Agile At Scale

by Aaron Hoffman

For the past year I've been working in an environment with over 30 agile development teams all working simultaneously on the same product/platform. This has been a new experience for me as I am used to working in environments where only a couple agile teams are working together at any given time (and usually those teams are pioneering the methodology at that company, working along side teams developing software using a waterfall methodology.) Working with so many different agile teams simultaneously has been a very enlightening experience. Most of the usual battles new agile teams face have been fought and won, and new and interesting challenges arise. Come to this session to learn how 30 team, with over 300 repos, all work together on the same product and release functionality independently of each other.

AngularJS Best Practices

by John Urberg

Angular has become one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. Most tutorials, including the one included with the Angular documentation, use outdated practices. This presentation will provide an overview of the framework and discuss the current best practices for using those features.

Applied RequireJS: Modular JavaScript for Fancy People

by Jeremy Wagner

How to implement RequireJS into your applications, taught in a simple and applied manner. The goal by the end of the talk is that anyone in the room will be able to immediately integrate RequireJS into their applications with minimal effort and with confidence. Topics covered include: An introduction to modules, RequireJS configuration, RequireJS optimizer, implementing the optimizer into your grunt workflow, and a short tour through an application powered by Knockout and RequireJS.

ASP.NET MVC UI Recipes: Build Better Interfaces With Less Code

by Dustin Ewers

Who doesn’t want to get more done in less time?

ASP.NET MVC gives us an excellent toolset for building web applications. Unfortunately, due to its rapid evolution, good documentation is hard to find. However, using some simple techniques, you can build user interface components that can speed up development while maintaining a clear separation of concerns. In this presentation, we’ll learn how to build custom controls, templates, and custom validation. Save time while creating cleaner code.

Building Adaptive iOS & Android Apps

by Brad Broulik

Want to learn how to create adaptive iOS and Android apps that are optimized for both small and large devices? In this talk, we’ll explore the latest iOS and Android techniques we can apply to create universal apps that adapt their content for all device sizes. Topic discussed will include:

• Adaptive advantages
• Adaptive layouts - master/detail, grids, and custom layouts
• Adaptive content - popovers, self-sizing cells, dynamic or scalable type
• Adaptive images - images by scale or size class and vector icons
• Adaptive testing - resizable emulators and previewing multiple layouts

Communicate All the Things!

by Kyle Tyacke

In this talk we’ll look take a look at WebRTC, a rather new technology that is giving Javascript developers the tools to add real-time communications to their applications without the need for plugins. We’ll examine the key components of this standard, look at how peer to peer connections are established, and discuss how you can start using it in your applications today using the Respoke Javascript library!

Continuous Delivery in the Cloud

by Ken Sykora

Continuous Delivery is a great way to reduce times in development cycles and deploy new features and enhancements faster. In this session, we will cover the build pipeline and all the different steps that are needed to automate a release cycle. We will review a simple website example and watch it from start to finish, covering configuration steps. Examples will be shown using Visual Studio, Git, Selenium, AppVeyor, Load Impact, Sauce Labs Continuous Integration, and Azure / Azure Powershell Management technologies for deployment.

Creating a High Performance Tree Directive in Angular

by Stephen Erstad

Building Angular directives can be a challenging proposition, building reusable directives is even harder, and building ones that scale is a whole different beast. We will walk you through building a Angular tree directive from scratch that handles tens of thousands of nodes while maintaining performance. We will show you where the dragons live and how to skirt their lairs. Included topics: Avoiding digest cycle limitations, compilation and linking and why it matters to you, templating without using transclusion (for reasons we will discuss), and why all of this is going to get better for developers in Angular 2.0.

Debugging Mobile Web Performance

by Dan Callahan

The mobile web continues to be a challenging place for developers and users alike. In this session, attendees will learn how to diagnose issues that occur in mobile browsers, with an emphasis on tooling and performance testing. This session isn’t aimed at experts, but at developers who know the foundations of the web (HTML, CSS, JS) and want to learn how to tackle bugs on mobile browsers. We'll specifically look at performance in terms of networking, framerate, and, memory use.

Dynamic Optimization - One Algorithm All Programmers Should Know

by Barry Stahl

This simple technique that every programmer should know can simplify certain types of problems tremendously, allowing us to find an optimal solution to difficult problems quickly and easily using a mathematical process called Dynamic Programming (not to be confused with Dynamic Languages or Functional Programming). In this session, we will run through examples of using this technique to solve several problems, both "on paper" and in code.

Getting Started with MongoDB

by Richard Brantley

MongoDB is one of a number of “NoSQL” database servers that stores data as documents – represented in JSON – rather than the traditional columns/rows/tables model. It is designed to be very useful for certain use cases, but is a poor fit for others. In this presentation we will discuss what exactly MongoDB is, discuss what types of applications are appropriate for it and which types are not, and walk through the basics of installing, issuing queries and using indexes. No special experience is required but some familiarity with database concepts and JSON will be helpful.

Going Beyond ReSharper with Roslyn

by Jason Lattimer

Most developers want to be able to write better code in less time which is why tools like ReSharper are so popular. If you've been keeping up on the latest from the Microsoft developer front you've probably heard about the .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn"). Beyond having visibility into the inner workings of the compiler one of the main features is the set of code analysis APIs it provides. In this session we'll walk through using those APIs to create your own ReSharper-like code refactorings and code fixes using the latest CTP of Visual Studio 2015. With any luck you'll leave with some ideas on how you can use the .NET Compiler Platform to scratch a couple items off your own personal "I wish Visual Studio did this" list.

Going Independent: The Secrets of Contracting, Consulting, Freelancing And Otherwise Striking Out On Your Own In The Software Business

by J Wynia

What exactly is all involved in leaving a regular job as a developer to strike out on your own? In this session, we'll talk about the full spectrum of the software world beyond 8 to 5 employment, including: 1099/W2/Corp differences, taxes and deductions, rates, healthcare/sick time/vacation, planning, avoiding pitfalls, dealing with recruiters, stability, and more. By the end, you'll have answers to the most common questions and resources to dig in further if you decide that working this way is right for you.

Intro to Rust: A New, Memory Safe, Systems-Level Programming Language

by Dan Callahan

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents almost all crashes, and eliminates data races. It accomplishes these goals by being memory safe without using garbage collection. And it just hit 1.0.

This presentation will provide an introduction to the Rust programming language, what it's good at, and why you might prefer it over C for your next project requiring low-level optimization. I'll also demonstrate using common C-style FFI mechanisms to call into functions written in Rust from other programming languages, like Python, Ruby, or Node.js.

Rust is already being used in nontrivial, real-world projects. At Skylight (http://skylight.io), Yehuda Katz is wrapping Rust inside a Ruby gem in order to profile Rails app performance with "low enough overhead that you can leave it always-on in production" (http://blog.skylight.io/our-new-featherweight-agent/). At Mozilla Research, the Servo project (https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design) is using Rust to "develop a new Web browser engine [...] that takes advantage of parallelism at many levels while eliminating common sources of bugs and security vulnerabilities associated with incorrect memory management and data races."

Introduction to HTTP/2

by Sean MacAvaney

Web developers are told that hacks like resource inlining, domain sharding, and image spriting are best practices for improving website performance. But these hacks are just to work around the limitations of an aging protocol. Although HTTP/1.1 has served the world fairly well for the past 15 years, changes to the way in which we use the Internet have pushed this protocol beyond what it was designed to do. The HTTP/2 specification addresses many of these limitations, while also making better use of network resources. Topics to be discussed are HPACK header compression, multiplexing, server push, and security considerations. Basic knowledge of TCP and HTTP/1.1 is recommended.

JavaScript Forensics

by Todd Gardner

Something terrible happened here. Traces of errors litter the floor; memory leaking from cracks in the ceiling. Someone lost their object context in the corner. Everything reeks of jank. In this session, a JavaScript error tracking expert breaks down a series of common and complex crimes against web applications. You’ll leave the session armed with techniques and tools to detect, diagnose, and fix your JavaScript web applications. Bring your bugs and let’s fix up our web.

Live Tiles: A Universal Window into the Soul of Your App

by Carl Schweitzer

Adding compelling Live Tiles to your Universal app can dramatically increase engagement and usefulness in the minds of your users. We'll explore multiple ways to use live tiles and we'll cover just what your app needs. Come join this session to learn the basics of how to make a stellar set of live tiles for your app, and then stay for the demos on how to make super-customized tiles.

Mentoring: Let's Learn Together

by Tim VanFosson

Mentors are invaluable resources when you want to learn something. They help you ask the right questions, show you pitfalls and traps along the way, and generally make it easier to learn by letting you leverage their experience. This session will cover mentoring practices at The Nerdery from the perspective of the mentor and the person being mentored, our successes and failures, and how our practices have evolved over time. A small group activity will let each attendee contribute what has worked or not worked for them and form the basis of a round table discussion on best practices as a mentor/mentee.

Message Queues - Why Should I Use Them?

by Al Zaudtke

Messaging systems are not new. You may even be using one in some fashion already. However, ask yourself the following questions. Do you have scheduled jobs that require an IsSomething flag in your database? Do you have tables that have more than 1 IsSomething Flag? Do I have necessary duplicate data across my system? How did you accomplish it? Are my external processing tasks decoupled, scalable, or long running? Are there pieces of my system that do not need to be real-time? If you answered yes to any of these, this session is for you.

This session will introduce you to the how and why of using a message queue. We will not focus on the details of the messaging system, only the use of it. Code demonstrations will be in C# using RabbitMQ as the messaging system.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Lombok

by Wendy Istvanick

If you've written Java code in the past few years, chances are you have come across Project Lombok. While there are many things that Lombok does that streamline Java code and development there are a few that make me want to pull my hair out. In this talk, I will go over a bit of how Lombok works and then delve into where I feel you should proceed with caution, and why.

ng-owasp: OWASP Top 10 for AngularJS Applications

by Kevin Hakanson

The OWASP Top 10 provides a list of the 10 most critical web application security risks. How do these relate to AngularJS applications? What security vulnerabilities should developers be aware of beyond XSS and CSRF?

This session will review the OWASP Top 10 with a front-end development focus on HTML and JavaScript. It will look at patterns to implement and others to consider avoiding. We will also explore several built-in features of AngularJS that help secure your application.

Objective-C for .NET Developers

by Doug Rhoten

Are you a C# developer looking to get started in Objective-C for the first time? In this session, we'll explore the language with another C# developer who recently started to make the journey into the world of Objective-C. We’ll look at basic data types like strings, numbers and dates while looking at the differences between how classes, methods and properties are constructed in both languages.Throw in some tips and tricks for navigating around Xcode along with some online resources, and you’ll be ready to start digging into it on your own.

Postmortem: Don't Be Dinner

by Matt Christian

Learn about the trials and tribulations that went into development of the Windows 8 game Don’t Be Dinner from Subject Matter Games. Built using Unity 4, Don’t Be Dinner is the team's first game and follows the many attempts of 5 medieval knights as they try to slay an evil troll with (often) disastrous results. This talk will go into a behind the scenes look at development, do’s and don'ts on design and implementation, Unity code examples, and plenty of Q & A.

Realtime Web Apps with Elixir and Phoenix

by Brian P. Hogan

Elixir mixes functional language power with friendly syntax, and it turns out to be a fantastic way to work with data. The Phoenix framework gives you the power to build realtime apps with the same ease that Ruby on Rails did for database-driven apps a decade ago. In this session you'll learn about the basics of Elixir and see how to build a realtime collaborative app with Phoenix and some JavaScript. Elixir and Phoenix represent one possible future for web development. See how you can put it in use today.

Reapp - A React Framework for Building Hybrid Mobile Apps

by Vince Bullinger

We've all heard of React, the JavaScript framework all the cool kids use nowadays. But Facebook recently announced the launched of Reapp. Reapp is a way to build "hybrid apps, fast."

When most people think of hybrid apps, they think of PhoneGap. Reapp is the React way of building hybrid apps. Reapp creates hybrid apps by binding React to a cross-platform UI kit.

In this session, we'll briefly go over React - in case anybody has missed the fun to date - before diving into the nuts and bolts of how to build hybrid mobile apps with Reapp, as well as briefly comparing the experience to other cross-platform mobile technologies.

Responsive Animation with HTML5, CSS3 and the JavaScript Canvas

by Rob Robinson

Creating HTML5 games and animated applications that run in any recent browser on any desktop, laptop, tablet or smart phone requires planning and a few special techniques. Topics covered are: Planning the scenes and interactions, designing the layout, detecting the device and window size, sizing the canvas, scaling the graphics, performing animations, responding to keyboard and mouse events on laptops and desktops, responding to touch events on tablets and smart phones, and completing the game with appropriate interactions. A simple “Keep Away” game will be used to demonstrate the techniques.

Ruby on Rails From 0 to Deploy in 60 Minutes

by Chris Johnson

It's been awhile since the flood of build a blog in 15 minutes in Rails videos, presentation and blog posts have flooded the internet. The barrier to entry in the Rails world has increased for the average developer over the last few years. I'm going to bring back the kickstart approach to building Rails applications. Here we are going to learn how to build a Rails app and deploy it in 60 minutes. We'll talk about the application structure, build a sample application and deploy it (pending internet connectivity). We'll even approach some topics like unit testing and styling.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Creating Xamarin Bindings to iOS Libraries

by Matthew Soucoup

Imagine this… You’re developing an app using Xamarin and come across a whiz-bang, flashy Objective-C UI library on GitHub which would be a perfect fit. You know there’s a way to consume this library with Xamarin, but everything just looks so, so … strange.

In this session we'll take the mystery out of binding and consuming these strange Objective-C libraries to C# and Xamarin. First we’ll cover the idioms of Objective-C to get a feel for the land. Then start to find our way around by mapping Obj-C to C#. Finally, we’ll add the niceties of home by extending the functionality of the original library with a more C# approach. By the end of this journey, binding Obj-C to C# will feel just like home!

Structured Logging with Serilog on .NET

by Allen Sanborn

Logging is an essential part of an application but for too long we've been stuck with log entries that are a string and a property bag which can be difficult to analyze and correlate with other log entries. It is too hard to create meaningful logs for complex distributed systems when we are stuck using old logging frameworks. The Serilog library for the .NET framework and its structured or semantic logs allow us to add more context to our logs, more easily correlate logs across systems and greatly ease our querying and exploration of errors based on events in the system and other log entries. Serilog is easy to integrate into existing applications and can help you provide the rich data that you are looking for at development time in and in production by abstracting your logging sinks away from how you create your messages. It has a clean and simple API and a healthy ecosystem of sinks for your application to log to so you'll still be able to meet your companies standards and help improve upon them. Let your logs make you happy for once.

Transparent Web - The Future of Web Development Looks Functional

by Chris Wilson

In this talk I give an overview of several cutting-edge web development technologies. Rather than being general purpose programming languages, they focus solely on the task of developing for the web. These languages use DSLs to simplify the common tasks of writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and interacting with the database. Also differing from many dynamic language web stacks, these languages employ static type systems which can catch many common errors early in the development cycle; saving on a lot of debugging time.

The frameworks that I'll cover are: Opa, Ur/Web, and Elm. The talk will also cover some functional programming techniques that are in common use in the frameworks.

I'll present several reasons why I think that web development is tending towards these sorts of technologies. Even if you don't find yourself using one of these in particular, you may well end up using the concepts that they contain.

Untangle Your Front End Development with Visual Studio 2015

by Scott Heckel

Microsoft has enhanced the VS tooling to support the front end development standards. In this session, we will setup a web project and learn to utilize node, npm, grunt, gulp, sass and bower to get our website up and running. Never heard of those tools before? Don't worry. We will cover that too.

Web Essentials

by Robert Boedigheimer

Web Essentials is an awesome extension for Visual Studio that adds incredible new features for web developers. Vendor prefixes and visual feedback for browser support are two of many CSS related features. Browser link creates a connection between a series of browsers and Visual Studio. Changes in Visual Studio are immediately reflected in all connected browsers, and changes can be made directly in a browser and reflected in the source. There are also a large number of enhancements to the HTML and JavaScript editors. Web Essentials is a great way to get early access to great new features that may be eventually added to Visual Studio.

What is Docker, and How Will it Help us Get to the Cloud?

by Wilson Gibbins

Docker containers running on Linux are all the rage – so much that even Microsoft is paying attention. What is all the fuss about? In this talk, we will discuss:

• What is Docker? Spoiler alert – it has nothing to do with Normcore
• Why is it so trendy?
• Seriously, how might it actually be useful to developers?

I will demonstrate how to build Docker images, test them in the privacy of my own laptop, and deploy them to the cloud. In the process I’ll show lots of fashionable stuff like ASP.NET vNext, Azure, Node.js, Microservice Architectures, GitHub, and Docker Hub at such a superficial level that it will frustrate the people in the room who actually understand these technologies. This is your chance to be on the bleeding edge, defined as before the first O’Reilly book is published.

Child Safety Warning: the demos will include typing in a Linux Bash shell. Not for the faint of heart, both for people who are GUI-oriented or who just can’t stand watching typing mistakes in live demos.

What's New in C#6

by Jason Bock

Dissatisfied that C# 5 only added async and await? In C# 6 you're going to get a lot more features! In this session we'll cover what these features are (e.g. nameof and string interpolation) and how they work in detail so you'll know when to use them effectively in your new .NET projects.

Xamarin.Forms for Cross Platform Mobile Apps

by Greg Levenhagen

Mobile apps are clearly here to stay. As developers, we’ve seen a lot of technologies come and go that promised a write-once and run-everywhere scenario. Xamarin has been around for a while and allowing developers to use a C# code base with native user interfaces. Last summer, Xamarin added support for the user interface under the brand of Xamarin Forms, which provides a XAML-like implementation for markup. This lets developers use C# and XAML to write mobile apps to target iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Come see what Xamarin.Forms can do for you, where it may fit it and the pros and cons of this type of cross platform mobile development. This will largely be demos, code and walk-throughs.