DevConf is a community-driven, developer focused, one-day conference hosted annually. The aim of the conference is to provide software developers with a buffet of tools, practices and principles applicable to tackling current and future challenges in the South African software development environment. It's an event where attendees can learn, network and be inspired regardless of their specific technology stack and programming language of choice.
DevConf serves to inspire software developers. A range of topics applicable to software development will be presented. From keeping up to date with the latest technologies and trends to tackling the challenges of working in large enterprise systems – it's a buffet of experiences, ideas and pragmatic advice as well as an opportunity to connect with peers across the industry.
We have put together a helpful letter you can use to convince your boss to send you: Download the boss letter!
We are running a waiting list in case of ticket cancellations, you can join the waiting list by clicking here.
Full price tickets are R2614.99 for Johannesburg and R2350 for Cape Town.
Buy in bulk and save! We offer 8% off for orders of 5 or more tickets!
FAQ: You can change the details of the person attending on the ticket up to two days before the event by logging into Quicket. If you are unsure of the person attending, you can also fill in dummy details now and update it closer to the event.
07h15 → Registration ← 08h30
07h30 → Lean Coffee ← 08h30
08h00 → Expo is Opens ← 19h00
08h30 → Welcome ← 08h45
08h45 → Keynote ← 9h30
Clifford de Wit This talk will cover the evolution of the developer and how as developers today we are in such a privileged position to have impact in our businesses but also on the world and society.09h30 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 10h00
Quraish Behari
The power of tech is not tech. It’s people. The people who dream it, code it, eat, breathe, sleep, live it every minute of every day as they pour their hearts and souls into making, shaping, crafting… creating. It’s at this intersection of creativity and technology that the magic happens. So how do you create an environment where these creative technologists can thrive? Overthrowing the yoke of legacy, Quraish Behari takes a look at fear, failure and freedom in this thought-provoking session on culture and creativity.
Quraish Behari is the CEO of Derivco, a leading software development and IT services company in the online gaming world, employing over 1500 of the brightest minds in the industry across six offices in South Africa, Costa Rica, Australia and Isle of Man. Having started his career as a Software Developer, Quraish quite literally learnt the “business” of software development from the inside out. Coming from a technology background, he brings a unique point of view to the boardroom table as he works to shape a culture where technologists can thrive.
William Brander
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)
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.
Christina Burger
If those who can’t remember history are doomed to repeat it, maybe it’s time for us to look back at inspiring women who shaped the modern world. Featuring heroines such as Ada Lovelace, Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper, let’s dig into the history of women in technology, in order to look forward.
Christina Burger is a senior software engineer from Durban. She specialises in front-end development for online games, focusing on performance optimisation and investigating new technologies. She is passionate about software craftsmanship, life-long learning and supporting tech communities. She holds a master's degree in Computer Science and a love-hate relationship with JavaScript. When she is AFK, she's usually reading, sewing or irritating her cat.
Rory Preddy
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.
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.
Gareth Stephenson
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.
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.
10h50 → Movement ← 11h00
Jade Abbott
How often have you had to advise to 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 on 3 different REAL WORLD applications:
1. A system with high-compute and memory and scalability requirements. 2. A web system with a high number of request requirements. 3. A system with extreme database/data requirements.
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
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.
Stephen James Smith
Micro Focus is a leading software company that creates many IT software products. Its production pipelines have transformed from traditional Waterfall methods to modern Agile and DevOps methods. This talk discusses how they have included quality and security into those pipelines and gives a deeper insight into what Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is and how it can help improve the quality and security of an application during the development of it.
Stephen James Smith is a 17+ year veteran of Micro Focus and HPe. He has enjoyed a multifaceted career in the IT world. He has learnt things he never dreamt he would meet people he never dreamt he would and been to places he never dreamt he would. He started in the IT industry in the days of MainFrame in the mid-1980s. Since then he has evolved through client-server technology, different operating systems like Netware and Linux, then on to networks in support and design roles and security working with Firewall and encryption technologies. Then onto HP where he has worked in the Software Presales arena initially in the OpenView solution suite. His focus was on IT management but expanded and changed as the HP Software portfolio grew over the years.
Felix Wu
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.
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.
Claire Wood
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.
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.
Ryan Kotzen
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:
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.
11h50 → Movement ← 12h00
Liz Spangenberg
Devs often get so caught up in making things work, they forget to consider the people that will be using their solutions. This talk looks at practical examples of how design principles can be used to create better user experiences. It's an introduction to design fundamentals and good practices, with practical tools that can help you create awesome software effortlessly.
Liz is a Senior Experience Designer and Head of Design at Retro Rabbit who is passionate about human-centred design, research, and collaboration with developers. She's summited Mt Kilimanjaro, has a master’s degree in Information Design and is currently working on a PhD proposal. She strives to create beautiful and intuitive experiences on any platform and to always fight for the people that will actually be using the solutions we create.
Liam Norman
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.
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.
Barry Jordan
Micro Service architectures have become, for many, the default architecture of choice. While the thinking and patterns around domain driven design and the exposed (mostly RESTful) interface design have evolved, many of the coding patterns, practices and underlying technologies from enterprise development have bled over into a world where they are either over-engineered or simply redundant. Golang is a language that was designed for efficiency, concurrency, scalability and most importantly, simplicity. Its standard library provides many tools out of the box to support the development of micro-services, and its simplistic language constructs and concepts allow a gentle learning curve for budding Go developers.
In this presentation, I’ll talk about why we chose Golang as our micro service language of choice, the toolset that it brings to the table, and about how it has aided and encouraged a more simplistic way of thinking about how we develop our software.
Barry has been a software developer for over 15 years, spanning numerous industries including online travel, sports betting, casino and financial services. His current role sees him working as a Software Architect at Allan Gray, coding in Scala, Golang and React. Having worked for many years across ASP, C#, Ruby, JavaScript, Java and Scala, he is finding Golang a refreshing break from the norm. Barry is an Irish citizen who has made Cape Town home for the past 7 years.
Karl Fischer
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
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.
Helge Reikeras
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.
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.
12h50 → Lunch ← 13h40
Matt Cavanagh
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?)
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).
Justin Slack
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
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.
Chris Tite
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
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.
Ian Buchanan
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!
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.
Gergana Young
Level: Beginner
IoT, one of the biggest buzzwords of our time. What does this world of “things” mean for people who create software? We are not the people who are good at connecting the wires and components and we really don’t want to have to worry about that little bit of static electricity that can blow up that fancy microchip.
In this talk, I would like to show you how we can write good quality software to connect devices. How we can use cloud providers to collect and analyse data from different devices. How we can take the multitude of devices that already exist and make them smarter. In this way, we can use the skills we already have to do things that were not possible without IoT. We can create software that runs on devices and makes our lives and the lives of others easier.
Let’s talk about where the software fits in, or as I like to call it, the “I” in IoT.
In this talk, I will cover some of the histories of the Internet-of-Things, where the phrase came from and how it became such a big buzzword. I will then show some examples of IoT devices and how the more popular these “things” become the easier they are to build and use. There will be some hardware examples to emphasize this.
After this, I will go onto showing some of the code used to program these devices and how you can use the cloud (in this case Azure IoT Hub) to collect and analyze your data. I will also show how we can program devices to communicate with the internet and each other.
This is not a buzzword talk, this is a talk about writing good software for devices.
In the last few years, we have had a number of IoT talks at different conferences and meetups. Most of these talks focus on the fun parts, building devices and how to program them. This talk will be slightly different.
Although I would still like this to be a fun talk, it will also contain a lot of information that software developers could use when putting into a situation where they are required to build devices for large corporate solutions. I think this is needed in order to understand why IoT is not just a buzzword people like throwing around. We need to understand it and where we fit into it.
Gergana Young is a software developer, adventurer, and Star Wars geek extraordinaire. Intending on making a career of reprogramming astromech droids with JavaScript, she abandoned the Imperial Academy and defected to BBD. After a tour of duty in the banking sector, working on .NET, JavaScript, Angular and Meteor, she finally found her place in the R&D team. In her spare time, she builds cool software and "things" for her other passions: rock climbing, running and, of course, Star Wars.
14h30 → Movement ← 14h40
Anna Migas
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.
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.
Robert Bravery
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.
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.
Chris Dawson
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.
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.
Jaap Coomans
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.
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.
Tom Wells
Architecture, best practice, tools and technology choices when starting out your journey onto Kubernetes, Kafka and AWS and how focusing on developer experience is the key to scale.
Tom holds a BSc (Information Systems) Honours in Computer Science from Rhodes University in Grahamstown. His childhood was spent war-dialling with his 2400 modem, researching and building blue-boxes, harassing local BBS sysops, and being k-lined off ZAnet IRC servers. Although he wrote his first qbasic program at age 7, he sharpened his skills through reverse engineering, virus writing and social engineering hacks throughout high school. At university, he met a group of like-minded hackers, learned to program C, installed Slackware Linux and once again got k-lined off IRC. His passion lies in the field of applied cryptography and building open, hyper-scale and AI enabled technology platforms.
15h30 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 16h00
Greg Fullard
Like gravity, the general lack of developer skills is a reality, whether we are ready to acknowledge it or not. Of course, it is a global problem, but South Africa's unique environment has made the problem significantly worse or us. In addition to demand far outstripping supply, we have another reality: The technical capabilities of developers coming out of our education system are frequently shocking. On an annual basis, I cannot help but notice that the pool of graduates who can actually add practical value to projects is getting smaller and smaller.
This situation has many effects, but the one I'm most concerned about is the how it impacts the capable developers on a team. For example, if your 10-person team includes 4 incapable team members, your customer still expects delivery by a team of 10 people. Which means the rest of the team have to make up the difference. On most projects this places heavy strain on senior team members who need to work extra hours to make up for the work not getting delivered by others in the team; And if you combine this with Scrum Masters and PMs who are constantly pulling tech leads into meetings (because they don't have an adequate understanding of the solution themselves) we end up with over-burdening the most valuable team members.
This talk looks at the problem from the perspective of a capable, senior tech lead. It investigates whether it makes sense to be a "Hero Programmer". The guy (or girl) who stays up late and ensures deadlines are made. Nobody can argue that Hero Programming takes a toll on your health and private life, but I'm interested in investigating whether it is a sensible approach at all.
Through anecdotes from many past projects, and by referencing the research by Kruger and Dunning into "Perceived Competence", I explore different strategies for delivering your projects successfully, even if you are stuck with a team who aren't exactly rock-stars.
With 20 years of hard-fought industry experience, Greg has been many things through his career. A developer, an analyst, various flavours of "Architect", and even a Manager (Ughhh).
Although there is little doubt that Developer is the best of them all, he is probably best described as a solution architect. On the tech front, he spends his time in the Integration-focused open source world, which covers technologies like Apache Sling, Karaf, Felix, ActiveMQ and Camel. However, earning a living frequently requires more mainstream technologies, like Adobe Experience Manager.
He gets his hands dirty on any project that needs a helping hand, especially if the helping hand can be involved in exploring new technologies.
When he's not at work you're likely to spot him in the Drakensberg with an SLR around his neck, or in his organic vegetable garden.
Enrique Geldenhuys
Closures, generics, inheritance, functional programming, microservices, and reactive programming: what do all of these have in common? While they have powerful capabilities and varying levels of popularity, they also have the power to be abused and misused. In this talk I want to discuss the rise and fall of popularity for different programming concepts and paradigms. What some of them try accomplish and the benefits of them, but I also want to discuss how none of these paradigms are golden hammers, and how each of them have trade offs. This talk is aimed at all experience levels with a focus towards helping senior developers responsibly mentor juniors. I want to highlight how touting these programming concepts and paradigms to junior developers, without proper context, can quickly leave the code unmaintainable.
Enrique has been a programmer for over seven years. And as his name suggests, he speaks Spanish even though he is proudly South African, born and bred. He started off with Java and transitioned to C# recently. Although he misses Java, he enjoys hacking around in Python, and developing on the web. His favourite pastimes are listening to audiobooks, watching series, playing the occasional PC game, and going to the gym.
Kevin Trethewey
“Reality is that which does not go away when one stops believing in it” - Philip K. Dick
There are deep patterns that play out again and again in our industry and it’s hard to notice them if you haven’t been paying attention for a while.
Innovative ideas synthesised in a particular context (for example TDD, Micro Services, XP or Scrum) are then generalised as they are more widely adopted until they become so abstract the ideas lose their effectiveness. Books are written on the abstractions. Industries spring up to profit on the popularity of the abstract ideas. They become context-free dogma. Small pockets of people start to ignore the dogma and focus on what works, starting the cycle again.
As a programmer since the late ’90s, I focused on what worked, and readily adopted ideas that were useful.
A decade or so later, 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 never seemed to have a particularly large impact for the people and teams I was coaching.
Today, as a technical leader I make and observe so many micro-decisions on an hourly basis that I’m growing a deepening understanding of why my coaching lacked impact.
After all this, what have I found Really Matters when creating software?
My answers might surprise you.
For some, they may also challenge your current way of thinking, but my goals for this talk is not to convert people to my viewpoint. I'm not selling anything. I'm hoping to bring some reassurance to people who intuitively see that much of today's industry dogma is wrong. That we've been focussing on the wrong thing, and that when I've shifted my focus to what matters in reality, great things have happened.
Some key talking points I plan to traverse...
* Detecting (and avoiding) dogma * The importance of core communication skills in software development * The impact of separating decision making from doing the work * How mindset affects people’s realities, and the micro-decisions they make * The difference between changing reality and changing the perception of reality * How leaders at all organisational levels set the tone for context and its interpretation * Organisational structures and the behaviour patterns they generate * The problem with training/certification * Approaches to change that work
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.
Saurabh Agrawal
Learn how to build a self-driving toy car using machine learning, microservices, Java and Groovy using a Raspberry PI. This will be a Java version of the famous Python based DonkeyCar. Also, see a live demo of a working self-driving toy car running on various funky car tracks.
Saurabh is a true technology enthusiast. He believes that software development is an art and that one has to understand the beauty in how to integrate different set of technologies together and create a brilliant (of course a bug free) piece of software which will fulfill a given business requirement. He has always been passionate about designing and developing various kinds of software for personal and professional use. To sum up who Saurabh is in Steve Jobs' words: He is a person who always likes to "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish".
Stay Hungry - Never be satisfied, and always push yourself. Stay Foolish - Do (or be willing to keep trying) the things people say cannot be done and always willing to learn new things.
Madene Marais
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.
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.
16h50 → Movement ← 17h00
Gerard de Jong
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pamela Hill
Many developers are under the mistaken impression that Kotlin is just for the Android platform. However, more and more developers are starting to use Kotlin for web backends and even frontends.
This talk will touch on the most popular language features of Kotlin. However, the bulk of the talk will consist of demonstrating that Kotlin can and should also be used for full-stack web development. I will take the audience through the development of a web app using Kotlin/JVM on the backend and Kotlin/JS on the frontend, using Spring Boot and React respectively.
Pamela is a second-generation coder and holds a BSc IT and BSc (Hons) Computer Science from the University of Pretoria. She has more than 15 years of experience writing desktop, web and mobile apps. She loves talking about Kotlin, ask her anything!
Sewagodimo Matlapeng
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.
Code name: Lady Sunshine Half marathon runner and python developer
Mike Geyser
JavaScript is weird. It is a product of its failures as much as its successes. As a language, it is both modern and outdated. Cross-platform, yet not. Interpreted, but can be compiled. Loved, yet reviled. 'Good' JavaScript written a year ago looks very different to what one might write today, never mind code written 10 years ago. Every year a new set of features is ratified into the ECMAScript standard and is rolled out by browser manufacturers. This continual evolution can be frustrating and confusing but provides us with a unique opportunity. To embrace change, unlearn what we take for granted, and fall in love with JavaScript (again).
This talk will attempt to (re)introduce this contrarian language, addressing novices and veterans alike. It will make fun of JavaScript's foibles, mitigate its faults, and emphasize its strengths. It won't attempt to divorce it from context but will show which parts of the language you can use and when you should use them.
Mike Geyser is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies from Johannesburg, where he works in the R&D team at a company called BBD. He is a co-organiser of the Jozi.JS and Docker Johannesburg meetup groups and is a frequent technical speaker. He has been hacking on the web since Geocities was a 'thing', and has the keening wail of dial-up 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.
17h50 → Drinks, snacks, cocktails & networking ← 19h00
07h15 → Registration ← 08h30
07h30 → Lean Coffee ← 08h30
08h00 → Expo is Opens ← 19h00
08h30 → Welcome ← 08h45
08h45 → Keynote ← 9h30
Clifford de Wit This talk will cover the evolution of the developer and how as developers today we are in such a privileged position to have impact in our businesses but also on the world and society.09h30 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 10h00
Cleopatra Douglas
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.
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.
William BranderThe 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)
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.
Justin SlackIt 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
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.
Chris TiteWe 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
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.
10h50 → Movement ← 11h00
Claire WoodDid 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.
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.
Ian BuchananYou 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!
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.
Jade AbbottHow often have you had to advise to 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 on 3 different REAL WORLD applications:
1. A system with high-compute and memory and scalability requirements. 2. A web system with a high number of request requirements. 3. A system with extreme database/data requirements.
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
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.
Jaap CoomansIf 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.
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.
11h50 → Movement ← 12h00
Madene MaraisOffline 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.
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.
Anna MigasPerceived 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.
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.
Phillip Kruger
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
12h50 → Lunch ← 13h40
Felix WuUnit 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.
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.
Matt CavanaghWelcome 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?)
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).
Liam NormanLevel: 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.
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.
Quintin De Kok
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.
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.
14h30 → Movement ← 14h40
Craig Risi
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.
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.
Ryan KotzenSo 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:
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.
Robert BraveryFacial 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.
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.
Chris DawsonAs 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.
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.
15h30 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 16h00
Kevin Trethewey“Reality is that which does not go away when one stops believing in it” - Philip K. Dick
There are deep patterns that play out again and again in our industry and it’s hard to notice them if you haven’t been paying attention for a while.
Innovative ideas synthesised in a particular context (for example TDD, Micro Services, XP or Scrum) are then generalised as they are more widely adopted until they become so abstract the ideas lose their effectiveness. Books are written on the abstractions. Industries spring up to profit on the popularity of the abstract ideas. They become context-free dogma. Small pockets of people start to ignore the dogma and focus on what works, starting the cycle again.
As a programmer since the late ’90s, I focused on what worked, and readily adopted ideas that were useful.
A decade or so later, 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 never seemed to have a particularly large impact for the people and teams I was coaching.
Today, as a technical leader I make and observe so many micro-decisions on an hourly basis that I’m growing a deepening understanding of why my coaching lacked impact.
After all this, what have I found Really Matters when creating software?
My answers might surprise you.
For some, they may also challenge your current way of thinking, but my goals for this talk is not to convert people to my viewpoint. I'm not selling anything. I'm hoping to bring some reassurance to people who intuitively see that much of today's industry dogma is wrong. That we've been focussing on the wrong thing, and that when I've shifted my focus to what matters in reality, great things have happened.
Some key talking points I plan to traverse...
* Detecting (and avoiding) dogma * The importance of core communication skills in software development * The impact of separating decision making from doing the work * How mindset affects people’s realities, and the micro-decisions they make * The difference between changing reality and changing the perception of reality * How leaders at all organisational levels set the tone for context and its interpretation * Organisational structures and the behaviour patterns they generate * The problem with training/certification * Approaches to change that work
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.
Wayne Beckley
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.
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.
Gareth StephensonFor 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.
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.
Karl FischerWhere 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
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.
16h50 → Movement ← 17h00
Gerard de JongIn 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.
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.
Rory PreddyMy 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.
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.
Sewagodimo MatlapengOne 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.
Code name: Lady Sunshine Half marathon runner and python developer
Helge ReikerasIn 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.
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.
17h50 → Drinks, snacks, cocktails & networking ← 19h00
08h00 → Registration ← 09h00
09h00 → Welcome ← 09h15
09h15 → Keynote ← 10h00
Marco Heimeshoff We build software that changes the world. From optimizing small companies to connecting humans and businesses on a global scale, our work plays a hidden but major role. Software development is not about software, it is about understanding the customers domain and solving their problems. We need a culture, a way of thinking about the needs of the customers first and putting an emphasis on their language and human interactions. If we let the domain drive our design, we can tackle complexity in the heart of software. The pillars of Domain Driven Design are learning, language and empathy. With the right mindset it becomes simple to derive good models, keep them pure and aligned with the business. Simple is not easy, but done right Domain Driven Design transforms everything in your organisation: code, culture, agile and architecture.10h00 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 10h30
Melissa Landsberg
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?
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.
Rouan Wilsenach
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.
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.
Tim Lewis
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.
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.
Gail Shaw
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.
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.
Peter John Welcome
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.
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.
11h15 → Movement ← 11h25
Terence Kruger
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amy Codes
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.
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/
Janco Wolmarans
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.
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.
Rebecca Franks
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.
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.
12h10 → Movement & Lunch ← 13h00
Griffiths Sibeko
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
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.
Peter Wiles
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.
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.
Willy-Peter Schaub
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.
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.
Robert Bravery
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.
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.
Mohamed Saif
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.
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.
13h45 → Movement ← 13h55
Kenneth Kalmer
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.
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.
Daniel Irvine
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.
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.
Chris Tite
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.
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.
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.
Knowledge Chikuse
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
14h40 → Movement ← 14h50
Christian Nwamba
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.
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.
Brendon Page
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rishal Hurbans
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.
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.
Marco Slaviero
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.
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.
15h35 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 16h05
Mike Geyser
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Organizer of the JavaScript in South Africa conference; founder of Broken Keyboards Software and CodeSkills.
Matt Cavanagh
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!
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).
Dries Cronje
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.
Neo Ighodaro
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.
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.
16h50 → Movement ← 17h00
William Brander
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.
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.
Oz Chihwayi
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.
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.
Warren Barratt
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.
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.
Gergana Young
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.
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.
Justin Worthe
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.
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.
17h40 → Drinks, snacks, cocktails & networking ← 19h00
08h00 → Registration ← 09h00
09h00 → Welcome ← 09h15
09h15 → Keynote ← 10h00
Marco Heimeshoff We build software that changes the world. From optimizing small companies to connecting humans and businesses on a global scale, our work plays a hidden but major role. Software development is not about software, it is about understanding the customers domain and solving their problems. We need a culture, a way of thinking about the needs of the customers first and putting an emphasis on their language and human interactions. If we let the domain drive our design, we can tackle complexity in the heart of software. The pillars of Domain Driven Design are learning, language and empathy. With the right mindset it becomes simple to derive good models, keep them pure and aligned with the business. Simple is not easy, but done right Domain Driven Design transforms everything in your organisation: code, culture, agile and architecture.10h00 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 10h30
Oz ChihwayiIn 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.
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.
Lisa Schaffer
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.
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...
Janco WolmaransThe 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.
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.
11h15 → Movement ← 11h25
Daniel IrvineThe 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.
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.
Rishal HurbansAs 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.
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.
Mohamed SaifEnd-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.
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.
12h10 → Movement & Lunch ← 13h00
Donovan Graham
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.
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.
Robert BraveryBots, 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.
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.
Peter John WelcomeThis 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.
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.
13h45 → Movement ← 13h55
Mario Matthee
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.
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!
Amy CodesKubernetes 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.
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/
Rebecca FranksDeveloping 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.
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.
14h40 → Movement ← 14h50
Neo IghodaroThis 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.
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.
Chris TiteLog files hold a vault of useful information for operations as well as business.
Processing your log files could reveal a host of useful information.
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.
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.
Gergana YoungExperience 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.
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.
15h35 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 16h05
Marco SlavieroFor 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.
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.
Tim LewisThe 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.
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.
Mike GeyserThe 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.
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.
16h50 → Movement ← 17h00
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.
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.
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.
Willy-Peter SchaubHow 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.
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.
William BranderAs 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.
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.
17h40 → Drinks, snacks, cocktails & networking ← 19h00
08h00 → Registration ← 09h00
09h00 → Welcome ← 09h15
09h15 → Keynote ← 10h00
10h00 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 10h30
10h55 → Movement ← 11h05
11h50 → Movement ← 12h00
12h25 → Movement & Lunch ← 13h05
13h30 → Movement ← 13h40
14h25 → Movement ← 14h35
15h20 → Movement, Networking, & Snacks ← 15h50
16h35 → Movement ← 16h45
17h40 → Drinks, snacks, cocktails & networking ← 19h00
08h00 -> Registration <- 09h00
09h00 -> Welcome & Keynote <- 10h00
10h00 -> Movement, Networking, & Snacks <- 10h30
11h00 -> Movement <- 11h10
11h40 -> Movement <- 11h50
12h20 -> Movement & Lunch <- 13h10
13h40 -> Movement <- 13h50
14h20 -> Movement, Networking, & Snacks <- 14h50
15h20 -> Movement <- 15h30
16h00 -> Movement <- 16h10
Great conferences like this one would not be possible without great companies passionate about supporting the local software development community.
We would like to thank the following companies for helping make DevConf possible.
Would you like your organization associated with DevConf? DevConf offers a variety of sponsorship opportunites to be able to connect with the best software developers in South Africa.
Please download our 2019 Sponsor Proposal for information.
DevConf will be held at The River Club, in Cape Town, South Africa.
