Lightning Talk 2023 Speaker Info

Gant Laborde

Talk Title

Fearless and Fabulous: Conquering Your Stage One Laugh at a Time

Description

Bio

Gant Laborde is an owner of Infinite Red, mentor, adjunct professor, published author, and award-winning speaker. For 20 years, he has been involved in software development and continues strong today. He is recognized as a Google Developer Expert in Web and Machine Learning, but informally he is an “open sourcerer” and aspires to one day become a mad scientist. He blogs, videos, and maintains popular repositories for the community. Follow Gant’s adventures at https://gantlaborde.com/

Taiwo

Talk Title

Self-Assessment: A Growth Pointer

Description

Self-Assessment: A Growth Pointer" is a talk that focuses on the importance of self-assessment in the tech industry. The talk explores how self-assessment can be used as a powerful tool for personal and professional growth and provides practical tips and strategies for implementing it effectively.

Bio

Taiwo is a Nigerian-based software engineer. He works at Grace Health. He studied electronics engineering in university but hasn't practiced for a day. He is a huge community person, loves Open-Source and cats.

Matt McInnis

Talk

ChatGPT for Developers

Description

<h1>ChatGPT for Fun and Profit</h1>
<p>Network error. Please login.</p>

BIO

Full-stack developer (Rails+React) at Typist based in Toronto, Canada. Former artificial intelligence lead at IBM and Microsoft, mathematics professor at Centennial College and Saskatchewan Polytechnic. I really love brunch.

Roger Gentry

BIO

Roger has managed the security and compliance for clients across the United States. Providing CTO/CSO level consulting to a variety of industries, Roger has worked with customers to achieve successful compliance certifications from PCI, ISO, SOC, and more.

Talk Title

Domains, DNS - The map that makes the internet

Description

Have you ever wanted to setup a website but overwhelmed with the "getting started" part? This talk will take you through the steps from buying a domain, to understanding the basics of DNS and how this connects to a hosting provider to take your website or app from idea to the World Wide Web.

Amy Shackles

Talk Title

Regular Expressions for Great Good

Description

Regular Expressions: Some hate them, some love them, some learn to live with them. But regular expressions can make your life easier if you let them. Let me show you how.

BIO

Amy is a Senior Software Engineer currently working at MURAL. She loves information, human interaction, solving problems, helping people, and cats - not in that order. She spends most of her free time lately learning Spanish, practicing calligraphy, singing, writing parody songs, and crocheting.

12:05-12:15 break

Dan Ott

Talk Title

Look for the Holes: Surviving Survivor Bias

Description

Bio

Independent front-end designer and developer, father, #ADHD person, and Clevelander. He/himIndependent front-end designer and developer, father, #ADHD person, and Clevelander. He/Him

Meg Gutshall

Talk Title

Low-Key Stalking for the Job Seeker

Description

In this Lightning Talk, I'll show you how to use the front, side, and back doors to approach your job search. This includes identifying the email addresses of key contacts, using social media strategically, and connecting with prospective employers in a way that will stand out. Get ready to dig in and uncover information you never knew existed!

BIO

Meg is a Ruby on Rails developer with a passion for open source and tech for good. She's always smiling, continuously learning, and quick to strike up a conversation. She takes her advice with a grain of salt & a shot of tequila.

Julia

Talk Title

A Great First Chapter: New Employee Growth & Your Content Pipeline

Description

I am proposing a new model for using technical blogging, friction logs, and other informal types of technical writing as a required part of a new-hire onboarding experience.

I'll present an outline of how this plan would work in practice and explain the benefits to all parties. New hires learn more deeply, product engineering teams gain greater insight into UX/DX, new employees have a deliverable product during those nebulous early weeks of onboarding, and companies build a stronger content pipeline by identifying and nurturing strong writers. Everyone wins!

If I were to go into private consulting, I think this model would be part of my 'unique value prop'. This talk is the start of working out the details in my proposal and getting feedback on the idea.

BIO

Julia Seidman is a technical marketing consultant and developer in the Seattle area. She has 2 terrific kids and a wonderful partner, and her family cos-plays as a “normal” family.

Julia is a believer in the careen, rather than the career.

After studying anthropology and writing a senior thesis on the ethics of museum collections of human skeletal remains, she took the job she could get, which was fundraising for a hospital.

From there, she became a financial analyst and employee educator for 401(k) and pension plans. After that, she got a Master’s in Teaching, and taught high school English, ESL and Debate for most of a decade.

Now, she works as a freelance technical writer and software developer, specializing in technical content marketing.

Along the way, she has learned a lot about a lot of things, including the Python ecosystem.

Brian Meeker

Talk Title

Taming Personal Knowledge Management With Obsidian and Dataview

Description

Obsidian allows you to take notes entirely in Markdown. Dataview lets you query metadata in those notes. Come learn how you can use them to track your life for fun and (no) profit!

BIO

Brian Meeker is a full stack engineer who occasionally leaves his basement in Indiana. Currently, he works as a Senior Engineer at Online Rewards. He works mostly in Elixir these days, but has a past littered with a wide variety of technologies and platforms. Outside of work, Brian is a devoted father, avid nerd, and lover of metal.

@CuriousCurmudge https://hachyderm.io/@brianmeeker https://brianmeeker.me/

Josh

Talk Title

What's a Linter

Description

This comes up a lot for me in day-to-day work because I work on linter tooling. I learned a lot of devs don't know what ESLint is vs. a formatter (Prettier), language (TypeScript), or other tooling. It'd be cool to go over the stuff a linter (e.g. ESLint) can or can't do. At the least:

* Differences between what a formatter vs. linter vs. type checker are

* Stylistic rules vs. bug-catching

* Why you would (or wouldn't) want to use one

Bio

Hi, I’m Josh! I’m an independent full time open source developer. I work on projects in the TypeScript ecosystem, most notably typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. I’m also the author of the O’Reilly Learning TypeScript book, a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and an active conference speaker.

@JoshuaKGoldberg joshuakgoldberg.com https://fosstodon.org/@JoshuaKGoldberg

BekahHW

Talk Title

The Power of Storytelling

Description

As humans, we are hard-wired to respond to stories. In fact, stories may be one the most important tools we have to fight the isolation of modern life. Storytelling powers imagination persuasion, and motivation. It provides a path for meaningful growth and deep connection in our shared humanity. This talk points out some of the opportunities to use storytelling to create your company culture and to build trust.

BIO

Bekah graduated from the Flatiron School Software Engineering program in May of 2019 and since then has spent time as a frontend developer, started the Virtual Coffee developer community, spent time in DevRel and has continued to mom her four kids. She currently co-hosts the Virtual Coffee podcast, tries to work on her postpartum wellness OSS project, and lifts heavy things in her free time.