No matter where you work, things can sometimes go wrong. How do you communicate that things need to change? What sorts of management practices can lead to people expressing themselves clearly and helpfully, even when the topic is difficult or confrontational? How can feedback be constructive, even when potentially confrontational and ruffling the feathers of people in charge? How can you criticize someone without making them feel excluded or patronized? In this talk, Rebecca Miller-Webster describes the problems that people can experience in trying to provide (or solicit) feedback in their organizations, and the ways in which teams can encourage and improve the ways their feedback channels.
DevOps is increasingly mainstream: Companies depend heavily on their servers, and this means that their operations, integration, and deployment need to be automated and monitored to an increasingly large degree. But beyond the obvious trends in favor of DevOps, what do we know? How many companies are investing in DevOps? Why? And what areas are of most interest? And how can devops engineers help companies to improve better and faster? In this talk, Michael Coté surveys the current state of devops, describes the trends, and tells us what language we can (and should) use to convince management that it’s a worthwhile investment.
Data science is all about working large data sets. Data scientists often perform experiments, in order to find interesting and useful correlations. But it’s easy to perform analyses that aren’t accurate, or that help you to draw conclusions that are less than accurate. How can you be sure that your analysis is robust? Use techniques that embrace your doubts, and allow you to demonstrate to yourself and others that the correlations you’re seeing really exist. In this talk, Hillary Green-Lerman introduces this problem, and then describes solutions which allow you to confidently describe the conclusions you’re drawing from your data-science experiment.
Coroutines are an advanced Python feature that is of growing interest to many Python developers. Coroutines can be hard to get your head around, but they make it possible to simplify certain types of software, and also to increase some software performance. But what are coroutines, how do you create them, how do you use them — and are they really that great? In this talk, A. Jesse Jiryu Davis demonstrates how you can and should use coroutines, and where they fit into the Python ecosystem.
High-tech companies often say that they’re committed to diversity. And many engineers say that they would like to see more women and minorities in their companies. But why do we want such diversity? Moreover, what does the high-tech world look like to someone who is a minority himself? In this talk, Kevin Stewart reviews a number of these topics — from the importance of diversity, to the hurtful things people say when meaning to be helpful, to the ways in which minorities perceive themselves in the high-tech world. If you’re interested in increasing the number of minorities in high tech, then this talk can give you some insights into the why, as well as some ideas of how you can start to help make it a reality.
Open-source software is now an established part of the high-tech infrastructure, with numerous success stories. Many of the contributors to open source are volunteers, students, and people who just want to get involved, or get experience. But how can you become one of those people? How do you choose a project to which you want to contribute, and then actually contribute? What can you expect? In this talk, Yvonne Lam answers these questions — the non-technical questions about open-source participation that are at least as important as the technical ones.
Angular.js is one of the best-known and most popular front-end frameworks. It’s currently going through a difficult time, with a major upgrade in progress. What is Angular2, and how will it differ from the current version of Angular.js? And how much magic will be included, and how will that change the ways in which programmers approach their front-end programming? I
f you’re familiar with Angular 1.x, and are curious about how Angular2 will do things — or if you’re just curious about Angular in general — this talk, by Rody Haddad, should put it into context, and help you to understand how much of your work will be taken care of by the framework. He does this by building an app during the talk, allowing us to walk through the development process as he describes it.
Elm is a new, statically typed, functional programming language that lets you create GUIs inside of your browser. It can communicate with JavaScript (a slightly more popular language used inside of browsers), and compiles into JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Elm offers a number of new ideas, alongside some old ideas put in a new context. In this talk, Elm creator Evan Czaplicki describes his language, and how it aims to make software easier to maintain.
Go (aka Golang) is a relatively new programming language from Google that bridges the gap, in some ways, between high-level languages (e.g., Python) and low-level languages (e.g., C). It is highly concurrent, cross platform, and compiles into fast-executing code. Now that Go has been used for a while in production, it’s time to ask: What is using it like? Where does it shine? And where does it not? In this talk, Vincent Batts reviews his experience using Golang on a number of projects, and describes what he believes to be the language’s advantages and disadvantages.
Python is easy to learn, which accounts in no small part for its skyrocketing popularity. But an easy-to-learn language can also be powerful, with advanced data types and uses. Python has many such features, which advanced users know and love, but which new users probably don’t know about. In this talk, Andrey Syschikov introduces several of the more advanced aspects of Python, including iterators, generators, and context managers. He shows that they’re not only interesting, but also useful in our day-to-day coding.