Michael Carducci

5 Essential SQL Skills Every Developer should know

1:00 PM MDT

There's nothing new or exciting about relational databases. We abstract them away with ORMS, grudgingly write a query here or there, but generally try to forget about them entirely. Then the performance and scalability problems begin. “Shading, the secret ingredient to the web-scale sauce” often won't help us.

The database is at the heart of nearly every system we build. Reading data and writing data account for the majority of performance bottlenecks. When it comes to SQL and relational databases, the syntax is easy, but the concepts often aren't. The most important knowledge is not obvious but it is necessary to make the right design, query, and optimization decisions.

Indexing, a glimpse under the hood of the storage engine and the query optimizer, and some best practices are all you need to know bring your DB skills head and shoulders above your peers and ready to build bigger, better, faster apps.

The Influential Engineer Overcoming resistance to change

2:45 PM MDT

By the end of this conference you will have learned many new tools and technologies. The easy part is done, now for the hard part: getting the rest of the teamand managementon board with the new ideas. Easier said than done.

Whether you want to effect culture change in your organization, lead the transition toward a new technology, or are simply asking for better tools; you must first understand that having a “good idea” is just the beginning. How can you dramatically increase your odds of success?

You will learn 12 concrete strategies to build consensus within your team as well as 6 technique to dramatically increase the odds that the other person will say “Yes” to your requests.

As a professional mentalist, Michael has been a student of psychology, human behavior and the principles of influence for nearly two decades. There are universal principles of influence that neccessary to both understand and leverage if you want to be more effective leader of change in your organization.

In this session we discuss strategies for getting your team on board as well as when/how to approach management within the department and also higherup in the organization.

Influential Engineer Part 2 Persuasion Patterns

4:30 PM MDT

In Part 1, you learned the core principles of influence and persuasion. How to we take this back to the office and apply what we've learned?

We dive deep in to specific strategies to get both the team and the business on board with your ideas and solutions. We cover several realworld patterns you can follow to be more effective and more persuasive. Part 1 was conceptual, part 2 is practical.

The Art of the Impossible

8:30 PM MDT

We all have an innate sense of what's possible. Not only is this how magicians fool you, but it might also be what's holding you back.

In this session Michael Carducci shares how he applied lessons learned in his career as a professional magician to his “day-job” as a software engineer.

Magicians have a simple process for creating new material; think of the most impossible thing you can imagine, the engineer a way to make it possible. Michael has been engineering solutions to “impossible” problems for nearly 20 years and this has given him a unique perspective on dealing with challenges in all aspects of his life.

This talk combines illusion, anecdotes and real-world examples to help identify and overcome your mental obstacles.

An Introduction to Micronaut

9:00 AM MDT

Micronaut is a modern, JVM-based, full-stack framework for building modular, easily testable microservice applications.

In this session we'll dive deep into Micronaut, it's strengths, capabilities and best practices when building & testing services, functions and reactive apps.

Offline First - The Progressive Web

10:45 AM MDT

The #1 fallacy of distributed computing is “The Network is Reliable.” Yet we still build web apps that 100% rely on a server and a network connection. What if we could build web apps that work, regardless of connection state? The promise and capabilities of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) make this possible, and these capabilities are available today.

This session doesn't focus on a specific technology or backend technology; while those demonstrations are impressive, they are only useful for a handful of use-cases. Instead we look at architecture patterns and techniques that can work with any framework, any backend, and virtually any app.

In 2005 the way we built web applications changed when Google released Google Maps and the AJAX map canvas. This approach fundamentally changed how users expect to interact with web applications. Suddenly any app that sent postback after postback felt cumbersome and positively ancient.

Progressive web apps and offline capabilities are that next big shift. Soon any app that doesn't work offline is going to be as jarring and frustrating of a user experience as it would be to go back to a pre-ajax world. Don't let this be your app!

Productivity for the hopelessly disorganized

1:30 PM MDT

It happens to us all; there are simply days where it seems impossible to get anything done. This session focuses on techniques and tips to get into the zone, stay in the zone and to protect your productivity, even in disruptive environments.

Rather than focusing on any one productivity methodology (e.g. GTD) This talk analyzes the internal and external factors that affect our productivity and offers broader strategies to get back on track.

VDD: Value Driven Development 10 Golden Rules for incremental Greatness

3:15 PM MDT

On the NFJS tour, there are questions that seem to come up again and again. One common example is “How do we determine which new tools and technologies we should focus our energy on learning?” another is “How do we stop management from forcing us to cut corners on every release so we can create better and more maintainable code?” which, after awhile becomes “How can we best convince management we need to rewrite the business application?”

There is a single metaanswer to all these questions and many others.

It begins with the understanding that what we as engineers value, and what the business values are often very different (even if the ultimate goals are the same) By being able to understand these different perspectives it's possible to begin to frame our arguments around the needs and the wants of the business. This alone will make any engineer significantly more effective.

This session picks up from where “Stop writing code and start solving problems” stops discussing what is value, how do we align the values of the business with the needs and values of the engineer.