Tuesday, February 8, 2022
OPEN TALK: Extending Real-Time Data and Compute to the Cloud, Edge, and Beyond
What will the future of the Cloud and Edge look like for us as developers? We have great infrastructure nowadays, but that only solves half of the problem. The Serverless developer experience shows the way, but it’s clear that FaaS is not the final answer. What we need is a programming model and developer UX that takes full advantage of new Cloud and Edge infrastructure, allowing us to build general-purpose applications, without needless complexity.
What if you only had to think about your business logic, public API, and how your domain data is structured, not worry about how to store and manage it? What if you could become “databaseless” and forget about databases, storage APIs, and message brokers?
Instead, what if your data just existed wherever it needed to be, co-located with the service and its user, at the edge, in the cloud, or in your own private network—always there and available, always correct and consistent? Where the data is injected into your services on an as-needed basis, automatically, timely, efficiently, and intelligently.
Services, powered with this “data fabric” of application state—attached to and available throughout the network—can run anywhere in the world: from the public Cloud to 1000s of PoPs out at the Edge of the network, in close physical approximation to its users, where the co-location of state, processing, and end-user, ensures ultra-low latency and high throughput.
Sounds exciting? Let me show you how we are making this vision a reality using technologies like Akka, Kubernetes, gRPC, Linkerd, and more.
KEYNOTE: Roblox -- Enabling Developers to Build the Metaverse
Once seen as a far off idea, the metaverse today is lauded as the future, discussed daily in the media, and prominent in the public discourse — anything but ignored. Many experts have hypothesized what this will look like, and companies across industries and around the world are starting to come forth with their plans for their presence in this next stage of the digital age. For Dan Sturman, there’s one concept that’s central to this vision of the future online — human co-experience. In this session, Dan will outline the five key pillars of creating an ecosystem for human co-experience — fully user generated, persistent identity, universal availability, immediate teleportation, shared fabric — and dive into the latest technologies available for developers within each, including open source software, storage enhancements, Luau programming language advancements, avatar tech, search and discovery, authentication, and more. He will also spotlight how developers across platforms are leveraging technology and advancing what is possible both today and in the future. Furthermore, he will share Roblox’s vision of what will become the foundation of an accessible, safe, creative, and civil human co-experience.
KEYNOTE: Cisco -- How Do You Solve a Problem Users Don’t Know Is There?
Necessity is the mother of invention. It’s a well-known proverb and means that the primary driving force for most new inventions is a need. When it comes to product innovation, those needs or ‘pain points’ are most easily identified when people in different roles tell you about them. You then follow a well-defined product innovation and development roadmap to create a solution to the problem.
But how do you solve a problem users don’t know is there? Steve Jobs famously said “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. With the ever-increasing pace of tech innovation and its ability to continually disrupt established ways of working, his statement has never been more true. So what is the trigger? How can you identify a ‘problem’ by convincing users that there’s a better way to do something when the current way of doing it works just fine.
Join Sanjeev Mervana, Vice President of Product Management for Cisco’s Emerging Technologies & Incubation team, as he details how to identify, generate, screen, and manage new innovation and incubation ideas that ultimately fuel growth.
OPEN TALK: Breaking Deep Learning Models with Adversarial Examples
Computer vision models based on neural networks have become so good in the last 10 years that nowadays serve as the “eyes” behind many mission-critical systems, like self-driving cars, automatic video surveillance, or face recognition systems in airports. What you probably do not know is that there are easy methods to fool them, forcing them to produce wrong predictions. These methods are theoretically simple and computational feasible and open the door to potentially critical security issues.
KEYNOTE: Amazon Web Services -- Move Fast and Don’t Break Things: Security at Scale
Ada Lovelace was one of the first to recognize the ability of a computer to do higher order reasoning. Now, with the move to cloud, you too interact with infrastructure as code, and security as code.
It’s a new security reality: from the moment you start to build, you configure governance and security controls, identity and access management; you make choices around services and resources; you store data and backups and architect for redundancy and high-availability; and so on. To do security at scale, you must embrace the reality that security engineers are developers, and developers are architecting for security. Making the secure thing to do, the easy thing to do, is hard—but it is the only way to do security at scale.
OPEN TALK: Quantum Computing with Qiskit
This brief talk by IBM Quantum Developer Advocate James Weaver introduces quantum computing with Qiskit to classical developers, and touches on the following concepts:
- Contrasting classical and quantum computing
- Axioms of quantum mechanics with Grumpy Cat
- Using IBM Quantum Circuit Composer
- Using IBM Quantum Lab (Python notebooks)
- Resources and next steps for attendees
KEYNOTE: Blockchain.com -- Leading Engineering Teams During The Trillion-Dollar Crypto Boom
2021 has been a breakthrough year for the crypto industry, reaching 100 million+ global users and a multi-trillion dollar market cap. In this session, Lewis will discuss what it takes to lead engineering teams building blockchain-powered products to keep up with skyrocketing mainstream demand. From implementing effective hiring methods to strategizing team roles and responsibilities, Lewis will share how technical leaders can hire and inspire high-impact teams to build industry-leading products. He will integrate key lessons learned while scaling the engineering team at Blockchain.com, increasing technical headcount over 1000% and helping the company achieve a $5 billion-plus valuation.
KEYNOTE: LocalStack -- Fast-track Your Cloud Innovation by Removing Developers Hand Cuffs
Policies, norms, and practices are an integral part of software development practices and undeniably important for delivering scalable and robust systems at high quality. Yet, they can simultaneously be a blocker to fast, iterative development processes which are vital to creating a culture of continuous innovation across the organization.
Even cloud developers who are striving to build bleeding-edge systems are often restricted in delivering value at their optimal personal speed. Handcuffs are being imposed on them by important, yet cumbersome cloud approval processes, as well as unnecessarily long wait times during deployment and testing stages within their cloud infrastructure.
In this talk we will shed some light on common inefficiencies and roadblocks that cloud developers face when developing against public clouds. We will discuss how to give back control and autonomy to developers over their own dev environments and tools with local and hybrid cloud development patterns, to foster innovation and fast feedback loops. Most importantly, we will highlight how the same concepts which give full autonomy to individual developers can also be leveraged to substantially improve team collaboration and feedback loops across team borders, for the best possible developer engagement across all stages of the CI/CD pipeline.
If you feel like you are not getting the full potential out of your cloud team, join me in this thought provoking session and let’s discuss strategies on how to free your development teams from their handcuffs - while embracing security, quality, and compliance.
KEYNOTE: Passport -- Breaking the Monolith: A Case Study in Starting Over
It's estimated that somewhere between 25 and 50 million traffic tickets are issued each year. Most of these tickets are issued due to antiquated systems such as physical signage and parking meters. Commuters simply don't know that they are committing a violation.
On the enforcement side, cities struggle to collect revenue from outstanding parking tickets. It's a lengthy and inefficient process that ends up being overly punitive for their residents and expensive to follow through on from the city's perspective.
It doesn't have to be this way. Imagine a smart city ecosystem where there are fewer parking tickets only reserved for those who intentionally disregard the rules, but cities still collect more revenue from the tickets they do issue.
Like most things, the answer to the nationwide parking crisis is coders. What does scaling a smart city API across thousands of cities that all have unique needs and requirements look like? Brad Powers, CTO of a leading smart city and mobility platform, breaks down his technical learnings and offers best practices for developers tackling similar challenges across any industry.
KEYNOTE: Fast -- Building a Ship While it Sails (During a Pandemic)
How do you launch a product with a bare-bones team working remotely in the middle of a pandemic?
In June 2020, I was tasked with taking an idea to launch in just eight weeks with nine engineers. I’d never met this team, and wouldn’t for almost two years: the pandemic had just locked everyone down.
But the investments had been made, and a date was set. I had to create a long-term vision with moments to spare and weeks to deliver.
There’s a saying: Take the leap, and build your wings on the way down. So that’s what we did.
But before you wonder how many 24-hour days the engineers put in? Not many. How frantically decisions were made? Not at all. How did the time crunch inform our tech stack? (Hint: we love Python, but Go was faster). And how does one cobble this all together, anyway?
The key to building and launching a product against outlandish technical constraints isn’t by grinding a small team into dust by making them row the boat until they can’t move. It’s by building that boat smartly, beginning with the end in mind, so you can build as you row with thoughtfully selected parts that move and scale with you from the get go.
The audience will learn:
How to replicate - or modify for themselves - my unique approach to tripling our remote team around the world in just two months
How to structure their organization for optimum collaboration, management, and conflict resolution during incredibly tight release schedules
Create 24/7 workflows without working your teams 24/7
How to choose the right tech stack for the project to get a massive project to market in a competitive timeline – without churning engineers or running into multiple dead-ends and refactors due to hasty decisions.
KEYNOTE: Puppet -- Wrangling Configuration Complexity: How It's Gotten Even Harder
Our ability to manage infrastructure, reason about the impacts of changes and keep it secure and compliant has grown in complexity. Full stop. The proliferation of development tools in the market with a variety of teams adopting different solutions on different infrastructures creates a silo effect that is real and painful for many operators today. Choices that were once the domain of the operations team are now handed directly to application teams, with an ever increasing push to adopt new technologies. This talk will focus not only on “the why” of this complexity but more importantly on “the how” to get your team on the right path to manage this complexity in a way that allows you to continue to deliver software and services quickly but in a secure and scalable way. It will explore how tools, practices and organizational structures all play a role in not only surviving, but thriving in a world of ever expanding infrastructure complexity.
OPEN TALK: The 10,000 Steps of Open Source Project Health
Human health is complex - it's not something we can buy; it's something we have to earn! This exact approach goes for open source projects and their communities. A truly dedicated and loyal fanbase cannot be bought; it has to be nurtured. But what do we mean when we call a community and the open source project "healthy"? This question is what we are trying to answer at Facebook!
In this talk, we will look at the approach that the Facebook Open Source team takes to measure the current state of Facebook open source projects, and how we use these metrics to prioritize and to direct our DevRel focus. Ultimately, we aim to show how by looking at information about your open source communities, your team can concentrate on the quality of the projects instead of only the quantity of repositories that you make public.
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
OPEN TALK: Batten Down The Hatches: Using Open Source for Smooth (and Secure) Sailing Through K8s
Creating functional deployments for k8s is hard enough without even beginning to think about doing it securely. Part of your team are at war backing Helm vs Kustomize and your dirty secret is that you love straight up yaml!
As a security fan you’re looking for an easy win with zero budget to help make sure the “Department of No” doesn’t block the deployment regardless of your Infrastructure as Code choice.
In this live demo, we’ll see how Checkov (you love Star Trek too!), the open source IaC scanning tool by Bridgecrew, can handle all of that AND do so right in your IDE.
DevOps + Security = SomethingSomething… let’s figure it out together.
OPEN TALK: DevSecOps Principles
DevOps involves integrating development, testing, deployment, and release cycles into a collaborative process. Security is often considered an afterthought; something to be inserted just before release.Thinking ahead to integrate security throughout the DevOps cycles involves intelligence, situational awareness, and collaboration. This is called DevSecOps.Join this session to learn about the importance of DevSecOps, the practicalities of implementing a strong solution and hear a couple of use cases to demonstrate why.
KEYNOTE: CircleCI -- What We Learned about Hiring Engineers after 6,000 Technical Interviews in One Year
Last year, CircleCI hit hyper-growth and needed to hire more engineers quickly. But the process was taking too long, so we had to figure out how to improve it.
We tried many things, including outsourcing technical interviews to a third party. When we still weren’t moving fast enough or finding the right talent, we iterated on our process again and again.
After conducting more than 6,000 engineering interviews in one year, Michael Stahnke, VP of Platform at CircleCI, shares what our engineering organization learned about how to scale the technical interview process and find top tech talent for growing startups.
KEYNOTE: Netlify -- Developing the Modern Web with Jamstack
The Jamstack movement has forever changed the trajectory of the web by decoupling backend and frontend technologies. Today, the Jamstack provides nearly limitless choices to developers designing the best customer experiences in web applications. Netlify’s platform unites the Jamstack ecosystem of modern web technologies with a great developer experience, helping developers create dynamic, scalable, secure apps..
To deliver the speed and agility that developers need when moving to a modern Jamstack architecture, Netlify continues to expand its platform to provide a workflow and productivity that natively integrates with every major web framework, API and developer tool. In this session, Matt will introduce the concepts of this architecture, highlight how to best utilize this integrated platform, and unveil how these workflows can unleash developer productivity for your team.
KEYNOTE: Uplevel -- Burnout and Productivity: Overcoming Emerging Engineering Team Difficulties
Over the last ten years the role of a software engineer has evolved drastically. Software continues to reach unprecedented scale and complexity. Organizations from all industries are now becoming software companies and with the pandemic everyone is feeling the effects of burnout. Creating an industry with healthy productivity is paramount but too much of a focus on “going faster,” without addressing burnout, is a recipe for failure. Engineering managers need to constantly balance both and as we move increasingly remote, these problems are even more acute. Ravs Kaur, CTO of Uplevel will share insights on how today’s engineering managers can ensure an efficient pipeline while making sure engineers are happy and healthy.
KEYNOTE: ClickUp -- The 4 P's of Pragmatically Scaling your Engineering Organization
In a world of tech debt, shadow IT, app sprawl, and reliability—the concept of "scale" can quickly spiral into speculative decision making, complete re-writes and delays in delivering customer value. While planning for growth is key for any organization, the methodology around how (and when) to scale an engineering org can be much more opaque. In this session, we'll cover the 4 P's of Pragmatic Scaling - People, Process, Product & Platform, and how to ensure you're maximizing the productivity and efficiency of resources through hyper-growth.
Join Shailesh Kumar, Sr. VP of Engineering, as he shares his customer-centric approach to engineering that helped scale ClickUp's platform from zero to over 800,000 teams in just four years.
KEYNOTE: Intel -- Simplifying Design and Development to Solve for Edge AI
As data drives new and evolving IoT opportunities across all segments of the market, the role of the developer becomes increasingly important in being able to utilize existing tools to drive new ways to create Edge AI solutions. However, solving for Edge AI can be a complex design and development process as it requires determining the right selection of sensors, hardware, deep learning frameworks, or deciding how to deploy the unique use case.
By democratizing access to AI and simplifying development, organizations can enable their developers to quickly experiment with different algorithms, processors and optimization techniques or prototype and customize without having to spend weeks obtaining and setting up development boards. In this session, Bill will discuss how organizations can achieve this and empower their developers to build innovative Edge AI solutions – solutions that will improve lives and transform industries.
OPEN TALK: Embracing Open Talent
Topcoder has been helping developers learn, earn and connect for over 20 years. Adam takes a look at crowdsourcing, remote work, and open talent. What was only cutting edge a few years ago is now the new way of working. What other opportunities exist in a talent-short market for developers and companies beyond the conventional full-time role?
OPEN TALK: The Open Source Path to Developing Enterprise Blockchain Platforms and Tools
Enterprise blockchain is a team sport. The technology serves as shared de facto infrastructure for stakeholders across and between organizations. Community-built DLTs serve as the foundation for decentralizing critical processes and creating transparent operations with trust built in at the core.
Increasingly, enterprises are looking to deploy blockchain platforms in larger systems and more complex solutions. This means integrating with other systems and even other blockchains. The open source development model is now delivering on a new generation of tools and technologies to make deployments simpler, to help networks interoperate and more.
In this talk, David Boswell, Senior Director of Community Architecture at the Hyperledger Foundation, will sit down with Hart Montgomery of Fujitsu and Peter Somogyvari
from Accenture, two long-time leaders in the Hyperledger developer community, to talk about how development happens in the open source community and the latest developments in the current enterprise blockchain ecosystem. Hart and Peter are contributors to Hyperledger Cactus, a blockchain integration tool designed to allow users to securely integrate different blockchains. They are also members of the Hyperledger Technical Steering committee. The discussion will cover:
- Business and technical drivers for expanding blockchain networks into extensible multiparty systems capable of exchanging data in secure, transparent ways across a mix of platforms
- The growing pipeline of technologies for cross chain, off chain and legacy system interoperability
- The value of an open ecosystem in driving innovation and trusted software
- The opportunities to get involved in the community of communities developing and deploying the increasingly diverse technologies in the enterprise blockchain space
OPEN TALK: Demystifying NFTs
Non-fungible tokens have taken the world of digital art by storm. The growth in NFTs this year is a staggering 1500%+, and is set to revolutionize art & collectibles. In this session, I present the basics of NFTs, and delve into industries disrupted by NFTs: art, collectibles, gaming. I will discuss how to dip your toes into the NFT world by minting your unique collectible as an NFT on platforms such as OpenSea.
NFTs started off on Ethereum blockchain, but soon, Ethereum ran into scalability issues since it only allowed 10-15 TPS. This sparked a surge in different blockchains designed specifically for NFTs, such as WAX, FLOW, etc. We will discuss about how they open up new types of dApps and marketplaces, such as NBA Top Shots.
Finally, we will touch upon some of the perceived environmental impacts of NFTs for users to make informed decisions about platforms they use for trading.
KEYNOTE: Wiz -- Look to the Right, Shift to the Left: A New Approach to Cloud Security
The Shift Left paradigm is broken. If companies start moving their controls to the left, they miss out on their actual security posture in production. If they deploy tools in the CI/CD in addition to the tools running in production, it creates complexity and inefficiency as they get different results from different tools and struggle with duplicate exception flows and lack of visibility across. A new approach is required!
In this talk, Ami will review Log4shell and other recent real world incidents, analyze where legacy approaches fail and present a new paradigm to cloud security: “look to the right and shift to the left.” Companies deploy a single policy across the stack, with central visibility across the process, creating a new and efficient way for security teams to work with dev teams.
OPEN TALK: Hackathon Top 5 Demo
See the DeveloperWeek Hackathon Top 5 team demo their Projects.