Accessibility Testing 101
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Accessibility is important to ensuring that everyone has access to services and information needed to help them live as independent and fulfilling of lives as possible. However, sometimes ensuring things are accessible can be a bit of a daunting process to get started with when you initially start looking into it. This talk will delve int...
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AI agents are calling APIs, submitting forms, and sending emails—but how do you control what they’re allowed to do? As agents act on behalf of users or organizations, traditional patterns like OAuth, session tokens, and role-based access often fall short.
In this talk, we’ll explore how machine identity is evolving to meet this new lands...
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In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, choosing the right approach can be as critical as the solution itself. Should you build a tailored machine learning model, leverage the power of large language models (LLMs), or integrate with AI copilots? Each option has unique strengths, trade-offs, and resource requirements, and...
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The explosion of AI capabilities, particularly with Large Language Models (LLMs), has created both incredible opportunities and significant architectural challenges for experienced software professionals. While conversational interfaces capture the headlines, realizing the true potential of AI requires building programmatic systems that c...
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Have you ever searched for "how to authenticate an API call" and been confused by the dizzying array of techniques, terminology, jargon, and acronyms that come back?
This session is designed for anyone that's struggling to make sense of modern authentication options. You'll learn the differences between OAuth, API Keys, HMAC, JSON Web...
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Discover the art of unraveling complexity in your software projects and returning to the fundamental principle of KISS ("Keep It Simple, Software developer"). As complexity grows in any system, so do its potential points of failure, underscoring the importance of mastering the art of software architecture simplification.
Journey with u...
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As feature flags move from simple toggles to core infrastructure, engineers face complex technical challenges that aren't covered in basic tutorials. This technical session dives deep into 3 critical problems in feature flag architecture at scale: maintaining consistency across regional deployments, handling circular dependencies between ...
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How do we effectively evaluate human talent in a world where AI tools can solve many coding challenges and complete take-home projects? This session explores the need to update our interviewing processes in the tech industry.
We'll explore:
- The limitations of traditional technical interviews in the age of AI assistants.
- Approac...
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Is your team struggling with undocumented knowledge, repeating the same conversations, or relying on tribal memory? You might be in an invisible documentation crisis—where critical information is lost even without anyone leaving. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
Great documentation can be the difference between a thriving te...
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Many companies use end-to-end testing to release high-quality software and stay competitive. With tools like Playwright and Cypress, testing web applications has become easier and more enjoyable.
As a software consultant, I have faced challenges that can make or break an E2E testing strategy. Slow tests caused by time-based waits, flak...
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Is your cloud environment a warm and inviting habitat or a fragile ecosystem everyone is afraid to touch? The migration to the cloud rarely starts with best practices. Every company has shameful infrastructure that was manually configured. However, at some point we decide our infrastructure needs planetary-level alteration. Whether it is ...
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Are you tired of recommendation engines that feel generic? Today's recommendation systems still rely heavily on collaborative or content-based filtering. These models lack true insight into why people choose what they do.
In this talk, we explore the next frontier: building recommendation systems that understand what users do and who ...
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Business-critical systems in payments that support real-time transaction processing are expected to be available and highly responsive 24/7/365. These systems must be fault-tolerant and highly resilient to any failures that might happen during payment transaction processing. Resiliency testing is the key to ensuring uptime and performance...
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This is not your typical SQL tuning talk. We’re deep diving --> beyond basic indexing tips --> into how modern relational databases actually parse, plan, and execute your queries.
- Do you know how SQL is parsed?
- Why does the optimizer sometimes pick the “wrong” plan?
Along the way we'll stumble upon subtle ways things can go wr...
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Want a seat at the leadership table? It takes more than clean code.
In most organizations, leadership opportunities don’t go to the loudest or even the smartest—they go to the developers who consistently make good decisions and communicate in a way executives trust. The good news? It’s a skill you can learn.
In this talk, we’ll expl...
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Everyone gets blocked sometimes. The key to getting unblocked is to ask clear questions.
In this talk, a journalist-turned-software-engineer shares tips taken straight from the news business to supercharge your questions and get you unblocked faster.
No "one weird trick" hacks here - just insights into:
- Why asking good questions ...
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Git can feel like a boss battle: confusing, punishing, and full of mechanics you weren’t properly warned about. But if you've ever played a video game, you already understand more about version control than you think.
In this talk, we’ll reframe Git’s concepts through game design, from commit as your checkpoint save to stash as a quic...
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Home Lab - Private Cloud on a budget
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Ever wanted to run your own private cloud but thought it was out of reach due to cost? Think again! In this session, we'll show you how to build a powerful, cost-effective private cloud.
- Acquire Cheap Hardware - Learn how to source and select affordable hardware that meets your requirements.
- Utilize Free Software - Discover how ...
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Let's face it, creating estimates for tasks is not an exact science. Whether it is points, hours, level of effort, or whatever else the next fad is, it all mostly boils down to what feels like a shot in the dark.
Join my session to find out a few lessons learned, tips, tricks, and strategies for creating accurate and timely estimates ...
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Temporal is a new ECMAScript stage 3 proposal for handling dates (and times!) that will be built-in to the language and forever change how dates are handled in JavaScript. Finally after 20 years handling dates in JavaScript without a third party library will no longer suck! In this talk we'll go over all of the new types and utility metho...
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For decades, developers have been using JavaScript to interact with the DOM - hiding elements, sorting tables, and adding interactivity. But today's JavaScript goes far beyond that: dozens of flexible Web APIs let JavaScript tap into native device functionality and advanced features. In this session, live demos and code samples will showc...
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Managing for Failure
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Oh no! Your team is doing a fabulous job. You never have to have difficult conversations, everyone is getting their work done to a high standard and on time. The higher ups are super happy with you. No one on your team has failed in longer than you can remember! How could you let this happen and what can you do to fix it?
Failure is an...
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MCP Demystified 🤖
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It is the age of AI - there is a huge boost to developer productivity and an opportunity to infuse apps with solutions powered by generative AI. The challenges with modern AI, however, are providing context to AI models and taking actions on deeply contextual tasks across disparate systems.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) can help - an op...
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Do you look like a famous meme character? Does someone you know? Knowing this information is vital—both for your career and your personal life. After all, am I the only one around here who wants to avoid [Angry Walter](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-the-only-one-around-here)? And who *wouldn't* want to work with [Success Kid](https:...
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Non-Automated Automated Testing
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There are times when simple manual testing and Smoke Testing isn’t enough. Are you doing production releases with hundreds of affected pages? Or are you migrating thousands of pages from one platform to another?
Smoke testing might not be enough for all deployment scenarios. In particular, when doing manual late-night deployments and h...
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In today's competitive environment, excellence in software development practices is fundamental for delivering value and achieving business success. This talk showcases how organizations can significantly enhance their software delivery processes and value creation by integrating insights from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics...
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TypeScript is JavaScript that scales. But how exactly do we scale TypeScript? In this session, we'll explore typing strategies, features to avoid, key tsconfig settings, linting rules, common mistakes, runtime validation approaches, advanced features, and lessons I've learned from transitioning teams to TypeScript.
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Whether you’re working with legacy systems, planning new features, or reviewing a team’s proposed data model, EventStorming is a powerful tool for surfacing what really matters in your architecture. In this session, you’ll learn how EventStorming has helped teams uncover the real scope of a project, reconstruct the logic behind legacy fea...
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Many of even the most impressive apps today have one glaring bug: they become almost useless if the network goes out. Even when you have a perfect connection, anything that depends on server state is going to have some sort of delay. End-users will tell you that spinner fatigue is real! The cloud tax is a major drag on developers, too; ev...
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In a world flooded with data, how do you make your message stand out? We have been in presentations where we tune out almost immediately. This talk explores the power of storytelling as a tool to transform data into compelling, memorable narratives. Whether you’re pitching to investors, presenting research, communicating a strategy, or sh...
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Testing with a script is like using GPS, but testing with a charter is like following a treasure map.
At the heart of exploratory testing is the charter. Charters should guide our testing and help us focus our exploration on what's most important and impactful. Unlike scripts generated for test cases, there's an art to crafting charter...
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Organizations invest billions in data infrastructure and analytics, yet measurement systems often distort the very outcomes they aim to improve. This presentation reveals how metrics create structural dysfunction through four predictable patterns: proxy displacement (when indicators replace actual goals), feedback narrowing (when unmeasur...
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What if you let AI code alongside your devs—would it speed things up or slow them down? At Modus Create, we ran a 3-month internal experiment to find out. Two squads were tasked with building the same app: one squad had full access to AI coding agents like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, while the other worked with zero AI assistance. The resu...
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The WebAssembly component model brings a rich, language agnostic type system to WebAssembly and makes it practical for server side application development. Programming languages that are able to target WebAssembly components include Python, C/C++/C#, javascript, rust, and go, with additional languages being rapidly added to this list. Tak...
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Why would anyone intentionally break their own systems? Welcome to chaos engineering.
In this fast-paced talk, we’ll demystify the what and why behind chaos engineering, no Netflix sized infrastructure required. You’ll learn how small experiments in failure can help you uncover blind spots, harden your systems, and sleep better at nigh...
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