Lyndsey Padget

If you’re using Angular 2+ and building forms the way you’ve always built them, you’re missing out on an amazingly powerful feature of the framework. Reactive forms (aka model-driven forms) allow you to build forms in the Typescript file, making complex validation and error-handling a breeze.

In this talk, we’ll walk through the steps to build a standard-but-tricky form, using the Reactive Forms approach, from scratch. Examples shown are in Angular 7. If you're not using Angular today but you need to build form-heavy applications, come see why people choose Angular's robust form features and quick scaffolding.

Would Chuck Norris ask you to come hear him speak at a conference? No, he wouldn't. He would TELL you that you're coming, and then roundhouse kick you in the face if you gave him any more lip.

“What would Chuck Norris do?” is a philosophy this session will cover in depth. Other topics include: badass vs a-hole, human duck typing, the art of [not] caring, instrumentality, and what your facial hair says about you. You won't learn any new code in this session, but you might unleash a Pandora's box of awesomeness that will change the way you interact with your coworkers forever.

BS is an acronym for… Business Speak, of course! You may have heard jokes about this office meeting “game”, but in this session, we’re taking EVERYTHING literally. Every attendee will get a BS Bingo card and a chance to win fun prizes! Randomized slides show an unknown idiom or business-y term. You guess the matching figures of speech and fill the spots on your card. When someone yells BINGO, we review the phrases and the insights behind them.

Come laugh and learn with us!

Most of us want tech to be an equitable and inclusive place where everyone feels comfortable. But it can be intimidating - or even frustrating - when it feels like the target is always moving. The things that didn’t seem like a problem yesterday suddenly are, and we’re not sure what we should be doing instead.

Rather than approaching this subject with anger or blame, we will instead focus on understanding and practical advice you can use to make your workplace more enjoyable and welcoming to all. At the end of this session, there will be a significant amount of time for Q&A, where we can have an open dialogue about how to become better allies.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Git is the most popular source control management in development shops today. And for good reason; its power overshadows tools you may have used in the past, such as Subversion or Team Foundations. While most developers and companies know this, making the switch can be painful. It’s all too common to lose code or introduce bugs because of difficulties merging or resolving conflicts. But fear not - it is possible to get comfortable with Git.

After a brief overview of concepts and capabilities, we’ll walk through exercises to simulate realistic scenarios. We’ll resolve conflicts, squash commits, stomp on other people’s code, fix mistakes, tag our commits, and more. All exercises will be performed on the command line, so you’ll truly understand what’s happening without the aid of GUI-based tools.

If you think that successful individuals in our field are just talented or lucky, you’re only partially right. More importantly, they are very good at focusing on the right things, making them extremely efficient. We often blame others for our inability to focus, but the truth is that we allow outside forces to drain our time and attention, leaving us time-crunched and stressed.

This session will highlight many popular productivity strategies, many of which can be applied in your home as well as in your office! Whether your issue is email or chat addiction, incessant meetings, procrastination, general disorganization, or poor estimation skills… this course is for you. Reclaim your time, your career, and your life by training yourself how to focus on what matters.

Even if you're already using Git and comfortable with the basics, situations can arise where you wish you understood it better.

In this session, we’ll quickly cover the fundamentals of cloning, branching, and merging. Then we’ll move on to different workflows, release management strategies, how to get out of a Git pickle, and more. We will explore less frequently used - but extremely helpful - commands that can save your team hours, days, or weeks of work. Finally, you’ll gather some pro tips for using Git on the command line, ensuring that wherever and however you work, you’ll become your team’s resident Git Wizard.

You may have consumed RESTful APIs before, but implementing your own can present unique design challenges.

In this session, we'll start off with an overview of REST and why/how it's used. We'll quickly get into the basic principles of RESTful APIs, terminology, design patterns, data, pitfalls, best practices, and more. Learn to identify API design smells and adjust course. Finally, we’ll use a contract-first approach to document, mock, and test an API that does not yet exist, unlocking the ability for front and back end teams to work concurrently.

This session will help you approach difficult people and situations with more empathy, and more importantly, discover practical tips on how to diffuse their effect on you and your happiness.

Does it seem like no matter what you do, you can’t make your boss happy? How about your nit-picky teammate who tears your code apart whenever they have the chance? Or the direct report who won’t do anything without you explicitly asking? When you have to work closely with these kinds of people every day, those annoying personality traits can make your life miserable. By peeling back the labels we assign to people, we will strive to understand what makes them tick. This session will help you approach difficult people and situations with more empathy, and more importantly, discover practical tips on how to diffuse their effect on you and your happiness.

The pandemic completely changed the workforce, resulting in a huge amount of churn in the tech talent landscape.

In this session, we’ll review a pre and post-pandemic tech apprentice program that was redesigned from scratch. We’ll cover the challenges and triumphs we experienced along the way - some anticipated, some not. These include communication across departments and companies, showing hiring managers that apprentices are worth the time investment, finding and interacting with “green” talent, and more. Learn from our experiences to leverage apprenticeships as a critical element of your tech team’s long-term success.