accidental runner who enjoys long runs and has completed the Comrades marathon.

Why machine learning is going to be needed in every aspect of application development.

About the talk

The nature of applications is critical to what we want them to do - they can provide meaningful and even critical advantage to a business – they can connect people that were unable to connect with each other before – or provide a new and engaging way to interact with customers. In a fair number of online businesses their ability to interpret and understand what customer are doing and how they are using these services, all comes from a deep understanding and application of insights gained from the data that is gather. This ability and understanding is no longer the domain of Facebook and Amazons but is a necessity for all business to – understand customers better, then be able to respond appropriately and ultimately assist customers in being able to take the best advantage of what value the business has to offer. This all has to happen at a rate and scale beyond human intervention. Machine learning has the promise and already proves to provide a means of addressing the insights and aids in responding to customer as and when they engage. The ability to produce effective functionally that is of value goes beyond automation and integration -it requires meaningful understanding and almost instant response to follow the flow of behaviour and usage. It requires functional response that assists humans using these applications.

About the speaker

I have been involved with custom application development in the Microsoft environment for over 20 years. I helped start a company called Shandon in 2000 in the middle of the IT dry spell which followed Y2K. The motivation for starting the business was to take advantage of the immerging opportunities that the Internet was providing businesses, by meaningfully interacting and transacting with customers. We learnt a lot very quickly and had our fair share of solutions end up on the ash heap. Learning from our mistakes was as important as the projects that succeeded. We have been very fortunate to have worked on projects in a number of industries from property management, banking, credit bureaus to name a few. The pinnacle of our efforts has been the opportunity to be part of an online solution that has affected how people submit and pay their taxes in South Africa.

The physical web and beyond

About the talk

Experience the excitement of the physical web with me and BB-8, the Star Wars app enabled droid. This little robot comes with an Android and iOS app so that you can control it with your phone. However, we should not just settle for an app provided by others when we have the knowledge and tools to create our own. The idea of the physical web has created a disturbance in the force. With just a simple web page, we can now connect to “smart” devices using technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi. The ability to do this, will soon be a standard in all new operating systems and browsers. This means that we will no longer be limited by our phone or tablet or the version of an operating system we are running. Join me and BB-8 as we explore all the opportunities that the physical web can provide for this little droid. We will build a website, deploy it and control our little droid. With only a smart device connected to the internet you, the audience, will be able to find the droid you are looking for.

About the speaker

Gergana is a software developer based in Johannesburg and works with the R&D team at BBD. She has been working in the software development field for about seven years on various projects involving .NET, JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS, MeteorJS and more recently Angular. Front end development has always been what she enjoys most and she is also interested in UX and design. She loves Star Wars, and because of that spends a lot of time hacking her BB-8 droid as well as exploring other IoT concepts and ideas.

Make better music with Rust, WebAssembly, and some funky pointers

About the talk

Hi, I’m Justin, and I play the trumpet. I’m a software engineer, bad musician, and chronic yak shaver, so when I discovered that my intonation was bad while playing the trumpet the obvious solution was to start programming. The idea was to have an application listen to me playing and give feedback on my pitch. This application is written in my current favourite programming language, Rust, and so my Rusty Microphone project was started.

Now that I have something that works, I’m looking at ways to make my application available to the world, especially to musicians. Musicians are not widely known for their ability to clone a git repository, assemble the necessary collection of libraries and compilers on their computer, and compile things, so I went looking for distribution methods.

As someone who spends his working hours building web applications, I’ve seen many cases of web applications that have been packaged as if they’re a smartphone or desktop application. What if I tried the reverse, and packaged my desktop application for the web? With Rust’s support for WebAssembly, this should be easy, right?

This is the story of me taking my Rust application and figuring out how to embed it in my website.

About the speaker

Justin is a software engineer, working on both sides of the Internet in the web development stack. This has resulted in a considerable amount of JavaScript. In his spare time, he likes to tinker with lower level languages and concepts, which has lead to his current fascination with Rust.

Wherever possible, Justin prefers to use free and open source software. He also tries to give back to these amazing online ecosystems by writing about what he's up on his blog, including code examples with open source licences for others to use and learn from.

His pug is not currently plotting world domination. Everything is fine.

Cultivating a Critical Thinking Mindset

About the talk

In this talk, we will introduce critical thinking; what is it and why it’s a critical tool for us as architects and deliverers of solutions? How can we add this to our daily tool box in order to improve our thinking in everyday situations? We will explore some practical steps to help us ask better questions, internalize feedback and make more sound judgements. How do our biases block our understanding , and how do we unlearn these in order to gain clarity of situations? We will also cover logical fallacies and unpack the key elements of an argument and tools that can help us enhance our arguments to optimize for better understanding and results.

About the speaker

With over 15 years of working in the delivery, testing and maintenance of systems, Oz seeks to identify and solve the right problems, while realising value. Oz loves to share experiences and is an advocate for collaboration in teams and organisations. He currently works as a Tester Coach at House of Test South Africa and is a co-organiser of the Joburg Software Testers meetup. He is active in building a community of super testers. A life learner and explorer; he believes thinking is his strongest skill in his bag of many varied tricks. Oz became an accidental runner who enjoys long runs and has completed the Comrades marathon.

Teams and Atlassian - lessons learnt - Autonomy vs Visibility

About the talk

In the fast paced world of Agile, teams are wanting more autonomy than ever before. A walk through using JIRA coupled with lesson's learnt will paint a picture that following certain processes can provide the autonomy teams crave as well as the visibility and accountability management look for. Basic features in a tool like this will enable teams to become more productive than ever before.

About the speaker

My motto is: "find what you love doing and you'll never work a day in your life" and true to my motto I have found my love. I am an improvement ambassador. I am an agile evangelist, I have faith in the methodology because I live and breathe it. No task is too large or complex for me. I am analytical, meticulous, driven and will always rise to any challenge. Currently I am the Principal Atlassian Consultant for Obsidian Systems, managing a team of great Atlassian Consultants and have been living my dream of "love what you do" for the last three years. Prior to this, I was a Development Operations Manager for various companies for approximately 6 years. I live, breathe, walk and talk Agile and Atlassian. I am a certified Scrum Master and Agile Practitioner and love nothing more than to step into companies and assist them in their Agile journey. I am passionate about breaking down silos that companies put up over time. I am passionate about bringing together developers, IT Ops and management so that all processes are streamlined to better work together to get features out faster. I do not believe there is only one way to fix a solution, it all depends on what you find when you step into a company's dynamics, but there are tools out there that are geared for the DevOps journey. It is not always a cookie cutter in the making, and often times there are a lot of tears, but when they all buy into the dream, that's when magic happens...

Expanding Borders: How to grow beyond just the next popular tech stack.

About the talk

The tech landscape is changing faster than ever, and this trend is only accelerating. How do technical people grow when the world is changing faster than you can finish your next cup of coffee? How does one keep up? What should you learn? Are there things we can focus our learning efforts on besides just the next tech flavour of the month? This talk will explore some areas of learning that technical people might not intentionally consider. These areas focus on higher-level concerns, with slower rates of change, which can help technical people develop into more well-rounded individuals.

About the speaker

Janco is a software craftsman on a lifelong journey of understanding the fundamental nature of software development. He spends most of his time building stuff he hopes will add value to someone’s life, while coaching, mentoring and journeying with fellow software craftspeople.

Secrets of successful mentoring

About the talk

The idea of mentorship is strongest within the software craft community, which values the idea of apprenticeship. But the concepts within the apprenticeship model are valuable to all technical mentors, not just those who hire apprentices. Knowing how to give feedback, having a set of coding exercises, regular planning and estimating are all invaluable skills. In this talk I’ll look at these and other ideas for how to ensure you give your mentees the best chance of success.

About the speaker

Daniel is a software consultant based in London. He's a member of the software craft community and a founder and organizer of Queer Code London. Originally from Ireland, he's been programming computers from a very young age. He started his professional programming career at an enterprise software vendor. Later on he worked in the financial sector before joining 8th Light as a consultant. In addition to leading development teams, he's an agile coach and mentor.

Daniel's focus is on building high-quality software. He's big on TDD and pair programming, and as a generalist he's worked professionally with C++, C#, Java, Ruby and JavaScript, although these days he's a Clojure enthusiast. Coding aside, his passion is on nurturing the technical growth of others around him.

Neural Networks: A Primer

About the talk

As members of the local technology industry, we are often bombarded with new jargon, new buzzwords, and new concepts from news and developments around the world. Artificial intelligence(AI), machine learning(ML), and neural networks(NN) all fall into that category of buzz words. This talk dives into the concept of neural networks. Neural networks are known as something used in machine learning, but few people understand how they work and the potential power of them. This talk includes how neural networks fit into AI, the historic inspiration, the intuition for how neural networks operate, the mathematical knowledge required for working with neural networks, the use cases for neural networks, and programming tools and frameworks that can assist one in developing machine learning applications using neural networks.

About the speaker

Rishal is currently fulfilling the role of a solutions architect at Entelect. He is involved in ideating, designing and developing solutions for various national and international blue chip clients whilst actively growing thought​ leadership capabilities within the company and tech community. He has a passion for software engineering, digital architecture, mobile development, design thinking methodologies, and artificial intelligence. Rishal founded Prolific Idea in 2015 where innovation is cultivated through research and technology. Prolific Idea has released a collaborative productivity platform, gethivemind.com. Rishal has a keen interest in community involvement and development. He runs the Artificial Intelligence South Africa(AI ZA) monthly hackathons and is an active speaker at user groups and conferences.

Continuously build, test, release, and monitor apps for every platform

About the talk

End-to-end mobile DevOps story that starts by connecting to GitHub, Bitbucket, or VSTS and build your app in the cloud on every commit. Automatically run UI tests on real 2700+ devices. Release to testers and stores. Continue to monitor your production app performance through analytics and crash reporting.

About the speaker

Mohamed has worked in diversified roles ranging from marketing to software engineering for more than 11 years, with 8+ of those being a digital transformation advocate for enterprise mobility, cloud and business intelligence. He’s a Global Black Belt Mobile App Innovation Architect at Microsoft with focus on driving business transformation for customers on advanced Azure technology such as IoT, AI and cloud application development, applied to mobile. He is working closely with customers/partners, providing the thought leadership, guidance, and expertise needed to deliver successful mobile projects.

Micro frontends – a micro services model for frontend development

About the talk

The micro-services models has changed how we think about developing application services. By defining smaller clear service boundaries it makes it easier to build, test, deploy and isolate failures. Using a similar approach, this session shares how you can carry the same benefits into frontend development. Within a large application, breaking up a frontend monolith into micro frontends allows teams to form around solving and owning a particular feature. Teams are cross-functional across backend and frontend and able to operate independently of each other. They can use different languages and typically own the continuous delivery and ongoing maintenance of the feature in production. Micro frontend work side-by-side or together inside the same html page wrapper leading to a cohesive end-user experience.

About the speaker

Donovan is a senior engineer at Allan Gray. With over 16 years’ experience in building and leading start-up teams, the last 2 have been helping digital and tech transformation in financial services. A battle-tested JavaScript veteran having written everything from hand-crafted js through Handelbars, Angular, Ember and React. He is a passionate about the future of the web, software as a craft and building products that last.

Bots, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive learning

About the talk

Bots, AI and Cognitive learning is going to change the way we life, how we think and how we work. It will also change how we code and how we analyse data. Automated and driverless vehicles are one example of software bots and mechanical robotics interacting. Deep learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) will make it possible to ask virtual bot assistants questions in a natural way and get meaningful answers. Analyzing huge amounts of text, social media posts to understand sentiment and thought process will be a huge advantage to business and even government. Face-recognition and photo-analysis at the hands of the populous makes searching and analyzing digital data easier smarter and more accurate. Lear how we can make use of Bot Frameworks, AI Frameworks and Cognitive Frameworks that are available today to achieve what we might have thought previously impossible or event at the least out of our reach.

About the speaker

I’ve been in the IT and Development game since the 1980’s. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K ram. I’ve developed code in more than 16 different languages and scripts. I have a passion for software development, designing and delivering the right software in time with as little defects as possible. Always sought to look at the most cutting edge of technology. From the very beginning, modifying an IBM Brother XT PC into the fastest PC around. I’ve seen tech come and go and I’ve forgotten somethings others have not yet event learnt. I am a manager and Senior Developer at IQ Business.

Kotlin for all the Droids

About the talk

This talk will be around Kotlin being a first class language for Android. How it makes Android code much cleaner, better to maintain and introduces many new concepts that Android developers could not do in Java. This talk will be showing Android developers how to take their code to the next level.

About the speaker

P-J, who is based in Johannesburg, is a Mobile developer that develops both Android and iOS apps. Everyone knows that he enjoys trying new and different technologies and being an explorer in the technology world. On a daily basis he works on a banking app, but also maintains some open source projects, apps and blogs about development technologies on Medium.

Software Developers are from Mars; Testers are from Venus

About the talk

Once upon a time Martians and Venusians met, started working in agile software development teams together, and had happy relationships because they respected and accepted their differences. Then they came to Earth and amnesia set in. (They forgot that they were from different planets.) Based on years of successful counselling of software developers and testers, Software Developers Are from Mars; Testers are from Venus has helped one team (somewhere) transform their relationships. Now viewed as a tongue-in-cheek talk on modern software development, this phenomenal discussion has helped software developers and testers realise how different they are and how to communicate their needs in such a way that conflict doesn't occur and relationships are given a chance to grow.

About the speaker

I'm the head of SQA Architecture and R&D at DVT and love seeing screens flickering away with automation scripts. Weekends are spent on my extreme makeover DIY house project. I am a dreamer with my head in the clouds most of the time, and I absolutely love software testing!

Building Helm charts from the ground up: An introduction to Kubernetes

About the talk

Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for container orchestration today. However beginner-level educational content to learn Kubernetes today is still focused on cluster management through the Kubernetes CLI tool. This can make it harder for novices to visualize the relationship between the commands they’re issuing and what’s happening in the cluster. Incrementally building a Helm Chart provides an easier, more intuitive, and more visual way of learning the key concepts of Kubernetes, while addressing how to manage package releases upfront.

This talk will cover how to incrementally build a Helm Chart for NGINX, and along the way, will cover key Kubernetes concepts. Content will include as many diagrams and visuals as possible to accompany these concepts, and include how to deploy the new NGINX chart from a Kubernetes cluster.

About the speaker

Amy Chen is a software engineer at her Heptio. She is passionate about open source, containers, orchestration tools, Go, and salsa dancing.

In her free time, Amy runs a youtube channel called Amy Codes where she talks about technical and non-technical aspects of being a software engineer. (https://www.youtube.com/AmyCodes). She aims to make the container and infrastructure industry more accessible by sharing her learning process and resources used through her youtube channel.

You can follow her internet shenanigans here: https://www.youtube.com/AmyCodes https://twitter.com/TheAmyCode https://medium.com/@amy https://github.com/amy https://www.instagram.com/theamycode/

Android Architecture Components: A testable approach to Android Development

About the talk

Developing Android Apps has notoriously been a difficult task. Previously, Google refrained from giving advice as to how you should go about architecting your Android applications and it has been “left it up to the reader” to decide how. This lead to apps having a lot of bloat in their activities and being really difficult to test. This has now changed since Google I/O 2017 where the new Android Architecture components were introduced. The libraries aim to make developing and maintaining your Android apps a lot easier. In this presentation, Rebecca will present the components and dive into detail around the different types of tests you should write (and where) for your newly architected Android application.

About the speaker

Rebecca Franks the Android Engineering Lead at DVT. She has over 5 years experience in developing Android applications. In March 2016, she was awarded with the status of Google Developer Expert for Android. In her spare time, she works with Book Dash – a Non Profit Organisation – developing an Android app to showcase their free children’s books. She enjoys public speaking and frequently speaks at conferences and local meetups. Her blog has been featured multiple times in Android Weekly . In June 2016, She was selected as part of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans. She has spoken internationally in Switzerland, United States and Kenya and Poland.

Building for the bad guys

About the talk

This is a feature presentation starring you the protagonist and the guy in the basement on the chair drinking Redbull and DDoSing your website.

Security has to always be a consideration when building applications. This talk aims to build that constant reminder that early in your application is the best time to think about security.

We will consider some commonly known exploits and how you can safeguard yourself and also some less common ones. We will consider some complex ones and how you may secure yourself.

This talk is for everyone who uses the web and has been designed to remove most complex terms.

About the speaker

Neo Ighodaro is the CTO at Hotels.ng. He is also an Ambassador at Auth0 and the organiser of LaravelNigeria meetup. He is a full-stack software developer with over 12 years of experience.

Mining your log files made simple - A Unified Logging Solution

About the talk

Log files hold a vault of useful information for operations as well as business.

Processing your log files could reveal a host of useful information.

• Who uses that brand new web solution you have just deployed?
• Which country are they in?
• What device are they using?
• When your host is under load, what else is happening in the environment?
• That pesky, intermittent error is back! How do you find it?
• Our build server is slow, why?
• Processing application and server log files used to be such a chore. Getting a unified view of all logs required wizard-like skills! But over the past few years simple and easy solutions have emerged. Best of all, they’re free. That’s right, they’re all open source!

Join me for a hands-on presentation, where we’ll pull some useful open source Docker containers and set to work making them weave some magic on our log files.

We’ll cover some Docker Compose basics to get you started with a simple ELK stack (Elastic Search, Log Stash and Kibana), configure some endpoints and setup log shipping (for Linux and Windows) so that we can process log files.

Once we’re processing logs, we’ll look at ways to transform and embellish our log data to add IT operational, as well as business value.

Using our transformed data, we’ll also cover visualising the data using Kibana.

To close out we’ll also consider alternative technologies such as Prometheus and Grafana, and discuss the pros and cons of the different technologies.

Mining log files has never been so simple.

Join me to see how easy it is to get started.

About the speaker

Chris is a software architect with 20+ years’ experience, committed to evolutionary and constant learning, often tinkering with new tools, technologies, techniques and architectures. He is passionate about quality software and great architecture, while forging the growth of this generation of software developers. Chris enjoys sharing his learnings, often accompanied by good beer. Chris can be found either overseeing the architecture at Kaleidocode, mentoring on the Kaleidocode apprenticeship program, or working hands on with his team.

The physical web and beyond

About the talk

Experience the excitement of the physical web with me and BB-8, the Star Wars app enabled droid. This little robot comes with an Android and iOS app so that you can control it with your phone. However, we should not just settle for an app provided by others when we have the knowledge and tools to create our own. The idea of the physical web has created a disturbance in the force. With just a simple web page, we can now connect to “smart” devices using technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi. The ability to do this, will soon be a standard in all new operating systems and browsers. This means that we will no longer be limited by our phone or tablet or the version of an operating system we are running. Join me and BB-8 as we explore all the opportunities that the physical web can provide for this little droid. We will build a website, deploy it and control our little droid. With only a smart device connected to the internet you, the audience, will be able to find the droid you are looking for.

About the speaker

Gergana is a software developer based in Johannesburg and works with the R&D team at BBD. She has been working in the software development field for about seven years on various projects involving .NET, JavaScript, jQuery, AngularJS, MeteorJS and more recently Angular. Front end development has always been what she enjoys most and she is also interested in UX and design. She loves Star Wars, and because of that spends a lot of time hacking her BB-8 droid as well as exploring other IoT concepts and ideas.

Fighting the Previous War (aka: Attacking and Defending in the Era of the Cloud)

About the talk

For years and years, network pen-testers have owned companies and networks with playbooks written in the 90’s. With a good mix of footprinting, scripting and unexpected interdependence, even moderately skilled attackers have been able to reign supreme without ever needing a 0day. How does this change as organizations slip more and more into the cloud? What do rootkits look like and what does lateral movement mean when its between different SaaS products? In 2009 we took an initial stab at answering some of these questions, and now we’re revisiting the topic in light of the huge strides made in cloud services.

We cover a few recent attacks on companies that leveraged cloud services, showing security failures can occur on the boundaries of, rather than solely in, services. We demonstrate easy and novel ways to embed compromise detection capabilities in third party services without requiring support in those services. We show how developers can be attacked with malicious code editor plugins. We tackle the gorilla, Amazon Web Services, revealing a series of attacks that cover reconnaissance, compromise, lateral movement, privilege escalation, persistence and logging disruption. Lastly, we end off describing how to aid compromise detection in cloud services.

About the speaker

Marco Slaviero is the lead researcher and chief dev wrangler at Thinkst. Marco has presented research at security conferences on a range of topics including timing attacks, Python shellcode, sock puppets, honeypots and cloud security. He is rumoured to harbor a personal dislike for figs.

JAMStack aka Serverless

About the talk

The JAMStack is a new way to approach creating a website or web application. In the past if you wanted to get something online, you’d have to spin up a server that was always online. If you wanted to keep costs down that server would have to be small, but that meant you couldn’t handle large traffic. If you wanted to scale cost-effectively, that meant you’d have to use someone else’s platform, which meant you lost some control. JAMStack allows you to create full websites that are fully delivered via CDN, but without losing functionality.

I’ve used JAMStack to create a personal blog, a corporate publishing platform, landing pages and product MVPs. The JAMStack is a very flexible tool that allows you to get your content in front of people, easily. Youre site consists made up entirely of static resources, that can be delivered through a CDN. If you need more processing, you can then offload those to ‘hosted functions’ like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or the like.

In this talk I’ll walk through the details of the JAMStack, creation of a site, how to deploy one and building in features like search and more complex functionality.

About the speaker

Tim Lewis is a full stack developer and a Team Lead at Entelect. Professionally, he's worked in risk management and fraud prevention, the health sector, lectured web design and been a web freelancer. In his free time, he is a UI/UX enthusiast and keeps a keen eye on cyber security. When offline, he is involved in a couple of charities related child protection and education.

Building Progressive Web Apps with Angular

About the talk

The holy grail of web applications is having them be near-native performance, and to a large degree this has driven the JavaScript revolution. To truly realise that goal we need to embrace native design thinking for our applications, applying it not only to our code but also to our content. Using ideas from Progressive Web Applications and a modern framework such as Angular we can create engaging, fast and available application experiences - the best of both native and web.

This code-oriented talk will show how to practically use select principles of Progressive Web Applications in conjunction with Angular to create fast and compelling web experiences. It will cover the creation of an application shell and go into using service workers for preloading, caching and even offline support.

About the speaker

Mike Geyser is a programmer at BBD in the R&D team, co-organiser of the Jozi.JS meetup group, a frequent technical speaker, and loves the web. He has been hacking on it since Geocities was a thing, and has the keening wail of dialup modem etched into his subconscious. While he is fluent in several ‘golden hammer’ programming languages, he has a long-lived love affair with JavaScript, and cannot see its (many, obvious) flaws. He has worked on lots of interesting enterprise applications, but it is the challenges of the public web that really appeal to him - having spent his formative years building transactional websites. He is always eager to talk about the web platform, but be warned, he is prone to hyperbole.

Project Kerbini - Now with added Explosions

About the talk

Since the dawn of man (And indeed, Kerbalkind), we have looked up at the moon and stars and wondered ... is there cheese out there? Seeing as how modern science has yet to answer this question sufficiently we set out to see for ourselves.

In spaceflight people use physical switches, dials, buttons and readouts to pilot their vessels. In the game Kerbal Space Program you use a mouse and keyboard. In order to get a more authentic experience, we set out to build a KSP Control Board.

As you can see from some of the sample pictures, a few people have managed this before. However most of it is written using C# since that is what the game is written in. Because JavaScript is awesome, we set out to use that instead.

There is a mod for the game called KRPC which allows you to use Google Protocol buffers and WebSockets to communicate with the game remotely. We wrote a node.js module that can be included in any regular app. Using this module, and Johnny-Five we wrote a node.js script that can interface with the Arduino. The Arduino in turn interacts with the various physical switches, buttons, joysticks, sensors and a LCD.

In addition we wrote an auto-pilot script that is capable of doing SpaceX Falcon 9 style return to launch site mission using a script written purely in JavaScript.

The Mk I

The Mk II

About Ryan

Ryan Kotzen is a recovering enterprise developer. Ryan joined Entelect in 2009 fresh out of varsity (UJ) and has been there ever since. He has worked in a wide range of domains including fintech, health, employee and customer loyalty, gamification, event management, and retail. Ryan started his career in .Net and was part of the founding of the start-up Encentivize where he gained a wealth of knowledge about JavaScript and the MEAN stack. As an Engineering coach within Liberty dHub, Ryan has had an opportunity to deliver a mobile app written in React-Native and exercise his automation and DevOps skills, dabbling in Python, Ruby and GO. He has a passion for teaching and coaching others. When not developing software, Ryan likes to spend his time playing Kerbal Space Program and engaging in the Warhammer 40k hobby.

About Jake

After spending some years dabbling and failing in the arts, Jake moved onto studying Electrical Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. Despite the big change in direction, he did well enough to graduate in 2014. By this point he knew he wanted to work with software, and was promptly hired by Entelect where he's been ever since. After spending some time as a .NET developer, Jake started to become interested in JavaScript as more and more of his work required it. Then one day, Ryan (Jake's co-presenter) sent him an image of someone's homemade Kerbal Space Program control board, and said "Hey, we should try something like this, but with JavaScript!". Thus began the work that lead to them presenting this contraption at the JSinSA conference, and now, at DevConf. When not coding, Jake can generally be found looking up at the stars, or playing some space themed computer game.

How we moved 65,000 Microsofties to DevOps with Visual Studio Team Services

About the talk

How do you migrate over 65,000 of the most demanding software engineers from infrastructure built up over decades of high-intensity work into a common engineering system based on modern software development technologies and best practices? This is exactly the challenge faced by Microsoft as they moved to their One Engineering system. Come and hear about how they did it and the lessons they learned along the way.

About the speaker

Willy is a program manager with the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) group. He’s responsible for the ALM | DevOps Ranger community, which provides professional guidance and gap-filling solutions to the developer community. Go directly to him if you need help with missing guidance or features for VSTS. Since the mid-’80s, He’s been striving for simplicity and maintainability in software engineering. Reach him on Twitter at @wpschaub, or the aka.ms/vsarblog, aka.ms/willysblog blogs.

Microservices suck at the UI - UI Composition techniques to make this better

About the talk

As developers we spend a lot of time structuring our systems just right. We make sure we select the right patterns, use the right combination of acronyms (CQRS + DDD + ES), and do all the right devops so that we can scale up/out/elastically. This adherence to best practices seems to fall apart at the front end though. We have separation on the back end, but on the front end this all needs to come together. How do we stop it from turning into a mess of spaghetti code? How do we prevent simple actions from triggering hundreds of web requests? Join William as he builds a .NET Core Composite UI from scratch.

About the speaker

A professional geek, William works for Particular Software writing amazing software like NServiceBus. Passionate about the web and security, he is engaged in a sordid love affair with JavaScript, and spends most of his free time trying to convince others of it’s beauty and elegance.

When not behind his laptop hacking away, this amateur beer enthusiast can often be found playing boardgames or drinking cold-brew coffee.

What is your value as a software developer to an employer?

So you are technical genius and you have the software community commits and contributions to prove it. Therefore your value to an employer is obvious...you should earn a fortune! Does this assumption hold true for the current and future trend in business? What does business value, historically, now and most likely in the future? My talk explains why you are not a resource or an asset. You are an investment. This talk explains what is needed from you and from the business to unlock the value of the investment in you and your career.

I am the CEO of Chillisoft. I have worked in the software development industry for 18 years, as a consultant, and owner of two software development companies. During the course of my career, I have studied and worked with software developers and senior managers. I am therefore in a unique position of understanding how soft issues, shape business, learning and sustainability of business and a career in the software industry.I have presented and spoken at various engagements, as a guest speaker or a presenter. These engagements have been to students, software developers, managers, senior decision makers from government, corporate and the private sector.

Agile Database Techniques – Refactoring to keep your database current

Do you have dark places in your database where only the knowledgable few fear to tread? Shouldn’t you try to change this?For more than a decade any team I have worked with has treated the database as code. We have also treated the database as a living object that changes its structure with every iteration of the code. This practice takes discipline but the payoff is well worth it.In my daily job as a consultant, I am often frustrated to find many databases in a state of uncertainty. Not many teams embrace the concept of Agile Database Design, and those that do, struggle to get it right. Databases aren’t treated as first class citizens and definitely not as code. This results in databases quickly losing consistency with the code and over time becoming unmanageable behemoths.In this talk I discuss why treating your database as a first class citizen is important.I cover the techniques we have used over the past decade to make sure we treat the database as code, as well as the techniques we implement to manage ve...

Chris Tite is a director and co-founder of Kaleidocode, a software consultancy based in Durban.Chris has over twenty years of software development experience, spanning multiple countries, technologies and industries as diverse as banking, farming, health services, call centres and financial services.Currently Chris can be found either overseeing the architecture of client solutions at Kaleidocode, actively contributing code to the solutions, or working with teams on new ways to approach technology, skills building and productivity.Chris is also involved in Kaleidocode’s mentoring programme, as well as giving talks around the country through his inStruct Series, or through the Durban Agile User Group, where he is well known for sharing his love of craft beer with active contributors during his talks. Chris has also presented at both the Johannesberg and Pretoria Developer User Group, and presented at last years DevConf.

Real World Mobile DevOps

Tools and Tactics for building, testing and deploying mobile solutions. Hear from one of the industry’s best how you can set your Mobile XPlat Development and DevOps strategy in motion

About Brent: I am a passionate technologist who enjoys providing leading-edge Information Technology services to medium and enterprise clients in a wide variety of sectors including retail, public, financial, media and communications, energy and the professional services industry. I create value by bridging the gap between business and technology through a focus on strategy; people, processes, information and communication technology. I am skilled in a range of offerings extending from Microsoft Dynamics implementations with customization to bespoke software solution offerings using Visual Studio, .Net Framework, SharePoint Portal Server, BizTalk Server and Microsoft Azure. Office 365 Development, Cognitive Services, IOT and Bots I pendulum between delivering software solutions and mentoring and coaching partners, customers and ISV's to do the same. About Dave: Dave is the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Tangent Solutions. Prior to starting Tangent Solutions in 2010, Dave gained wide exposure into the Information Technology consulting industry in Johannesburg whilst working for a number of Gold Microsoft Partners and Blue Chip corporates including amongst others, the JSE, Investec, Standard Bank, Sun International and Liberty Life. Tangent focuses on delivering innovation and mobile and web applications that combine sexy UI and UX with high quality engineering. Tangent is a strong proponent of build automation and DevOps and have helped a number of enterprises implement digital transformation and reap the benefits thereof, allowing for quicker time to market, reduced build costs and improved quality. In the Digital age, good enough is not good enough. Excellence is the only currency.

Overview of Chef

"An introductory overview of ChefChef is a policy management tool which allows for the automation of server deployment. I have been working with chef for over 18 months and would like to share some of my experiences. This talk is for those who would like to know about what Chef is and what it can do, and how to use it.• What Chef is and what to use it for• The Chef Development Kit• Your first cookbook• Bootstrapping a node• Quick overview of chef server features."

I work as a Senior Developer at Dariel and started working in software over 10 years ago.I studied Electrical Engineering and am in the process of completing my Masters in Software Engineering. I have experience in a wide range of technologies including C# and .Net, Ruby, Chef, JavaScript, Angular and Knockout.I am currently based at a bank working with a team to provide a strategic project with a fully automated development pipeline using Chef, Ruby and Angular2.I run an internal training programme at work, was a presenter at Tech-Ed 2013, and have given a lecture on Software Security to 3rd year Engineering Students.

Why Agile teams perform better and how it links to behaviour psychology/motivation

How is it possible that a seemingly highly skilled team struggle to meet business deadlines whilst a team of average skilled professionals consistently deliver value to their client? Do the skills of the team members have any outcome on the delivery of the team? Of course they do, but without the secret sauce even the best team will fail. The uncomfortable truth is that human beings do not do ANYTHING unless they are sufficiently motivated to do so, despite what they may say they will do. Unfortunately, in most organisations, people learn to say what their managers want to hear and then still proceed to do the opposite. Why do people do this? In this talk we will explore how an Agile approach makes average teams become great teams through the injection of one vital ingredient: motivation. We will explore how an Agile approach gets people in all kinds of industries (not only developers!) become motivated to be successful without them even realizing it. The key principles of Agile that, probably coincidently, addresses the fundamentals of human motivation, will be uncovered.

Jaco heads DVT, a team of 600 staff that specialises in Agile software development, testing and related services for clients in South Africa and the United Kingdom. He has more than 20 years IT experience in the field of software development and has been involved in the architecture, design and construction of various size software development projects, some of which were in the utilities, financial and insurance industries. Jaco holds a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Johannesburg and has focused his Ph.D. research on object oriented software design and information security.

Batman tackles Functional JavaScript with Elm

This talk will be an introduction to the Elm language (http://elm-lang.org/docs) with live examples featuring the Dark Knight himself (and maybe other super heroes if time allows).Elm is a delightfully simple to learn typed functional programming language which compiles down to HTML, CSS and JavaScript and runs in the browser.Elm is also an opinionated framework for writing simple and elegant single page applications with a clear separation between models, views and updates. Think of it as React + Redux but put together in a single, easy to use framework that checks (well compiles) your code to protect you from all those funny JavaScript errors at runtime. Disclaimer: I am not using Elm in any serious capacity, just currently learning about it. I do however have JavaScript apps running in production.

I am a software engineer / DevOps guy currently building and deploying software systems used in TV production (think BBC, Sky, etc, etc).I am self employed and I work from home in Johannesburg but with media companies based in the UK and the US.I've given many presentations on various topics (Scala, configuration management with Ansible). I also presented at DevConf 2015 on the topic of property-based testing.

Database performance monitoring for developers

The database is slow! Or is it? How do you know it’s the database that’s slow?This session will show how, as a developer, you can get some insights into exactly what queries your application is running against that database and precisely how slow (or not) the database queries really are.

I'm a tech lead at Entelect Software. I've presented at database conferences locally, in Europe and in the USA

Is functional programming just a fad?

So, is this functional programming thing just a fad, starting to have its 15 minutes of fame? Are there any benefits to learning a functional programming language? Or to switching your development over to a functional language? In this talk, Rachel will discuss several of the considerations and use cases that helped Jet.com (and a few other companies) decide whether to consider, or fully make the switch to using, a functional programming language.

I've presented at several large and small conferences, mostly focusing on functional programming, and I'd love to visit Johannesburg!

From Zero to Docker

Come see how we set up environments and deploy to Docker containers. We will walk though automated packaging and deployment of Docker environments make releases a non-event.

Founder of Team Foundation Consulting, Niel Zeeman is a Technology Specialist, ALM MVP and Visual Studio ALM Ranger . He provides support and services for Application Lifecycle Management and Team Foundation Server in South Africa. Niel has more than a decade and a half of experience in the IT sector. He often hosts ALM community sessions and regularly speaks at developer and ALM focussed events such as DevConf 2016.

The care and feeding of Microservices

An overview of how Spring Boot and Spring Cloud can help with the development of Microservices with specific attention to the service discovery and management.Demonstration and code included.

I have been the Chief Software Architect at JumpCo (formerly TSC Technologies) for the last 10 years.I presented at DevConf in 2016 and I Code Java 2016 and 2015. I regularly present at Johannesburg Java Users Group.

Infrastructure as Code FTW! And why it didn’t work for us

Infrastructure as Code was supposed to revolutionise the way we managed our build servers, freeing us up to work on cool stuff whilst it automagically managed the drift! We’re still working on this dream… I’m going to talk about where we went wrong, and how we’re using Docker to make this a reality.

I started out as a developer 15 years ago when I became fascinated with automation and how it could solve many of the problems I was experiencing. I currently lead the DevOps team at Derivco and co-host the Durban DevOps Meetup group. I am passionate about collaboration and automation, and spend a large amount of time finding ways to improve our software delivery pipeline and bringing people together to work on complex problems. When I’m not at work I enjoy spending time with my family and taking time out to run, cycle or workout at the gym.

Why your choice of index matters.

The database is often cited as the cause of poor performance but is it true the SQL just won't scale. In this talk we will look at the most common cause of poor query performance "missing or poorly chosen indexes". We begin by showing you how rapidly query performance degrades when poor indexes are used and then show you how to chose indexes that support your application as it grows

Michael is an independent Business intelligence consultant from Johannesburg, South Africa. He specialises in data warehousing using the Microsoft SQL server stack and runs the local SQL Server user group.

Introducing Blockchain to Web Developers

If you haven’t heard about blockchain, you probably know Bitcoin. Blockchain is the underlying technology that powers Bitcoin. Although it was created to support Bitcoin, the blockchain concept can be defined regardless of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Experts say that blockchain will cause a revolution similar to the one enabled by the advent of the Internet. But what is it really, and how can it be used to build apps today? In this talk, Badi explains the blockchain phenomenon to developers who primarily build web and mobile apps. You’ll understand the fundamentals of blockchain and how to get started with building apps with it.

Badi is a lead developer at IQ Business and a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in the making. Badi focuses on growing African businesses by solving problems and finding new and better ways of doing things using technology. Since beginning his career with Yahoo!, Badi has lived in four countries, worked on numerous projects for multi-national companies, led many software teams and built beautiful software.Badi is also an avid public speaker having spoken at more than 10 developer events and conferences in 2016 alone, including international conferences held at places like Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Kenya and at home here in South Africa.

Let's make Software Engineering great again: culture, practices and tools for innovation

Innovation is about challenging the status quo and solving problems in interesting new ways. To allow innovation in our day-to-day work, we need to actively work at it. Allow space and time to think. Allow space and time to exercise the craft and mastery of Software Engineering. This talk will cover how culture, practices and tools underpin this search for innovation.

Dan Acton is Head of Devops and Software Engineering at Absa. In this role, he and his team help teams across the organization to deliver high quality software at high velocity. Dan has been at Absa for a year and a half, and before that was at Google. Dan is passionate about software and people.

Evolutionary architectures

I would to explain and show what evolutionary architectures are all about, examples, and when they can be beneficial, and when they are not. Share what event driven architecture is about, what would be the indications whether event driven architecture is the right choice for our application or not. What  its strengths are and when it’s better to pass on this approach.

I work at ThoughtWorks (Johannesburg).I have given a talk on RESTFUL services and how to implement that architecture using Spring Boot at the Tech4Africa in CapeTown 2015.

REST Assured

We create REST API’s to be integrated to system that are expected to at the end achieve a business defined goal. We never test against these requirement and wonder why we have to either add or rework some of our service because they don’t match requirements. Join me in this discussion as we bridge the great rift between business and technical using Cucumber-Serenity. This talk will expose you to writing normal English scenarios (test cases) that are translated into methods which test the actual contract you expose to the public and enable rich reporting for visibility.

Ruddy Riba software developer at BBD and an Honours graduate in Computer Science. With 4 years experience she has worked in various project involving .NET, knockout.js and is recently taken on a venture to Java with Spring and Angular. She strongly believes in testing code from unit test to end-to-end. Ruddy is a co-founder of an organisation called Pink-IT aimed at creating a social culture for females to be exposed to software development to achieve gender diversity in the workplace.

Knowing when to choose SQL and when to choose NoSQL.

I wrote a document with more details about this, which can be requested, I am just going to highlight some of the points I want to talk about.The reason for having a database has changed. It used to be only for persistence, but has now become a means of storing more and more data to be able to do meaningful analytics to help grow the organisation. I have gotten a lot of questions regarding "Why do I use MongoDB, why is it better than SQL?".  This talked is aimed at answering that question. To explain that it is the wrong question to ask, since neither is better than the other. Each has different benefits and a different reason for use. With NoSQL (I will specifically talk about document stores) it is easy to make design changes and it's better for rapid development and deployment. It is also a good fit in the world of micro services. Choosing NoSQL vs SQL has more to do with the development process and less with the way of storing the data. With polyglotism it is also not necessary to only have one database. ...

I work at Dariel, contracted out to do development jobs at clients. I am currently working on a Big Data project using MongoDB doing ETL and analytics. I am a MongoDB certified developer and have set up a proper production cluster using MongoDB enterprise. I previously worked on a project involving setting up a SQL data warehouse and doing ETL and analytics. I have done presentations at international conferences about conference papers I wrote for academic purposes.

Cluster Computing using Apache Spark on Raspberry Pi's

I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour of Apache Spark and cluster computing, as well as how to build your own micro big data computing cluster. I'll also show you how bad Scala code turned better can affect run time performance.

I'm a member of Driven Alliance, have spoken at a couple Developer User Groups in Johannesburg and Pretoria, Wits University via the CPD programme, as well as JS in SA in 2013. I've been writing code professionally since 1999, and I'm still no good at it.

Continuous Integration and Delivery using Microsoft Team Services: A True Story

Follow the story of Liam, a software developer bogged down by the repetition of tedious build and deployment processes and his journey to enlightenment.

Calvin has worked in the professional services industry for over 18 years and in a number of major organisations, both in South Africa and abroad. He has a background of delivering highly complex solutions across a broad spectrum of businesses, including; financial services, engineering, logistics and government and has undertaken many roles including project management, project reviews, package selection, vendor assessments, solution architecture and implementation. Denzil is an experienced senior Technologist with good Consultative skills. He has 9 years’ experience in the IT industry. Technically he spends 80/90% of his time coding with managerial tasks interspersed. His core skills lie within C# . He has worked across many technologies including, MVC, angular.js, node.js, mongodb, iOS development using Apple’s swift language, WPF, windows and web forms, Web Services, MS SQL, ASP.net, Raspberry Pi etc

What is software product design?

One of the oldest and most harmful misconceptions is that programming and testing are activities similar to manufacturing or construction in mature engineering disciplines, performed after the design has been completed. In this talk I will give the audience a fresh look at growing software, inspired by a 1992 article by Jack W. Reeves: “What is design?” I will show how software product development is a creative, collaborative design process involving the creative energy of all the role players.Finally we will take deep look at modern software design practices like Continuous Delivery, and see how it interlinks with disciplines like Lean Startup and UX Design and allow us to iterate fast toward superior solutions.

I'm founder of nReality and a software engineer who divides my time between coaching software development teams and building software products, mostly mobile (both native and hybrid). Most of my experience has been in developing crucial font-end applications in the financial industries: online trading, online banking, insurance and branch banking.I have plenty of SA and international software industry speaking experience, highlights being Agile 2015 Washington DC, and Agile Australia 2016. This is a new talk which I have been working on for months, and I plan to present it at a few events – I think it speaks to one of the biggest misunderstandings in software creation.

The Dimensions of Tests Model

Automated testing is becoming more visible as a critical practice for the development of high-quality and high-value software products. There is a lot of guidance around this practice, for example the Test Pyramid popularised as part of Continuous Delivery. A potential problem with this guidance is that the parameters involved in automated testing are changing all the time, for example the tools enabling automated testing are improving all the time. I developed the Dimensions of Tests Model as part of my coaching and training, with the aim of helping development teams have better conversations around why they want to have automated tests, and to help them decide which types of tests they should write.

I work as a Developer Coach at nReality where I help organisations get better at making customer-delighting software products. I also lecture part-time at a post-grad level for the Jo'burg Centre for Software Engineering at Wits

Slumdoc Billionaire

Over the last couple of months I have been leading a team tasked with upgrading an extremely core component of our gaming systems. There are just 2 requirements for our project to be considered a success, seems easy right? Well we need to support near infinite scale (i.e. Google/Facebook load) for hundreds of millions of users, and everything in the system has to happen in real-time. If this system goes down, or runs poorly, the money printer stops. After lots of research and testing we ended up picking Couchbase as our primary data store. In this session I will highlight some of the lessons learnt along the way - from coding to hardware infrastructure - that allows our clusters with billions of JSON documents to meet these lofty requirements.

Work at Derivco, and have presented at 6 SQL Saturday events in the last 2 years (Cape Town, Durban and JHB)

Keep Calm and Upgrade Angular

After years of protracted development and a tumultuous release cycle, Angular 2 abruptly crash-landed onto the web. Now that the dust has settled, the thoughts foremost on developers minds is - can it be used? Is Angular 2 backwards compatible? Can I upgrade from my Angular 1.x app, or is it a full rewrite? Do I really have to? This talk will explain the angular 2 upgrade path, from restructuring your angular 1.x code to running side-by-side using the UpgradeAdapter.

I work at BBD, across JavaScript, C#, and Java. I've presented several times at JSinSA, the DeveloperUG, and at the first DevConf.

Native Cross Platform Mobile Development with Xamarin Forms

A fast paced trip through Xamarin Forms showing how real world native apps can be built with a single UI definition layer.

I'm a freelance developer currently using Xamarin to build cross platform apps. I presented at the first Xamarin DevDays in South Africa in September, and I also co-organise and regularly present at the Gauteng Xamarin user group.

Getting the best of everyone into all the code using Mob Programming

Collective code ownership is challenging. Different members of the team have different ideas of what "well" written software is. Personal styles often creep in making it easy to "identify" who wrote what and introducing key man dependencies.In the past we have come up with various approaches to counter this ­ from code reviews to pair programming. While they all help, what if there was a better way?What if there was a way we could get the best of everyone into all the code?What if while doing this new team members could become almost instantly productive, overall skill level increased by all involved, key man dependencies radically reduced and the overall output and quality increased?Over the last year I've used a technique that has done just that ­ we call it mobbing. Mobbing has allowed us to speed up, scale up and skill up all at the same time.It sounds like a magic, but it isn't ­ it has its set own challenges.Today I would like to share the journey I've had with mobbing with you. By the end of this sessi...

I've been involved in creating software for over two decades. Most of the time I have gotten it wrong, sometimes I've gotten it right. As I get older it feels like I am getting it right more often. I find nothing more fulfilling than being involved in creating something that has a real impact on other people's lives.I'm currently an engineering lead for MYOB in Auckland.I love sharing the insights I have gained from these experiences with others - I do this by speaking at events, writing andfacilitating workshops.

Lessons Learned from a Decade of TDD

The software industry seems to finally be paying attention to the practice of TDD and its benefits.This is great, but TDD is hard and there is a long road to becoming proficient at it.In this talk I will be sharing some of the things I have learned in my journey over the past 10 years of practicing TDD. Hopefully these insights will prove useful to those just starting out or even a decent way down this road to mastery.

I work at Chillsoft, hailing from Durban, South Africa. I have been involved in professional application development for the past 15 years and I have been practicing TDD for 10 years.I have spent most of the past 8 years assisting customers in successfully getting their failing software projects back on track.

Introduction to Azure DocumentDB

DocumentDB is a fully managed schema-free global scale NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development. In this talk we will explore what's involved in working with DocumentDB including using the rich and familiar SQL ad hoc query capabilities, using and using JavaScript within the database and what it means to be able to store in DocumentDB for apps written for MongoDB with the new MongoDB protocol support.

I'm a technical all-rounder with many years of experience working with the various incarnations of Microsoft development tool and have worked extensively with SOL Server throughout my career. I currently work at Microsoft South Africa as a Cloud Data Solution Architect. Most recently I have been working on projects utilizing Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse, Azure Stream Analytics and Azure HDInsight (Microsoft's Azure distribution of Hadoop). I particularly enjoy the intersection of electronics, math, data and innovation.

Concurrent Programming and Distributed Computing with Akka.net

Akka.net is a port of Scala Akka. It uses the Actor model to provide a higher level of abstraction for writing concurrent and distributed systems. Getting up to 50 million messages per second on a single machine. Akka Actors have a small memory footprint with about 2.5 million actors per Gig of memory. In this talk we will see how we can use the Akka framework to simply create a concurrent and distributed system. Hopefully looking to show how we can get about 10 million transaction a second (creating text data files) on a simple laptop.

I've been in the IT and Development game since the 1980’s. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K ram. I've developed code in more than 16 different languages and scripts. I have a passion for software development, designing and delivering the right software in time with as little defects as possible. I am a manager and Senior Developer at IQ Business.

Android Things - The IoT platform for everyone

In this presentation, Rebecca will cover the new platform recently announced by Google, called Android Things. She will cover an introduction to Android Things, basics of getting started with the platform and how any developer without electronics experience can build IoT apps with Android Things. A few use cases and examples will be shown in this session, along with how you can use the existing android libraries with your next IoT project.

Rebecca is a Senior Android Developer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She loves working with new technology and has a passion for making great user friendly products. During the day she works the DStv Now app adding new features and supporting old ones. In her spare time, she manages her open source app, Book Dash, which contains free African story books. She speaks at conferences and local meetups mainly about Android. When not coding, she can be found baking and travelling the world. Previous talks : https://riggaroo.co.za/talks/

Preventing Burnout

Burnout has been synonymous with the IT industry since its birth in the 60s and many good people have suffered the consequences. Everything in our industry is geared to pushing us towards burnout, with those resisting it often labeled as lazy or “not pulling their weight.” Even tinkering / playing / learning new technologies in your own time can be detrimental. The objective of this talk is to equip people with a number of practical techniques to prevent burnout and attain that elusive “sustainable pace,” regardless of your boss’ demands. That way we can reduce the human and financial cost of burnout. The content is based on lessons learned in a 4000 person organization where employee performance was demanded and burnout was deemed unacceptable.

Marius is a process improvement pragmatist. He has worked with individuals, teams, and organizations around the world, to find better ways of delivering on their promises by mainly employing Lean and Agile thinking. Marius' career has been a mix of external coach/consultant and full time employee, ranging from developer on a small team to senior executive of a 4000 person organization. This journey has provided him with first hand experience in the rewards of successful change and the deep learning that results from abandoned initiatives. Though qualified as mechanical engineer, software has always been his passion, and helping others find joy in work, his motivation.

All your data are belong to us: Reverse-engineering API's, web scraping, and the details of how I gained access to 7 million [company name redacted *] accounts.

With more and more data being available on the web, wouldn't it be nice to know how to access it? I'll show you just how easy it is to work out how a private API works by sending requests through an HTTP proxy, and how to scrape data directly out of web content when an API doesn't exist.Finally I'll detail the process I went through to discover and exploit a vulnerability in one of the largest [type redacted *] companies in SA, and how to avoid this in your company.* = currently going through the responsible disclosure period. Which will be up soon and they're publishing a fix soon.

I'm a Windows developer, Microsoft MVP, blogger, and hardware hacker from Durban. Currently I'm building awesome media apps at Plex and building an Xbox One game.

Real world applications built with Firebase

AppCapital built a realtime online auction and catalogue system in under 6 months, using the Google Firebase platform, coupled with native iOS and Android applications as well as a web portal built on AngularJS. The use of Firebase greatly improved the user experience, reduced the time to market and facilitated an Agile delivery against other technologies.  In this talk we demonstrate and show the code of the application(s), their commonality and their differences. We will also delve into the various design considerations and mindset changes required when using this technology stack to deliver an application, in a short amount of time, that surpasses client expectation and technical performance.

I am currently a Director of a new tech startup called AppCapital, focusing on mobile and web applications. Before that I was Head of Software development at EOH A Microsoft Partner and was with them for over 12 years. I have over 20 years experience building all manners of software, mostly in the enterprise space. I have presented previously at DevConf 2016,  2 Microsoft Tech-ed's, some DevdDays and a few other Microsoft events.

So you wanna build a service bus

You don’t really need a service bus, do you? There are service bus offerings out there, but they’re too complex and opinionated. Surely it’s easy enough to write your own messaging layer over a queuing technology like RabbitMQ or SQS.It doesn’t make sense to take a dependency on 3rd party software with millions of lines of code when you could have a lot more fun writing the perfect solution all by yourself. In this session, I’ll show you everything you need to know to build the ultimate service bus of your dreams from scratch.After all: how hard could it be?

(Not sure if this is a bio, or just a thing about me. I'm gonna assume it's a bio)A professional geek, William works for Particular Software writing amazing software like NServiceBus. Passionate about the web and security, he is engaged in a sordid love affair with JavaScript, and spends most of his free time trying to convince others of it's beauty and elegance.When not behind his laptop hacking away, this amatuer beer enthusiast can often be found playing boardgames or drinking cold-brew coffee.

NativeScript: Marrying Angular 2 and Mobile Development

With every increasing speed of delivery required and a great need for exception devs, the amount of companies that can afford to employ a dev for every platform is quickly draining.Additionally, small projects have enough to decisions to make when trying to build the right app for their customer. Every project would benefit from being able to remove the decision of which platform to deliver to first. If it were possible to deliver a responsive app, while still developing for all platforms, it would be a no-brainer.NativeScript tries to achieve this by allowing developers to write in JS and compile down to truly native mobile apps. NativeScript is to Angular 2, what React Native is to React.

Mastery: the art of software craftsmanship

The path of a craftsman is one of mastery.  Our industry is only starting to understand the implications of this.  We are feeling the pains of losing our best craftsman to other countries or managerial positions, but don't really know what to do about it.For craftsman, this talk will give insight into the mastery model adapted from the Northern European guilds' model of apprenticeship.For leaders, this talk will help you to understand how to support your team members to grow in mastery, become more fulfilled and structure your organisation to nurture mastery as motivation.

I've worked at Business Connexion and a few small companies and I will be running a dev start-up from 1st of January '17. I have a B.IT degree and a M.A. in Organisational Leadership.With a team  of friends, I've written and presented my own full financial seminar. I've presented many times at a pre-marriage seminar. I've given a similar talk as the one I'm planning to give at DevConf to the Pretoria Dev User Group (you can ask Sean or Terence who were hosts for feedback). I haven't given a talk at a conference like this before.

AI in Perspective

A look into the current state of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the future of computer intelligence. This talk aims to reveal and demonstrate some common concepts that are currently being utilised for advancement in AI. The aim is to provide an overview of the simplicity and uses in machine learning techniques and SDKs useful to get started. The outcome is to encourage developers to learn more about current AI technology and spur tinkering with these concepts.

Rishal is currently fulfilling the role of a Team/Technical Lead at Entelect. He is a senior software engineer designing and building solutions for various national and international blue chip clients. He has a passion for web architecture, mobile development, and design thinking methodologies. Rishal founded Prolific Idea in 2015 where innovation is cultivated through research and technology.

Flying a drone with VR, what I've learnt.

My journey in trying to fly drones through using mobile VR, trying out Oculus Rift and seeing what sticks. I'll talk around how everything communicates together, what options you have if you'd like to do this and general lessons learned.

Hi, I'm Theo. I've been a practicing Software Craftsman for 9 years now, I love Software development, love teaching it and eating an elephant one piece at a time. I've embarked on what I can only call my calling: A code school, The Coding Ground, for individuals that cannot afford it. O yes, I'm also addicted to flying stuff.

Visual Studio Code for the Java Developer

RedHat recently released an Extention to allow full Java Language and maven support for visual Studio Code:(https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.java) In my session we'll demo Power-User features, including debugging on-the-fly, intelliSense for your favorite Java Libraries, and other editor hacks. We’ll also demonstrate Maven integration and discuss writing your own extension.

Rory has worked in many of the blue chip companies in Johannesburg. A Developer since 2001 he is a Oracle Certified Java Programmer and has his Honours BSc. Rory is lucky enough to work full time in R&D at BBD which gives him an unparalleled insight into industry movement. He is a co-organizer of the Jozi-JUG, General Manager of Jug-Africa and is a passionate Programming Evangelist

Craft Beer and Data Science: Adapt or Die

The growth of the craft beer industry has been a boom stick for a dycotamy of new products, businesses and brewers across South Africa, though, like most businesses, brewers and event's organisers don't utilise the mountains of digital information and feedback available to them. Social media and data analytics tools offer brewers and events the ability to tap directly into the opinions, popularity and conversation of a consumer base that they'd not originally be able to. This intelligence can be most effective in small businesses like brewers who are small enough to adapt a moments notice over larger businesses. I use craft beer and brewers as an example, but, this rules apply to all businesses and corporates in most industries.

Hi there, My name is Brett Magill, I'm an entrepreneur based out of Alberton, South of Johannesburg and Maboneng, Jeppestown. I currently run three business; Milled.co.za; focusing on Millennial centric content in the entertainment, technology and business conversation, Joburgbrew.com a online retail store and beer of the month club, and lastly, Third Planet Media, a digital communications agency, focusing on paid media, data analytics and social media. I've spoken on topics such as eCommerce, startup entrepreneurship, craft beer and the craft beer industry, social media and digital communications and entrepreneurship overall. I've got more energy than I know what do with and more energy than most stages can handle. I am usually able to get a rise our of a crowd and keep the audience engaging and tweeting at the same time. I'd like to speak at DevConf because, yes, it's a great opportunity to expose myself for further opportunities, but I also have the opportunity to add value to my audience out side social m...

A short history of keyboards (and why we need better ones)

We'll have a quick history lesson showing the (lack of) evolution in keyboard designs over the last 150 years. The reason we do this is to understand why we should all care about things like RSI (or at the very least productivity and happiness) and how our tools can affect that.Finally, we'll discuss some modern alternatives to these antiquated designs including building your own keyboard (from kits as well as designing and 3D printing your own).

I'm a software developer who develops mobile apps for Discovery by day and tries to find ridiculously interesting projects to tinker with by night.My decade of work experience includes setting up an SMS service for USAID in Afghanistan, consulting on a mobile CRM system in Costa Rica and helping out with systems for an SMS campaign during presidential elections in Zambia.My tinkering has included computer vision, robotics and home automation projects. This has led to talks on using Sci-fi interfaces as inspiration, using computer vision to keep physical and electronic scrum boards in sync and getting started with robotics using Javascript.

Scalable Distributed Design - Let me show you my architectures

Architects, those that design buildings, study architecture from the past to the present to best understand their craft. As software developers we aren't easily afforded this opportunity, this has always frustrated me, and has thus lead me to always want to share with my fellow craftsmen.

In this talk I lift the veil on a two of my enterprise projects implemented using a message based architecture. I walk through the architecture of the projects highlighting the SOA patterns used. The first architecture focuses on patterns employed for performance and scalability and the second focuses on big data principles for data visualisation using projections and the lambda architecture. This presentation also focuses on the do's and don'ts when designing a scalable message based architecture, as well as potential technology you may consider such as NServiceBus.

Chris Tite is a director and co-founder of Kaleidocode, a software consultancy based in Durban.

He earned his B.Sc. Electronic Engineering through the University of Natal and has 22 years of software development experience, spanning multiple countries, technologies and industries as diverse as banking, farming, health services, call centres and financial services.

Currently Chris can be found either overseeing the architecture at Kaleidocode, mentoring the intern programme which is run through the company twice a year, or giving talks around the country through his inStruct Series, or through the Durban Agile User Group, where he is well known for sharing his love of craft beer with active contributors during his talks.

Architecting Polyglot-Persistent Solutions

The World we live in today makes us deal with a lot of information. The solutions we put out there also have the same problem. We collect a lot of data through our applications and we try to give these data back in a non-asphyxiating fashion. Doing this with a single data storage technology will make you feel definite agony even on a medium-scale solution. Furthermore, it's next to impossible to provide a viable solution in a large scale products like Foursquare and Twitter.

This is where polyglot persistence comes into picture. As much as the word "polyglot persistence" sounds extremely fancy to your ears, it's also not that straightforward to adopt in a solution; especially in existing ones. Come and join me in this session to learn about what most matters in this type of architecture to build a viable, maintainable solution. Also, I will be talking about how to make decisions to choose the right data storage technologies based on my personal experiences I gained with the side project I am spending my nights on.

I am a web guy, Microsoft MVP and software developer specialized mainly on .NET Web technologies. I've worked at the tourism industry to build tourism software services and products for long time and now, I am working at Redgate Software as a Software Developer helping people do database delivery in a joyful way. I am also a very involved member in the community and try my way to expose my knowledge to others through my blog, webcasts, authoring books, giving talks on various topics and so on. I live in lovely and green Cambridge, UK and I am married to a lovely woman.

Speaker Experience: I have been speaking in international conferences and local user group events for last four years. A few examples: I have spoken at That Conference in US, Web European Conference in Milan, Progressive .NET Tutorials in London, /dev/summer in Cambridge and Azure Conf 2014 Virtual Event and many other local events in UK and Turkey. In addition to that, I have some upcomming speaking engagements scheduled like Codemash 2016, in USA.

DevOps Demystified

DevOps is not a job title! This session will be a brief look at the latest buzzwords in IT. We discuss how DevOps fits into the greater scheme of things and what the actual implications are surrounding a solid DevOps focus.

• Overview of how DevOps fits into a full application lifecycle
• Overview of what DevOps encompasses
• How does DevOps affect me?

Founder of Team Foundation Consulting, Niel Zeeman is a Technology Specialist and a Visual Studio ALM Ranger. He provides support and services for Application Lifecycle Management and Team Foundation Server in South Africa. Niel has more than a decade and a half of experience in the IT sector. He often hosts ALM community sessions and regularly speaks at developer and ALM focussed events.

iOS development in Swift

Dispelling the myths of the complexity behind native iOS development.

• understanding of how iOS apps are put together
• overview of Xcode
• insight into some of the good aspects of Swift and why it's the language to watch in 2016

Life-long techie with a fascination with all the new bits, but with a realistic (some would say 'cynical') view. Always pursuing the unicorn. Founded: JSinSA, CodeSkills, Broken Keyboards Software and a few community projects.

The simplest way I built an award winning App

When I started out with app development I had zero knowledge on app development, all I had was just design skills. I got over my fear starting on developing an app by testing the waters by building an app based on my experiences. After building a few apps, I got to advance my XAML skills. This later got me to build an award winning app with minimum skill set on building an app.

• Discover a simplest way to build a basic app.
• Gain insights on different tools
• Applying new skills to real life problems

Griffiths Sibeko, a lifelong learner with a grade zero mentality who draws his design inspiration from nature, human interactions and communication patterns.

Learning how to use a computer at the public library at age 11 where the staff was always sceptical that he would break the equipment, he got to excel at using computers and got his first promotion from owning a library card to owning a library staff card. He later then realised his passion to design and develop solutions to help better ways in which people interact with the world around them.

Griffiths' work range from software design and development, knowledge management, and digital design. Griffiths has skills on various Microsoft technologies and has since published various apps on the Windows store. Griffiths was awarded the MTN Best App Garage Developer 2014 for the Rea Vaya app he designed and developed beginning of January 2014 in a quest to solve some of the issues he encountered when using the service.

After finishing an internship program at the Microsoft AppFactory, Griffiths now works for Zapper which is a successful mobile payment solution company he competed with at the MTN App Awards for the consumer choice award and is based in Cape Town. After hours, apart from working on local relevant solutions, he is furthering his understanding on software develop and to better his skills.

Rapid prototyping with jboss forge

How many times have you wanted to start a new project in Java EE, but struggled to put all the pieces together? Has the Maven archetype syntax left you scratching your head? Everyone else is talking about cool new tools in other languages or frameworks, and you're left thinking, "I wish it were that easy for me." Are rapid prototyping tools a thing of the past?

JBoss Forge is the tooling and technology you have been waiting for! It will blow your mind how easy it makes development. Just say "hold on, let’s prototype that" , "Yes, that is what we need!" We’ll first see the insane productivity this tool offers, and create a full JEE multi-tiered application in under 5 minutes! Restful services made with 2 lines! Swop out our JSF layer for angular in one statement!

Rory has worked in many of the blue chip companies in Johannesburg. A java developer since 2001 he is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and has his Honours BSc. Rory is lucky enough to work full time in R&D at BBD which gives him an unparalleled insight into industry movement. He is a co-organizer of the Jozi JUG and is a passionate Java Evangelist

Beautiful API's

APIs are part of our day to day work even if we don't think so. Often developers only think of 'APIs' as service endpoints for certain web services but this is only a single type of API. In this talk we'll discuss what types of APIs there are and how we can write and maintain beautiful APIs. What is a beautiful API and how can you craft one? Join us for the session and find out.

Software developer. Conference Speaker & Coach. Not a rockstar/ninja/pirate/guru. Interested in learning and sharing experiences. I've been a developing software for just over a decade now and in that time learned that software development is more about people than code. Although the code is fun, the people aspect is so much more important.

Things I wish developers knew about SQL Server.

Oh the horror stories about SQL Server systems that I could tell.... Over the years I've come to realise that most of the worst problems could have been avoided if a few things were more widely known, So in the interests of preserving my sanity (and my weekends) I'm going to talk about a few things that I really, really wish more developers knew.

Learn the importance of good database design, the reasons for SQL's locking behaviours, the use of indexes, the risks of functions, the need for maintenace, and more.

Deploying at the Speed of Thought - Developing a DevOps Mindset

DevOps is the intersection of tools, processes and people. There are tons of tools and a plethora of processes - but what about people? In this session we'll take a step back and look at how to evolve your culture to help speed your DevOps transformation.

• What is DevOps is and what it isn't
• How to overcome challenges to creating a DevOps mindset
• How to create an environment that encourages good DevOps

Colin Dembovsky is a senior DevOps practitioner for Seattle-based Northwest Cadence. He is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. After completing an MSc in Computer Science at Rhodes University, he worked as a developer (first in Linux/C++ and moving to .NET/C#) and later systems architect. He left development work to start ALM consulting, and has been a Microsoft ALM MVP since 2011. He is passionate about helping teams embrace DevOps as a journey, without self-destructing on the way.

When he is not working on improving DevOps somewhere around the world, he is playing guitar or mandolin and recording in his home studio, or entertaining his wife and 2 kids.

Colin is a frequent guest speaker and has appeared several times at DevDays SA and TechEd Africa.

A year of dealing with RabbitMQ

Over the past year (and a bit) our team has been working with RabbitMQ on our production lead management system. We adopted it as the base of our unproven "Service Bus" based architecture that we wanted to try out.

This talk will share learnings, take-aways (eaten), technologies adopted and options, lessons learn, pain and tumblebeasts experienced and other near homicidal ideas.

• Queues... what are they?
• Reasons why to design disconnected systems (benefits)
• Things to expect when moving to queue based systems (pitfalls)
• Examples of service bus systems that exist

Having loved computer science at school I realised that software development was my calling; I moved on to complete my B.Sc. HONS Computer science at UCT (long before #feesmustfall).

I have been working with C# for last 11 years, moving from front end development focused on Windows forms to back end development services and now slightly begrudgingly towards web (but mainly the services behind the scenes).

Moving from 5 years of working in the "casino world" and the 100% uptime that comes with it, I moved to JAG Method to help revolutionise their IT systems. JAG Method is one of SA's largest online lead generators. We specialise in generating leads for the financial services industry (no we are not those SPAMMER guys!).

Adopting an unproven service bus based design our small team has rewritten the 10,000 line one-file VB service (sexy!) into a multi-service, service bus oriented system with full management portal and monitoring (scary!). We currently process between 4000 and 8000 leads a day which are received, cleaned, run through a rules engine and then send on to the insurers for conversion.

Developer Design Thinking

Design thinking is a methodology used by designers to create innovative and effective solutions. Most scientific methodologies of working take all the known factors into account when deriving a solution, whereas, design thinking analyses both the known and the unknown. It challenges us to delve deeper into the problem and read between the lines before forming a solution. This talk aims to provide insight into activities and practices that assist developers in building effective, robust, and usable software by utilising the design thinking methodology.

The outcome of this talk is to highlight the benefits for the developer, team, client, and project in being a design thinker. It is to also convey some practices that the audience can immediately apply in their working lives to better themselves and their projects.

Rishal is currently fulfilling the role of a team lead at Entelect. He is a senior software engineer designing and building solutions for various national and international blue chip clients. Rishal is also the founder of Prolific Idea where innovation in software is cultivated through technology and research. He has a passion for web and enterprise architecture, mobile development, and user experience design. Rishal is an avid speaker at various conferences and user groups such as Tech4Africa, JSinSA, Java SA, RubyFuZA, Jozi JUG, Jozi Android UG, and the Gauteng Dev UG.

The Pragmatic & the Purist

This session dives into discussion and code, depicting the two often conflicting approaches to software development – Pragmatic vs Purist. There are pros and cons to both which can filter through all levels of development e.g. choosing the perfect persistence store against choosing what that would work now or choosing a perfect solution vs choosing the one that full fills the requirements now. The end result, however, still needs to be a maintainable and simple solution.

Mark Biagio

Solution architect, software engineer and aggressive agilest. Mark has a passion for well-constructed clean code and loves building pretty much anything - mobile, web and complex enterprise line of business applications. It must just work and bring value.

Adriaan Putter

Senior software developer with a passion for web development and open source technologies. Adriaan is driven to build the best simple solution using the technologies, platforms and tools that fit the requirement, and unit testing, always, fits the requirement.

Composition over inheritance in Javascript

The gang of four make two important statements in their book. "Program to an interface and not an implementation" and "Prefer composition over inheritance" This talk is about more than just that it's about what we call the two pillars of javascript. Prototypical inheritance and Functional Programming and how we can use the two pillars to enable composition.

• Learn when and where to use composition
• Get a better understanding about how prototypes and classes work in javascript
• Learn about functional tools closures, lambdas, functors, higher order functions, etc...

Ben is a javascript developer trying their best to manage complexity and constraints in software design. Ben has been building software for as long as they can remember and has built everything from accident and traffic management software for Government, to digital contract management software, to itinerary builders and presenters for travel companies. Ben currently works at Red Comet Labs and worked at Go2africa in the past. In the past Ben has worked with British and South African Government, at Unboxed Consulting and, at Microzone

How to prepare your Enterprise for NoSQL

With most new technologies it looks very simple when you have done a little 'Hello World' tutorial. However, when you start implementing it in your enterprise and it needs to work at scale then simple isn't that simple anymore and all kinds of problems start showing their ugly faces. There isn't any difference when it comes to NoSQL. With more solutions starting to contain NoSQL components more developers will need to come to terms with what to expect in the real world. Scaling isn't the only problem you will face. In this session we will look at the different types of NoSQL databases and unpack a few of the important issues you need to address to ensure you don't discover these ugly face problems late on a Saturday night when production goes down.

The session will cover all major NoSQL database types and look at the two or three main issues of each to be aware of and how to solve them.

I am a technhical lead and part-time trainer at BBD. I'm currently drifting around in the banking space. I have been a developer for the last 15 years and hold an MEng from Wits. When I'm not working or trying my hand at something new in the technology world I like to run. I'm currently training for my first Comrades marathon this year. I am part of the Jozi-Jug committee and presented 2 talks at the JUG last year, one on Swagger and the other one on the value of certifications. I also present the Java expert level certification training at BBD.

Metrics Driven-DevOps: Delivering High Quality Software like Facebook & Co

Becoming the next Uber is only possible when bringing your ideas faster to your end users. Some aspects of DevOps are perfect for that as it only works if Ops and Dev work closely together. But what does this mean for you as a developers? Delivering code faster with the high chance of failing faster?

In my opinion we need to look at Key Technical Metrics such as Memory Usage per User or Request, # of SQLs, # of Service Calls, Transferred Bytes, ... - these are metrics you need to track starting at your workstation all the way through CI into Ops – and don’t forget the Business: How often is the new feature really used? What does it cost to run it? Let these metrics act as Quality Gateways and stop builds early before they Crash your System: faster than ever.

In this session we look at how companies like Facebook, CreditOne and Co apply metric-driven DevOps. We look at use cases that crashed rapid deployments, identify metrics that identify the reason of the crash and learn how to use these metrics to steer your pipeline to build better code, deploy faster, without failing faster!

Andreas Grabner is a performance engineer who has been working in this field for the past fifteen years. Andreas helps organizations identify the real problems in their applications and then uses this knowledge to teach others how to avoid the problems by sharing engineering best practices. He was a developer, tester, and evangelist for Segue Software, builders of the Silk Testing product line. Later Andreas joined Dynatrace where, for the past eight years, he has helped organizations worldwide test applications, better understand the technologies behind their apps, and improve the entire development process. He shares his expertise on blog.dynatrace.com Conferences I spoke at: JavaOne 2015, Java South Africa 2015, Velocity, STPCon, StarWest, Agile Testing Days, ... Some of the meetups I spoke at last year: Java New York, Web Perf Chicago, .NET Devs in Redmond, DevOps Boston, DevOps Berlin, Web Perf Amsterdam, ...

Gradle: The Build System you have been waiting for

Introduction to the Gradle build system with historic overview, examples / comparisons and case-study.

• Understanding of why should they be using Gradle.
• Potential migration paths.
• Understanding some of the differences between Gradle and Maven conventions.

Corneil is a Software Architect and Developer with over 30 years experience in all manner of software development technologies on hardware from embedded systems to Mainframes and just about everyting in between. He has written software using Assembler, Pascal, C, C++, Java and a few more languages. He has a special interest in developer productivity using a variety of patterns and tools to improve the feedback cycle. Corneil presented at the inaugural Java South Africa Conference in Cape Town during November 2015 and at various JUGSA and Developer User Group meetings over the past few years.

Code Reviews - a team tool

When working in a team environment, code-reviews are an essential step in the process of producing code. Reviewing code decreases “silos” by increasing mutual understanding, exposes bugs/pitfalls and allows you to maintain consistency and quality. I’ll be sharing some of my experiences with the Zando team, how we work and the tools we use.

• Learn how to conduct productive and critical code-reviews
• Behaviours to encourage and discourage in code-reviews
• Habits to develop in your team to lead to fewer defects in production

I'm Danny - Lead Developer @ zando.co.za

Passionate about quality code, mentoring, code-reviews and using great tools. Coding since using Netscape Navigator wasn't a laughable offence. A transplanted (but unrepentant) Vaalie

Lap around Azure Machine Learning

This session will take you though a journey of Azure machine learning and how to use it. It will explain how the platform works and how it can be leveraged to build great predictive analytic solutions.

Get an introduction ot machine learning, and understand how to build and execute an experiement.

Testing with types, how to test more by typing less

Testing is important, but I am lazy. So why spending copious time thinking about test cases when your computer can do this for you in a fraction of the time?

In this talk, I will show you how to use an awesome approach called property-based testing.

It allows you to automatically generate test values based on the properties of the things you want to test, from primitive types, all the way to arbitrary data structures.

Generating copious amount of random data can certainly break things but sometimes you want to find out which particular test case causes your system to fail.

This ability to hone on the particular bug (it is called shrinking) is extremely useful and almost makes property-based testing very hard to distinguish from magic.

I will use Scala, a typed functional programming language as a driver for demonstration, together with the ScalaTest and ScalaCheck frameworks.

The principles of properties-based testing have been applied successfully to many other languages, from Haskell to Erlang and I will briefly touch on those as well.

I am a self-employed consultant doing Software Engineering (mostly in Scala) and DevOps (mostly with Ansible). I am from Martinique and I've been in South Africa for over 3 years.

I currently work in the TV broadcast industry building software solutions to help media companies produce news and sport content.In a previous life I was doing a lot of work on distributed systems and configuration management at HP Labs. I've started the Scala and Ansible Meetups in Johannesburg where I try whenever possible to hammer in the benefits of functional programming and automation while feeding people some pizzas.

I've given talks at Meetups in Johanesburg and at Tech4Africa on topics such as Scala, DevOps and Continuous Delivery.

Rapidly fire up apps with FireBase - A no-nonsense, NoSQL database

Building extraordinary user experience requires extraordinary capabilities. Among these capabilities, persistence of data is one of the most important one. We need a database that is fast, scalable and supported by world-class infrastructure, has a wide-variety of APIs, allows for clean code and needs less coding.

FireBase, Google's NoSQL cloud database, provides just that. Auto-scale to millions of users; real-time user experience; easy-to-use APIs. It allows developers to build extraordinary mobile and web apps. With FireBase, you can build and build fast for any device. FireBase also supports REST API natively. This session will be focussed on providing a practical overview of this awesome database with coding examples.

Badi is a developer, architect and agile practitioner with over 14 years of professional experience in a wide range of software development roles. He excels as a solo developer, team member, team leader, or manager of multiple distributed teams.

Badi started his career at Yahoo! in 2003. He has since evolved as a thought leader in the field of software architecture, software design and development for the web, the desktop and mobile platforms. Badi has spoken at, and contributed to, numerous internal training events and International conferences like the Free and Open Source Software conference (India), the Unicode Conference (USA) etc.

He is currently a leading technologist at IQ Business, South Africa. He works closely with clients to define ideas and deliver products.

Getting Started with Analytics (GTM and GA)

In this session I will discuss the importance of analytics in the application life cycle and how to use it to drive change that improves the end users' experience of applications. This includes how to define meaningful metrics to measure so that the data being used to inform decisions is accurate and reflects the actual usage of the system.

I will be showing attendees Google Tag Manager(GTM) with Google Analytics(GA), as an example of tag managers and why they should be using them instead of implementing analytics tags straight into their applications. The techniques for that I'll discuss can be used for other tag managers, like Omniture, but I chose GTM since it's free to use so attendees can start playing around with it straight away.

My name is Veroon Budhai, I'm a Senior Software Engineer with Entelect Software that specialises in front end development. I have a strong passion for UX Design and Analysis and try to bring my experience with it to the development process so that the applications we build are focused more around the end user than just the requirements.

Performance Testing Tools in Android

Developing an app for the fragmented Android ecosystem can be a difficult task. Problems such as small amounts of RAM or low performance GPUs on some devices makes the job of an Android developer a difficult one. In this talk, we will discuss various tools (and how to use them) to ensure your app isn’t slow or dropping frames. Enabling your app to run smoothly across a larger set of devices.

Rebecca Franks is an Android Developer working at DStv. She has over 3 years experience in developing Android apps. In her spare time she blogs over at http://riggaroo.co.za and has released several android apps. She graduated cum laude at the University of Johannesburg with a BSc (Hons) degree in Information Technology.

Who still needs a Tester?

With the advancement of Software Development, developers' capability to test their own code has been greatly improved. IDEs and automated testing tools are enabling developers to easily create unit, integration, regression and any other tests as required. The widespread availability and use of automated build tools that aid testing, and practices like TDD, do we still need human testers in a software development team? Do testers have a role in this ever improving environment of automated testing? What skills and value do they bring? What is the mindset that keeps a tester relevant and valuable in a software development team?

Originally from Zimbabwe, with working experience in a few African countries, Oz currently works as a software tester in a mature development team. He believes thinking is his strongest skill in his bag of many and varied tricks. With over 15 years of experience, mainly in financial systems, he is focused on solving the right problems, the right way. A co-organiser of the Joburg Software Testers meetup, Oz loves to interact, learn and grow with the community. He enjoys a good coffee, especially with developers and other non testers alike. He has spoken at Agile Africa 2015, and co-facilitated a workshop at Lets Test Conference South Africa.

Automated Platform-independent deployment – our journey at Allan Gray

Ernst is currently leading the “Digital Team” at Allan Gray. His aims are creating a highly productive team that builds stable, reliable software that can be deployed with zero downtime or effort. The team is technology agnostic and delivers business value using the most appropriate tools and tech for the job at hand.

He also enjoys good coffee, great whiskey, trail running, skateboarding and traveling.

Hi, I'm Joshua, and I'm a Reformed TDDist

I'm Joshua, and I used to be addicted to mocks. I fell in love with TDD many years ago. In the past, every class I wrote had its own unit test and was perfectly isolated from its collaborators using mocks. More recently, I've changed my specification test philosophy quite drastically, to the point where I now no longer use mocks or other test doubles unless I absolutely have to. I believe my specification tests are now much more valuable, understandable, changeable, and also smaller and quicker to write. My production code is much easier to refactor, and I can also start releasing my code earlier. Let me tell you my story of rehabilitation and liberation from my addiction to mocks and how I came to see the light.

Joshua Lewis has an MEng from Wits and has worked in the software development industry for a decade – gosh that makes him sound old! His experience is mostly as a software developer, though he now works as a (software) Developer Coach at DStv Digital Media. He also lectures post-grads and CPD students part-time at Wits.

Combining Neo4j and Elasticsearch - search and explore your data

Graphs are great for discovering connections between things, but what if you want to search as well as do recommendations or exploration? It's time for polyglot persistence: store your connections in the graph, the indexed documents in Elasticsearch, images in some random key-value store, logs in Splunk and maybe some tabular data in your SQL Database.

It's not rocket science, but I would like to share the way we designed our data stores to connect the graph and other stores elegantly. I'll start with a super-quick overview of Neo4j and Elasticsearch and then dive straight into connecting the two. I'll follow that up with why you might want to do this, and what kinds of applications could you build with it.

Age: 36

Sex: Male

Location: Pietermaritzburg (yeah)

I love software development, doing it, reading about it. I'm tech/ops director at Chillisoft, and with the growth of our software dev company I seem to now do more telling other people how to software develop, but I'm also more invested in maximising the effectiveness of software developers - both from a tools and personal effectiveness point of view.

Surround yourself with data: how to create dashboards that help you uncover what's really going on

How many people are using your website right now? Which features are their favourite? Are they experiencing errors? Getting stuck? How are your servers performing? Is your code easy to work with? Are you making money? Dashboards are a way to have the answers to these questions all around you, all the time.

Join Rouan as he shows you why building dashboards will change the way you look at software. He’ll share concrete examples of the kinds of dashboards you could build and will show you the tools with which you can build them. He’ll introduce you to principles that will guide you as you make decisions about what you dashboard, how you treat data and how you use data to make decisions.

Rouan Wilsenach is a software developer at ThoughtWorks. He has built software for companies in the financial services, health, media and education sectors. He has worked as a consultant and coach, helping teams learn and adopt good engineering practices and has helped businesses with organisation-wide agile adoption. He enjoys setting up feedback loops that lead to good ideas and setting up automation to help get those ideas to production. He has spoken at several conferences including Agile Africa, Scrum Gathering and JavaScript in South Africa.

What is The Actor Model? A glance using Akka.NET

We all have a favourite actor. For some of us it's a heavy hitter like Robert Downey Jr, for others: the more obscure the actor the better. Regardless of how good the actor is though, he or she can only act out one scene at a time. The same is true for systems that implement the Actor Model - a conceptual model aimed at reducing the complexity associated with concurrency. By treating a piece of computation as an "actor" we can direct multiple actors into a single, fluid scene that describes complex business scenarios in a simple fashion all while make sure each actor only has to do one thing at a time. Join William as he sets the scene for explaining the Actor Model, and tries to fit as many bad actor puns into one talk as he can.

Professional geek. Amateur beer enthusiast. Works for Particular on amazing products like NServiceBus.

What is testing anyway?

In 1961, in his chapter about testing in his book "Computer Programming Fundamentals", Jerry Weinberg wrote - "It is, of course, difficult to have the machine check how well the program matches the intent of the programmer without giving a great deal of information about that intent. If we had some simple way of presenting that kind of information to the machine for checking, we might just as well have the machine do the coding. Let us not forget that complex logical operations occur through a combination of simple instructions executed by the computer and not by the computer logically deducing or inferring what is desired."

Are you testing if you have a set of automated tests that you consistently run? Do you need a human doing testing? Why bother testing at all? In this session, I would like to discuss and debate what 'Testing' means to people.

Testing is not just a career to me, it is a massive part of who I am. I have been blessed to come across people who have inspired me and taught me and I believe I have been that person to others over the years. The learning never stops though, and I continue to practice the craft and apply learnings from other disciplines back into software testing. Building the craft and community of testing in South Africa is also a passion of mine. To this end, I am the co-organiser of LetÕs Test South Africa and the founder and co-organiser of the Joburg Software Testers Meetup. I am also one of the founding members of ISST - the International Society for Software Testing and a member of AST (Association for Software Testing).

I enjoy speaking at conferences and have spoken at LetÕs Test in Sweden, Copenhagen Context and CAST in North America and served as the co-program chair for CAST 2013.

As Director and Consultant at House of Test South Africa, I am hoping to continue working with awesome people, partnering with friends whom I respect and working my butt off to promote $hit HoT testing.

Frontend tech: Keeping up with the Jones

Frontend tech: Keeping up with the Jones" covers the importance of challenging yourself to keep learning and exploring new tech. We as an industry we need to push the envelope of tech, experimenting with new projects. We take a look at how to create value for both startup and enterprise developers, allowing us to give actionable information when consulted by our businesses or clients. Then we take a look at how to practice some of these ideas and lifehack our learnings.

I am a full stack developer and a Senior Software Engineer at Entelect.

Professionally, I've worked in risk management and fraud prevention systems, the health sector, I've lectured web design and been a web freelancer.

Personally, I am a self proclaimed UI/UX enthuasist and keep a keen eye on cyber security.

In the analog world, I am involved in a couple of charities related child protection and education.

Brownfield TDD: How to eat an elephant?

I have heard so many developers say "TDD is great in concept, but I can't use it in my current project. I'll wait for my next project to introduce it..." and they never do. Let's be honest TDD is not easy, especially when you have a large legacy code base to deal with, and if you are waiting for the perfect situation to start it may never come around. You need to make it happen. This talk will give you practical handles on how to introduce TDD as one of your development practices in your existing brownfields (legacy) project. When do we start? Well, there is no better time than the present!

I have been involved in professional application development for the past 15 years and I have been practicing TDD for 9 years. I have spent most of the past 7 years assisting customers in successfully getting their failing software projects back on track.

Building responsive off-line web applications with CouchDB and PouchDB

People are using our web applications on mobile devices, so internet connectivity is no longer always guaranteed. We need to build applications that work offline. Enter PouchDB, a database that works in the browser and CouchDB, a NoSql database that replicates. Combine both of these and you can build responsive applications that work whether the user is online or offline. In this talk I will introduce both of these great database technologies, show you how to get started with CouchDB and PouchDB, and demo many ways you can combine them for an amazing web experience for your users.

Garren is a JavaScript fanatic. As a Apache CouchDB Project Management Committee member, he has spent the last few years working on Fauxton, the new CouchDB Web Interface as well as contributing to PouchDB. He is the founder of Red Comet Labs a software development consultancy and is a regular contributor to OpenSource code. Garren is also the creator of Classroom 7, an online course building application. He loves living under the African sun in Johannesburg.

How About Treating Infrastructure-as-Code like Code?

Nowadays, infrastructure automation is a necessity to achieve repeatability of deployment processes across multiple servers with minimal/zero human intervention. Yet, mere automation has proven to be insufficient when trying to keep up with ever growing business requirements.

Tools such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible have consequently emerged to ensure versatility and consistency of automated infrastructure. These tools provide ways to treat server provisioning and configuration management as we would treat software source code; thus making it possible to apply software development practices.

Unfortunately, just like with the rest of our software code, infrastructure code can grow difficult to maintain when good practices are not followed thoroughly. And that is even a bigger problem when multiple teams are involved.

In this session, I will share my experience of some Chef anti-patterns. I will then discuss the approaches that can be taken to address them. More specifically, I will show how software principles such as DRY, domain modelling and versioning can make a difference for teams who need to collaborate on automated infrastructure.

Charlene is a developer who is currently working at ThoughtWorks. Before that, she lectured programming to Computer Science students. As a consultant, she helps deliver software solutions across different business domains.

She enjoys being a polyglot developer and does not mind wearing the DevOps hat to simplify the way to production.

Her past talks include a keynote at Rubyfuza and a presentation on mobile health services at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women conference in the United States.

Patiently waiting for Angular 2

We're stuck in limbo with angularjs 1.x, knowing that v2 is looming large on the horizon - with significant changes, but no clear upgrade path. In this session we'll focus on some of the major design flaws of angular 1, the reasons behind the change, and work through how to best future-proof your code. Even if angular 2 doesn't become a 'thing', we can make our angular 1 code the best it could be.

Major changes between angular 1 and angular 2

How to avoid the biggest angular 1 performance pitfalls

How to structure and partition angular applications for development at scale (both amount of functionality and team size).

How to start preparing existing angular applications for v2

Mike Geyser is a programmer at BBD, specialising in designing and building for the web platform. He's been hacking on the web since geocities was a thing, has a long-lived love affair with javascript, and has (almost) come to terms with the fact that he will never have a programmer beard. While he has worked on some interesting large-scale enterprise applications, it is the challenges of the public web that really appeals to him - having earned his stripes on high volume transactional websites. He works primarily in javascript, C# and (unfortunately) java, and seldom refers to himself in the third person.

Scrum, Kanban, Agile Portfolio Management with Visual Studio Team Services

Join us to discuss how to use Visual Studio Team Services to manage your agile team(s) and find out how we are using the tooling. See what’s coming and share your mind for any future work.

Willy-Peter Schaub is a program manager with the Visual Studio ALM Rangers at the Microsoft Canada Excellence Center (www.microsoft.com/en-ca/sites/vancouver-development-center).

Since the mid-’80s, he has been striving for simplicity and maintainability in software engineering. His blog is at aka.ms/willyblog and you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wpschaub.

Lessons learned while crawling the internet with Kubernetes

Johann is an extremely passionate engineer and long time techie. He has a passion for continued learning and playing and due to this he holds a wide scope of language / framework / service knowledge and always trying to find the tools that fit. Johann has a deep understanding of systems ranging from embedded to large data processing services; and is also experienced in developing successful services from front to back. He is currently working on a ton of cool products.

He is a regular on the local tech scene in Cape Town and attends every conference possible. He also helps to run the local NodeJS chapter (meetup.com/nodecpt/) and helps other groups organize and source speakers.

Johann is experienced in building and team leading large scale systems with past work examples such as a Data Aggregation and Reporting service being used by a few US based financial companies. Currently, his main focus is building and leading development for a real time betting site, where large amounts of data needs to be processed and shown in a way that makes sense to the user.

He also builds, maintains and leads one of the four national microchip databases for Southern-Africa that is currently working with a few local organisations to find pets that have gone missing and get them home.

Using forensic techniques for targeted refactoring

Everybody seems to be in agreement that maintenance is the most expensive phase of software development and that we as developers read more code than we write.

There has also been better adoption of agile methodologies and continuous delivery which are essentially putting parts of your code live (and therefore in maintenance) much earlier.

What all this means is that there is a very clear need for focused refactoring to make live code more readable and hence more maintainable. Of course, this has to be balanced against the cost implication - rewriting all bad code you come across is not sustainable either.

In this session we will look at how we can use forensic techniques to identify bad design and the code most in need of refactoring in your projects.

We will use version control data along with complexity measures to identify hotspots in your code that is not only complex, but that changes often. By doing this we can focus our refactoring on the code that will slow us down most often.

The techniques used is tool and language independent, so will work on pretty much any project you may be maintaining.

I'm a software developer who develops mobile apps for Discovery by day and tries to find ridiculously interesting projects to tinker with by night.

My decade of work experience includes setting up an SMS service for USAID in Afghanistan, consulting on a mobile CRM system in Costa Rica and helping out with systems for an SMS campaign during presidential elections in Zambia.

My tinkering has included computer vision, robotics and home automation projects. This has led to talks on using Sci-fi interfaces as inspiration, using computer vision to keep physical and electronic scrum boards in sync and getting started with robotics using Javascript.

However, what I am really passionate about is producing quality code. I'm always looking for better ways to refactor legacy code.