Speakers

Allison McMillan

Allison McMillan is a well-known Engineering leader. She’s previously help leadership roles at QuotaPath, DEV, and GitHub. Allison has worn many hats in multiple industries as a community builder, managing director, and software engineer.

Allison started a podcast about being a parent in tech, Parent Driven Development and is the former board president of Ruby Central, as well as current board member. She is an internationally recognized keynote speaker and speaks on a variety of topics including building interactive workshops for engineers, improving remote work-culture, and more.

When she's not coding, you can find her encouraging her son's climbing skills, being both proud and annoyed about her daughter's sassiness, or pretending she has time to bake.

Keynote: The Most Annoying Lesson to Learn

The lessons we are forced to learn as parents make us better managers, leaders, and teammates. Parenting is stressful, difficult, and changes the very essence of your being. It gives you high highs and low lows. It forces individuals to reconcile their personality and approaches with these new tiny humans they’ve brought into the world. Parents are challenged to think differently and leave their comfort zone in ways they could have never imagined. When I became a parent, I had read the books and done the research and yet still, I was completely unprepared for the challenges that awaited me. Learn about how these new perspectives impact the way you think about teamwork, conflict, compromise, and communication on engineering teams.

Doguhan Uluca

Doguhan Uluca is a Google Developer's Expert in Angular, author of the best-selling Angular for Enterprise-Ready Web Applications, and a Principal Fellow for Excella in Washington DC. Doguhan is passionate about contributing to OSS projects and teaching. He loves Lego, playing Go, and traveling.

Intro to Qwik: The Answer to Web App Scalability Issues

At scale everything breaks. All the Angular and React in the world can't help, when even laws of physics break down at different scales. Qwik is an upcoming new framework to build web applications with O(1) scalability. It forgoes hydration in favor resumability and embraces server-side-rendering in a seamless/magical way. Qwik has plans to implement React and Angular integrations in the future, so this is definitely a framework to watch and experiment with.

John Athayde

John Athayde is a designer and developer who spends a lot of time fighting bad coding practices in the Rails view layer. He is currently consulting and searching for the right place to land. He’s run Meticulous (a design consultancy) since 1997. In previous times he was the Head of Design & UX at PowerFleet, and VP of Design at CargoSense, both Logistics/IoT focused companies, and Lead for UI/UX and Front-end Development–Internal Apps at LivingSocial. He's a nut for well put-together design systems. He lives on a small permaculture farm outside of Charlottesville where he can garden and play in the dirt with his wife and four children. In his free time, he plays guitar and keyboards for the DC-based band, Juniper Lane, and works on his solo music project, Rotoscope. He co-authored “The Rails View” with Bruce Williams. He holds his Masters in Architecture from Catholic University of America.

Design Systems from Zero to One

Starting a design system can be daunting, especially on a more extensive app or family of applications. How do you start, and then how do you implement the plan? What are the pitfalls of common approaches and off-the-shelf setups? We'll dive into how to start your team on the path of bringing a design system to your organization. We'll identify steps you can take today to move the ball forward, and finally, we'll discuss some of the pitfalls and concerns to watch for as you move towards a unified experience.

Karl Groves

An unstoppable force for change and thought-leader in an industry regarded for saying "No", I’d rather lead by example in saying "Yes, and here’s how…". I seek to offer solutions to complex problems relating to universal usability. Together we can meet both our goals: your business goals and my goals to lead the way in accessible user experience. I have over a decade experience in doing IT consulting for the biggest companies in the world and biggest agencies in the US Government. Widely regarded as a pragmatic solution-finder, my work is cited in nearly a dozen books and used on curricula in Human-Computer Interaction across the globe. I lead by doing, I teach from experience, and I succeed by facilitating others' success. When others say "That can't be done" I show them how.

All Sizzle, No Steak

An examination of the distance between fantasy and reality in the case of accessibility overlays. He discussed his research into website accessibility overlays and their marketing messages and explained why overlays are not recommended to make websites accessible. They can, in fact, add accessibility problems to websites and make them more difficult to use.

Jordan Kasper

Jordan Kasper started programming in 1993 and has developed systems on platforms ranging from IBM mainframes to TI calculators and everything in between. His professional experience ranges from startups and digital agencies, to Fortune 100 companies and government institutions. He is currently a Senior Advisor for Technology in the government. Jordan is an open source software advocate, community organizer, conference speaker, and board game enthusiast.

Jordan's participation is subject to agency approval.

Anyone Can Be a Civic Tech Hero

Government agencies produce, store, and provide open access to hundreds of thousands of datasets. Teams within the General Services Administration (GSA) create reusable components not just for other agencies, but for everyone to use. Are they perfect? Of course not, but they serve a vital role in iteratively improving the public's access to data and services.

In this talk Jordan Kasper will discuss how he created a website built on top of those tools and data to solve a real world problem. He'll cover how to discover open datasets and APIs, give an intro to the US Web Design System, talk about open source software in the federal government, and show how every one of us can help improve civic technology for the greater good.

Dave Aronson

Dave is a semi-retired software development consultant (writing code and giving advice about it), with 37 years of professional experience in a wide variety of languages, systems, frameworks, techniques, domains, etc. He is the T. Rex of Codosaurus, LLC (his one-person consulting firm, which explains how he can get such a cool title) near Washington, DC, USA. His main focus in software is to spread the gospel of quality, including defining what that even means. In his spare time, he makes mead and teaches others how.

ACRUMEN: What Is Software Quality Anyway?!

Without a good definition of software quality, you’ll have a tough time achieving it! This talk introduces ACRUMEN, my simple yet fairly comprehensive definition, that you can use with any tech stack, for free. It stands for the idea that software should be Appropriate, Correct, Robust, Usable, Maintainable, and Efficient. (Come to the talk to see what the rest stands for!) I will explain why we need a definition, and how to apply this one, then explore each aspect in turn, including further nuances and immediately useful tips on how to achieve each one. You will come away better equipped to analyze the quality of anybody’s software, give precise feedback on its shortcomings, and most importantly, improve the quality of your own software.

Justin Schroeder

Justin is a senior engineer and co-founder of Braid LLC. He’s also the creator of FormKit, author of AutoAnimate, and eternal guardian of VueFormulate. When he’s not creating GitHub trending open-source packages, Justin is a devoted husband, father of three boys, and connoisseur of all things aviation.

Design patterns for modern JavaScript

The IE11 winter is over! While we were hibernating, JavaScript evolved dramatically — yet most of our design patterns haven’t. Developers (yes, you) — it’s time to refresh how we author our “everyday code” and leverage these new tools! This talk will discuss new patterns for creating a global store, memoizing instance data, emitting events, parsing strings, and observing DOM elements. The future of JavaScript is already here — we just need to learn how to use it.

Chris Lorenzo

Chris enjoys building/motivating teams and ramping up new projects using the latest patterns and web primitives. At Comcast he has led development on many major projects including XFINITY Home and XFINITY xFi. Outside of Comcast he is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies and loves hiking and chilling on the beach.

Intro to Progressive Web Apps

What’s a progressive web app (PWA)? Should you turn your site into a PWA? Does it replace the need for a Native Web App? Do PWAs work offline?

This session will provide answers to these questions and show you how to create a reliable, fast and engaging PWA. We’ll work through enabling a web app for ‘Add to Home Screen’ support by creating a web app manifest and service worker. Next, we’ll leverage the service worker to optimize loading of images for different devices and network speeds. We’ll wrap up with pushing a web notification to our new PWA.