2024 Lightning Talks Speaker Info

Speaker: Bekah Hawrot Weigel

Talk Title

The Virtual Coffee Effect

Description

It’s always been about the impact, the ripple that goes into the industry. We’ve intentionally never encouraged a transactional atmosphere in our community; we’ve sought to create “An intimate community, optimized for you,” because we believe in people, in growth, and relationships. This is what makes Virtual Coffee different and will continue to differentiate us from large communities: At our core, we believe in people and want to create an environment where we encourage people to grow together in healthy ways.

Bio

Bekah graduated from a coding bootcamp 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, works as the Developer Experience Lead at OpenSauced, tries to work on OSS projects, and lifts heavy things in her free time.

Speaker: Jörn Bernhardt

Talk Title

Decentralization with WebRTC

Description

Let’s look at a brief history of web technology and examine its current capabilities. Jörn will demonstrate how Flottform.io leverages WebRTC to improve user experiences by enabling collaborative input on web forms.

Bio

Jörn started developing web-based software in the last century when he was still in school. In 2018, he founded his second company compose.us where they build user-friendly web applications for clients and products like Flottform.io. In his spare time Jörn organizes local meetups in Germany and creates at least one open source commit per day to push his side projects.

Speaker: Abdurrahman Rajab

Talk Title

How to Become 10x Engineer through Open Source

Description

In this talk, I will share my personal story of how I was able to find a job, level up my experience, and gain knowledge through open source. I will touch on the graduate mindset, the impact of open source, and how my journey began with failure. At the end of this talk, you will get a few points to help you start your own story and become a greater engineer through open source.

Bio

Abdurrahman is a software engineer who contributes to open source and loves volunteering with NGOs. He has worked in the industry as a web engineer and DevRel engineer. He loves learning new technologies, sharing his knowledge with others and disadvantaged people (refugees, orphans, etc.), and empowering others through workshops and events. He is the host of the hadithtech.com podcast, where he talks with people about their tech experience and shares his experience on YouTube as well.

Speaker: Eddie Banner

Talk Title

Collaborative CSSBattles

Description

In this lightning talk, I will describe my project CSSBattlesCollab, an effort to add a collaboration feature to the website cssbattle.dev. I will explain the original motivation for the project, sources of inspiration, show a demo, briefly describe the architecture, challenges, and close with some ideas for future work.

Bio

Eddie is a backend developer with a passion for connecting people and things. He is interested in interactive and collaborative programming experiences. He enjoys expressing his creativity through programming side projects that illuminate and make opaque things translucent. He particularly likes programming in Python. In his free time, he likes playing pickleball and catching a frisbee at the beach.

Speaker: James Curran

Talk Title

Becoming a Keyboard Power User

Description

Using your computer keyboard most effectively by understanding the common shortcuts that are common across applications.

Bio

James has spent 35+ years as a developer programming in Assembly, C, C++, and C# (in that order) with sidelines in ASP/VBScript, ASP.Net, JavaScript, Perl, VisualBasic, plus a few others which he's not going to mention 'cuz if he did someone might ask him to use them again. (Shudder!) He's also a Licensed Massage Therapist (NJ), an award-winning theater impresario, a gallery-exhibited photographer, and a published playwright. Yeah, that's right. He's a Renaissance man!

INTERMISSION

Speaker: Ayu Adiati

Talk Title

Building Bridges, Not Walls: The Importance of Documentation in Open Source Projects

Description

This talk explores the critical role of documentation in open source projects. It defines different types of documentation, explains its benefits for users, contributors, and maintainers, and highlights key ingredients for creating clear, accessible, and user-friendly documents.

Bio

Ayu is an open source maintainer, contributor, technical blogger, and self-taught front-end developer based in The Netherlands. Her passion for lifelong learning and collaboration is what motivates her open source contributions, project collaboration, and community engagement. Learning new things fills her with excitement, and she's eager to share her learning in public and pass on her knowledge through her blog and Twitter.

Speaker: Andy Ennamorato

Talk Title

OTel Me a Story: Observing Code in Production

Description

You shipped your code and someone says it's busted. How can it be?! Observability is a super power to help you diagnose your systems. OpenTelemetry - or OTEL - is a set of APIs, SDKs and specs for observability. We’ll briefly cover Observability and how to get started so you can analyze and improve your software.

Bio

Andy is a father of 3 and husband of 1. He's the Director of Engineering at Ninjacat, a marketing and advertising data company. He's written bugs in nearly every programming language and likes data, devops-related ideas and all things software. He'll eat a lot of sushi if you let him.

Speaker: Nick Taylor

Talk Title

Demystifying TypeScript Generics

Description

We'll start by explaining something in the real world that we can tie into TypeScript generics, and we'll give a concrete example in TypeScript.

Bio

Nick Taylor is a Senior Software Engineer at OpenSauced. He is a big fan of Open Source and has a growing interest in serverless and edge computing.

Speaker: Agi Tanner

Talk Title

Growth Mindset in Software Engineering

Description

“Growth Mindset” has reached buzzword status and is often confused with being flexible or open minded. If it’s not those things, what is it and why should we care? Come on the journey to discovering these answers with me.

Bio

Agi is a full stack software engineer who took a non-linear path into technology. She attended Northeastern University for finance and marketing and started her professional journey at a Fortune 100 company before pivoting into the world of start-ups filling a variety of roles. Agi attended Flatiron School in 2020 to begin her journey in software and currently works in ad tech. She is passionate about diversity in the tech industry, participating in company DEI initiatives and holding a leadership role within the Out In Tech organization. She lives in Oakland, CA with her wife, toddler and Maltipoo.

Speaker: Dan Ott

Talk Title

Level Up Your GitHub Markdown Game

Description

Dive deep into the world of GitHub-Flavored Markdown with Dan as your guide! Sure, you’ve mastered the basics, but get ready to discover a treasure trove of hidden gems that’ll have you Markdown-ing like a pro. Get ready to level up your Markdown mastery and add some sparkle to your GitHub adventures!

Bio

Dan Ott is a full-stack developer based in Cleveland, Ohio. Currently serving as the Lead Developer at Sprokets, a strategic design and development firm, Dan brings over 15 years of joyful experience in JavaScript and front-end development and design. He also contributes as an Org Maintainer at Virtual Coffee. In his spare time he enjoys spending time with his two boys, playing disc golf, and woodworking.