solving today and tomorrow's software development challenges
Johannesburg
27 March 2018
946
DAYS
14
HOURS
39
MINUTES
39
SECONDS
AND
Cape Town
29 March 2018
946
DAYS
14
HOURS
39
MINUTES
39
SECONDS
DevConf is a community driven, developer focused, one-day conference hosted annually. The aim of the conference is to provide software developers 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.
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 2018 Sponsor Proposal for information.
DevConf will be held at Birchwood Hotel & OR Tambo Conference Centre, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
DevConf will be held at The River Club, in Cape Town, South Africa.
