NERD Summit 2020

Information and orientation for day 1 of the first-ever virtual NERD Summit.

More info and sessions: https://nerdsummit.org/

How we went virtual: https://nerdsummit.org/virtual.html

John Sawers (https://emotionalapi.com/)

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/johnksawers/hacking-your-emotional-api

Being a good developer isn't just about slinging code; we're part of a community. Interacting with others in a community means feelings are involved.

But feelings are messy and uncomfortable, so why can't you just ignore them? Because emotional skills are critical for working well on a team, and for writing code every day.

In this talk you'll learn how emotions are affecting you by modeling them as an API and looking at the code.

Workshops:
- http://aliceamos.me/p3retreat/ (The one I teach with Alice Amos)
- https://www.p3workshops.com/ (Very similar model)
- https://thecrucibleproject.org/ (Looks great, was planning to go to April weekend)
- https://emotionalapi.com/workshops.html (A 4-hour workshop version of my talk, where you get to practice the tools)

Benjamin Schenkman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/benschenkman/)

Maybe as an Agile practitioner you have a tough time encouraging the team to move beyond the rote practice of Scrum/Agile frameworks. Maybe as an organization working on Agile Transformation you have a lot of requests to "modify" things. What are some considerations for moving past the framework toward a more thoughtful approach of implementing Agile practices? Let's have some conversations around the approach!

Attendees should have a decent grasp of the core of Scrum or other Agile frameworks that have established cadence/ceremonies.

Alberto Castro

Slides: https://github.com/albertocastro63/terraform-nerd

"Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions." - Terraform website

This tool is used to deploy and maintain infrastructure in AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Dozens more services and infrastructure types can be managed too using available "providers" from Terraform. This talk will concentrate on using Terraform and examples will be given for AWS, so some knowledge of cloud infrastructure is assumed. Material will be covered as time permits.

Topics will include:
- Why Terraform?
- Basic examples of deployment of networks, virtual servers and databases.
- Terraform modular architecture (language and provisioners).
- Managing and storing Terraform state.
- Creating modules in Terraform for code reuse.
- Best practices.
- Terraform Registry.
- Terraform pros and cons, when to use it and when not to.
- One advanced example (if time permits).

All code and slides will be provided in github, and while this is not a hands-on tutorial you can experiment with it later on.

Jackie Fallon (https://www.fitstaffingsolutions.com/about/leadership-team/)

The team at FIT Staffing will cover an overview of Jobs in the Valley, specific to Developers. We will also cover updated Salary data for tech jobs in the local area and how they compare to other areas of the country.

Jim Skowyra

Simply put, Drupal is a massive SQL database machine. And Views is perhaps the most powerful tool in Drupal for fetching and organizing data pulled from the database.

This session will introduce you to using Views without needing to be an SQL expert, though Drupal site building experience will be most helpful.

We will explore:
- The Views User Interface and what the sections provide
- Creating lists
- Creating Search pages
- Naming Twig templates to control the display of the data
- Additional modules that provide even more functionality

Karl Hakkarainen

Slides: https://queenlake.com/presentations/nerd-summit-2020/

The convergence of advanced technologies, including deep learning, robotics, and AR/VR, with the study of humanities is changing both tech and scholarship. We'll explore Yoknapatawpha County, robot-generated art, the social networks of the KKK, and GPT-2, seeing what's new, interesting, and scary.

Chad Hester

Slides: http://bit.ly/ut-performance-measurement-framework

Example Documents:
- https://bit.ly/nerd-summit-2020-example-pmf
- https://bit.ly/nerd-summit-2020-example-pmf-worksheet

Use a Performance Measurement Framework to inform priorities and growth!

You will likely get many different answers if you asked any one person on a development team, designers, subject matter experts, or key stakeholders: "How do we measure the success of this project?" That can be a problem because people are working from too many directions to be considered a team effort.

We will address that issue in this presentation by reviewing the strategy to create a "Performance Measurement Framework" for everyone to rally behind. This is a living thing that can change, while aligning everyone under common Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and holding people responsible for their hypotheses they recommend to improve those measurements. This work is heavily inspired by *The Lean Startup*, Agile development practices, and growth-driven design.

Learning Objectives:
- Analyze business and audience needs
- Create KPIs as a team for a specific project
- Create an adjustable plan to use measurements to succeed as a team
- Inform an Agile development process with critical data and aligned priorities

Target Audience:
The audience for this presentation is broad and can include: project stakeholders, project managers, designers, developers, researchers, strategists, and business analysts.

Prerequisites:
It will help to have a basic understanding of analytics, user research, conversion funnels, business goals, and project management.

Sage Orville Shea (https://www.sageorville.com/)

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DZuIFoWWmaLlKuOVipVuadENWY6Ok9n2REz7ZLbWxDA/edit?usp=sharing

Modern principles of web design focus most heavily on the user experience and being able to successfully assume and satisfy the user's needs. From menu headings to links, skim friendly and hierarchical written copy to clear functionality, web designers make hundreds of decisions to craft a perfectly intuitive web experience so the user doesn't have to think. Brutalist websites, by contrast, are abrasive and grungy with many rough edge interactions. With no clear discernment for comfort, they seem to throw out the playbook on intuitive design, or do they?

Mike Miles (https://www.mike-miles.com/)

Slides: http://bit.ly/NERDConnect

Networking with other professionals is an important part of everyone's career as it allows for creating mutually beneficial and meaningful professional connections. But, it can be overwhelming to attend a conference, prospective client meeting or a public event and try to connect with others. The ability to network successfully seems to be a dark art that a handful of people know or an inherent skill that only certain types of people possess. However like anything else, networking with other professionals is a skill anyone can learn. It is an act that can be broken down into a series of repeatable steps that can be learned and followed by anyone and everyone.

This presentation breaks down the act of professional networking into a series of simple steps and practices. Using the speakers personal experiences as case studies, attendees will learn how to follow these steps and practices to build and grow their own professional networks.

Melissa Rossi & Chelsie Johnston

Whether you're building a pattern library or a CMS site, Visual Regression Testing can support your project team in building effectively and with confidence - and Backstop makes it easy! We'll demo various ways that project teams can integrate VRT using BackstopJS, including steps for manual and automated workflows, and walk through example code and scenarios to help you get started. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how and why to implement Visual Regression Testing using Backstop at a conceptual and technical level.

Keynote by Pam Victor (https://www.happiervalley.com/)

Sponsored by Last Call Media (https://lastcallmedia.com/)

As a professional improviser, Pam Victor eats the unknown for breakfast. Her job literally is to jump into the unknown and instantly create content out of thin air with her colleagues. And now, Pam would like to share these improv-rich techniques in order to support you in improvising opportunities in this unexpected new reality. Because that's what improv is all about: The acceptance of the reality of the moment and the agreement to move forward together with positivity.

In this insightful keynote experience, Pam uses wise-cracking stories and the wisdom of improv tenets to provide immediately-applicable, game-changing tools to help you reframe challenges, redefine failure, reduce anxiety, and quiet the internal voices of fear and self-judgment that may be getting in the way of your progress and forward momentum. Ask yourself this: What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

Panelists: Mike Miles, Donna Bungard and Abby Kingman

Moderator: Stephen Cross

Accessibility is critical for all projects, but it's often not at the top of the priority list. This panel will discuss the following and answer your questions:
- Why accessibility is essential and how to explain that to your customer
- How to get started: the tools and techniques
- Integrating accessibility into your team and processes

Jacob Bashista (https://orange.haus/)

Slides: https://tiny.cc/soccerrobots

Current soccer robots are complex, uniquely machined, and require complicated camera and positioning systems. My goal for the past few months has been to build a soccer robot platform that anyone with a computer, webcam, and a couple of low cost MicroBit powered robots can get running in their school, house, or work. In this session I will be going over how the system was built, what it takes to run it, and a live demo where you can program the robots using a Scratch environment and play a game of soccer (or at least have some fun with robots).

James Morton

In systems with many sites for individual clients, such as higher education and different schools, individuals clients can want custom and specific functionality for their sites. Drupal 8 modules can be excessively clunky, difficult to manage, and time consuming to update.

During this presentation we will explore a method of using a single Drupal 8 module combined with embedded react in order to create de-coupled, reusable applications quickly; drawing from a real-life example at Brown University.

In this example, we were starting an upgrade of hundreds of sites from d6/d7 to d8, and we found that multiple schools required one-off custom modules. Instead of rebuilding all the modules in d8, we created a single d8 module which contained a directory of Javascript files, each of which was a webpack uglified react application. Using a library of reusable components, we rebuilt the custom applications in react and embedded them in a page through the module's custom paragraph type; using a dropdown list of applications defined in configuration. This method was so successful, that we extended it further to other modules which were used across multiple sites, preferring the React applications to custom Drupal modules. We plan to expand its functionality in the future!

This method has many advantages over using multiple Drupal modules, and the potential to be useful in lots of different situations. We'll look at the advantages and disadvantages of the method, how we overcame obstacles such as storing data, sending mail, and CORS issues. We'll also see a working example of the module and configuration.

Hanna Liebl (http://hannaliebl.com/)

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11rbyr0qlSkuSh4HDbbTny96Ue78thCmQwNyQKmYpduc/edit?usp=sharing

Most developers love to build new things, but maintaining existing software is also an important part of our jobs. In the front end world, the question of what to do with software and tools that become outdated seemingly overnight is a particularly pertinent one. This talk focuses on strategies for maintaining and updating web apps--keeping them evergreen--either by deciding to completely rewrite them or, more interestingly, incrementally updating them. It is told through the story of three web applications on healthcare.gov, and how we implemented a redesign and an internal upgrade from AngularJS to React in time for the seventh health plan open enrollment period in 2019. It talks about strategies for how to decide on large technical changes as a team, how to ship continuously throughout a redesign or rebuild, specific strategies for moving from AngularJS to React, and other questions to consider when thinking about how to build but also maintain apps that will exist and be used by millions of people today and years from now.

Michael Lynch (https://mtlynch.io/)

Slides: https://decks.mtlynch.io/nerds-2020/

One night, I saw an interesting post on a cryptocurrency forum. A user posted their 29-word passphrase, claiming that it was broken. The passphrase protected a wallet containing over $2,000 in cryptocurrency. Two hours later, my hastily-written Python scripts had cracked the passphrase, and I transferred the money to my own account. In this talk, I'll share the true story of how I pulled off this daring heist and why it was the most ethical course of action.

Peter Johanson (https://petejohanson.dev/)

Slides: https://petejohanson.gitlab.io/nerds20-rust-webassembly/

Real World Example:
- https://petejohanson.gitlab.io/hyperworm
- https://gitlab.com/petejohanson/hyperworm

Rust is a fast, memory efficient programming language that benefits from a rich type system and a powerful ownership model. This elegant blend of features has allowed Rust to thrive for a variety of use cases, from powering Mozilla's Quantum browser efforts to targeting another recent technology, WebAssembly.

WebAssembly is a language-agnostic binary instruction format that powers a stack-based virtual machine. It is intended to be a cross-platform target for higher level languages such as C/C++ and Rust, allowing developers to write fast/efficient code in powerful languages that can target the web, and more recently non-browser runtimes.

Attendees of this talk will be introduced to the Rust programming language, learn how to install it via Rustup, and then follow along as we bootstrap a simple Rust + WebAssembly project that demonstrates how to integrate Rust with the web platform. After bootstrapping the project, we'll add a basic "Hello World" to help highlight the tooling involved and how Rust can interface with the DOM and other JavaScript APIs.

Given time, we will also review more recent efforts on standardizing the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) that enables running WebAssembly outside of a browser context, with APIs for file/filesystem access, Berkley sockets, random number generation, etc.

Molly Taffe & Chelsie Johnston (https://lastcallmedia.com/)

Successful microinteractions have the potential to surprise and delight users, while poorly executed microinteractions can make a web product virtually unusable. In this session, we'll examine how to establish strong patterns and weave connections throughout the user experience through the use of motion design, as well as explore some common pitfalls that can break the experience and deter project teams from cracking the microinteractions egg at all.

We'll look at:
- How microinteractions might benefit your end users, your designers and developers, and your company
- The particulars of designing and developing accessible microinteractions
- Tools and tips for designing microinteractions
- Particulars of implementing motion design, both in Drupal and elsewhere
- How to facilitate the dreaded design "handoff" between designers and developers and capture the all-important nuances that can make or break microinteractions
- Lessons learned through the lens of a recent case study about a major corporate website redesign
- Common pitfalls to look out for when including microinteractions in your projects

Instead of writing off microinteractions as being "icing on the cake," let's delve into how microinteractions are more than just aesthetic, and how they can make a lasting functional impact so that you and your team can create winning web projects.

We hope the audience will come away with:
- An understanding of why and where it makes sense to implement microinteractions
- Ideas and code snippets for implementing motion design in Drupal themes and elsewhere
- Knowledge of how to consider accessibility in the beginning of a project, and thoroughly test throughout

Alexandrea Mellen

What contains your personal and corporate data, is most likely not running the latest OS, and is constantly connected to the Internet?

Mobile devices are used more than ever, generating 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide. Not only that, but they are also being targeted more than ever. 74% of IT leaders from global enterprises report that their organization has experienced a data breach due to a mobile security issue.

It’s not surprising that mobile devices have been ranked the #1 hardest enterprise asset to defend. Compounded by bring-your-own-device policies, enterprises are struggling to protect themselves against mobile threats. Attacks on the endpoint are no longer limited to servers and desktop PCs.

Join me during this session to learn about the challenges and successes the endpoint security industry has had addressing mobile. Learn about the evolution of mobile device security, where it is today, and where it is headed.

Kendra Bassi (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendrabassi)

Kendra's presentation will be about the Customer Experience and how you engage your customers through technology. To be truly successful you must provide your customers, members and accounts with an amazing experience with your brand. When you blow them away with streamlined technology that automates their journey, they will become advocates, provide referrals and continue coming back to buy more.

In this session, Kendra will define what the Customer Experience is and offer 5 tips to giving your customers a great experience with Customer Experience (CX) portals using Drupal.

Rick Hood (https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardhood/)

Slides: https://alltheways.website/

In the beginning, websites were simply a bunch of files that "webmasters" uploaded to a server somewhere via FTP. Fast forward to 2020 -- 30 years after the first web browser was invented -- and there is a massive, wonderful, but very confusing array of software, methods and services to build websites with. Much of this change has been due to the rise of Javascript, for both the front and back end of websites, and "static" site generators, as well as the rise of SaaS offerings from Squarespace to Contentful.

This talk will offer a brief history of how we got here, and then tour and describe the many methods available today for building and publishing websites.

Topics covered will include: Squarespace to Drupal to Contentful to Graph CMS; Jekyll to Eleventy to Gatsby; Bluehost to Acquia to Netlify; and ASP to Rails to PHP to Javascript ...and more.

Brian Demers

Ever seen a security-related issue that you felt should be reported? Unsure of how reporting security issue is different than a regular bug? Developers of any level should know how to report a vulnerability. In this talk, we will talk about what CVEs are, some general vulnerability classifications, look at a few common ways you can report security issues, as well as look at a few common mistakes. This talk is geared toward non-security professionals.

Chris Amato

Most would agree that "tasks" are the primary unit of currency in managing projects. But when it comes to medium or long term planning, relying only on task-level data can become a daunting (ahem) task!. It's easy to get lost in the weeds, parsing hours reports, crafting spreadsheets, counting points, etc.

On the flip side, most firms generally consider "prospective sales" or deal-flow information from the CRM, to be all but useless in resource planning. The operational mind generally avoids the uncertainties of "win probabilities" and the vicissitudes of sales forecasting altogether. But the reality is, some of those prospects will become real, so to ignore the precious meta-data that we can extract from the deal-flow is perilous.

In this session we'll look at ways of going beyond the task, and digger deeper into the CRM deal-flow to synthesize the broader patterns in workflows. Armed with such insight, we'll learn to bring both stronger operational decisions and smarter sales strategies to the team.

Gleb Bahmutov (https://glebbahmutov.com/videos)

Slides: https://slides.com/bahmutov/gh-actions/

Links:
- https://glebbahmutov.com/blog/trying-github-actions
- http://tenminuteheroes.com/

In this presentation, I will show how simple the continuous integration can be with GitHub Actions. They are powerful, have generous limits for public repositories and can be easily reused.

In particular, I will show a few use cases that can be of interest to any JavaScript or TypeScript developer:
- How to run Prettier inside a GH Action and push any updated code back to the repository
- How to correctly install Node dependencies with a single YAML line
- How to run end-to-end Cypress tests without pulling your hair out

Chad Hester

Slides: http://bit.ly/ausa-2019-user-journey-mapping

Understanding user journey maps will help you analyze a person's feelings, thoughts, and touchpoints as they move through different stages of a process. This is a user experience exercise that evaluates the behavior of users and the emotional impact on them during a series of tasks. Incorporating a user persona and other user research helps identify areas where we can improve user experience. These efforts can lead to more efficient and higher converting digital experiences.

User journey mapping is sometimes confused with user story mapping and user workflows, which is something clarified in this presentation. We will define each of these tools and evaluate their application with examples.

Learning Objectives:
- Create user personas and user journey maps
- Identify how journey maps differ from user story mapping and user workflows
- Improve website usability, human processes, and overall success with these tools

Target Audience:
The audience for this presentation is broad and can include: user experience designers, developers, marketing strategists, and business analysts.

Prerequisites:
No prior knowledge or prerequisites are needed to attend or gain value from this presentation. However, it will help to have a basic understanding of human behavior, conversion funnels, business goals, analytics, and user research.

Jen Wahlund

Regardless of what your role is, finding a bug in Test/Pre-prod/Dev code should make you happy! And if that happiness is buried under frustration or disappointment or panic, it's still often worthwhile to acknowledge the joy, even for just a moment.

I want to share my love of bug-finding as well as some tools (non-technical) that we use while doing QA/testing as well as during production support. We won't cover Selenium and Kantu and other technical stuff; instead I'll focus on how we think about and approach bugs and testing.

Paul Bissex (http://paulbissex.com/)

MassChallenge, a global startup accelerator headquartered in Boston, uses Python and Django for its core application "Accelerate", the backbone of its operations. Recently the MassChallenge engineering team upgraded the entire system to run on Python 3. Here's how we did it and what we learned.

Elyssa M Serrilli

The modern human spends more waking free time on social media than on any other activity. And yet, very little is accomplished while doing so. If Nature were this inefficient, we would all be dead. What if ecological design principles were applied to social media to create a 'digital ecosystem', where people and resources are mobilized to meet living needs? Join this session to hear about overall platform design, a few intriguing use cases, and add your questions and design ideas to the hive mind.

Chris Amato

There's an ancient Zimbabwean proverb that goes something like:

If you can talk, you can sing.
If you can walk, you can dance.
If you can type, you can code.

So bring your laptops - Chromebooks are fine! Have you ever wanted to program but just felt like you'd "aged out", or just didn't have what it takes to parse the bizarre characters and logic of code. Balderdash! This session is designed to not only demonstrate how anyone can learn to code, but that it can be totally fun!

Get ready to roll up your sleeves and start coding neat, colorful animations within minutes. We'll be using the P5.js JavaScript framework, which is designed specifically to make coding more accessible than ever.

Pre-requisites:
- Must take some minimal pleasure in colors
- Must delight in watching things dance around the screen.
- Mastery of basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and (sorry) division.
- Left vs. right differentiation
- Hunt-and-peck typing skills

Sage Orville Shea (https://www.sageorville.com/)

Employers spend only a few second reviewing a resume. So how do we change this? We can't. But that doesn't mean all hope is lost.

In a hyper saturated internet, web design lends lessons on making content quickly digestible and impressionable. Learn how to make a better resume and CV with these principles. Walk away with the ability to professionally market yourself with a resume that is more skim friendly, better visually formatted out, and bold with language that is sharp, heavy hitting, and without filler. I'll cover how to restructure information and make those few seconds count with higher traction and retention.

Jim Katz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimkatzarkiv/)

The Buddhist Digital Resource Center, founded 1999, digitizes and publishes Buddhist texts from many cultures in Asia. Starting with a physical collection of texts , we built an ontology, a trilingual search engine, and a digital viewer which has served the Buddhist research community well. Initially the focus was on Tibetan Buddhism, but we've expanded into other Asian literatures.

This talk starts with a description of our initial processes, which began from an in-house digitization workflow, and how that we approach it as the scale doubles and doubles again.

In addition to the scale doubling, we:
- Receive more of our material in finished batches from partners in Asia
- Perform more processing operations (resizing, split-cropping n-up images into n 1-up images)
- Distribute sets to archival partners (Harvard University, Internet Archive)

I will describe the current state of our processing complex, and how we plan to evolve into CloudFlow: a more effective use of a hybrid AWS cloud to increase our throughput and flexibility:
- Moving from MAC platforms to Debian servers
- Bash to Python and Java
- AWS SNS, SQS, Workflow, for messaging and control
- AWS EBS for temporary file access
- AWS Cloudwatch as the monitoring plane: driving reporting and monitoring.

Kelly Albrecht (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyalbrecht/)

What conversations are we having?

We have lots of conversations as a team. Sometimes we are describing a problem and seeking a solution. Sometimes it's more about improving an already ok situation. Sometimes it's about a completely new idea trying to find its way into becoming real, and hopefully proving valuable. Whether we are doing something about something, building something for some reason, or simply improving something for the sake of improvement, our efforts at this stage seek alignment with others involved that can help as well as seeking a consistency with who we see ourselves to be and where we see ourselves going.

How do break all of this down into actionable, achievable, and testable items of work?

This presentation offers and overview of several techniques we can use along the way. In doing so, we'll explore Impact Mapping, Story Mapping, User Stories, Specification by Example, and Behavior Driven Development.

Keynote by Kirsten Richert & Esmilda Abreu

Sponsored by Last Call Media (https://lastcallmedia.com/)

Studies show that diverse organizations are more innovative—but what if this was also true in reverse—that by intentionally facilitating a culture of innovation, you can proactively support diversity and foster an inclusive culture.

This keynote session will identify core elements of an inclusive culture and show how they overlap with innovation best practices. It will highlight key challenges to diversity, equity and inclusion that leaders must consider—hiring, retention, activation of expertise, and career advancement. Presenters will share three examples of proactive change initiatives that modeled inclusive behavior using a mixture of facilitated collaboration, active learning, and contemplative practices.

This fun, interactive talk will demonstrate how to go beyond basic diversity training and take strategic actions that shift an organization toward a culture of inclusion. Participants will be challenged to commit to one action they will take to actively promote diversity and innovation in their own organizations.

Panelists: Kelly Albrecht, Chad Furman, and Scott Weldon
Moderator: Heidi Stanclift

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/HeidiStanclift/nerd-summit-2020-servant-leadership-panel

Pressure produces compliance, not commitment. The compliant never achieve greatness. The heart of servant leadership is connecting with others to bring out their best. Let's explore the principles of servant leadership and ways to weave them into projects and relationships. Build up those around you and teach them to lead.

Paul Grenier

Slides: http://bit.ly/i7edocs
Article: https://www.24a11y.com/2019/automating-inclusive-documentation/

Learn how to create, update, and use automated style guides to improve documentation.

A few things better documentation can do for your team:
- Reduced barriers for outside contributors
- Faster on-boarding for new employees
- Lower time-to-repair for outages
- Improved customer relations
- Higher job satisfaction
- Fewer code defects

Stephanie Luz (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbWvcwWtuDm09M153pcx3-Q4iHIMnwcYk)

Download Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/

This session will provide an overview of how to use Inkscape - a free and open-source vector graphics editor.

Keegan Rankin

Computer networks today are an integral component of our human networks. Unfortunately, there are still a large number of people in the United States and around the world that do not have internet access and as a result are often out of the loop and excluded from building the political and economic future of their own neighborhoods. For this reason, it is of great importance that we have a serious conversation about how our networks are actually built, as opposed to simply taking their existence for granted, since the well-being of our communities may depend on their arrangement and logistics.

For the first part of this presentation I will provide a design justice critique of the various network-building strategies that attempt to confront this digital divide, and contend that participatory networks are the most direct solution to the problem at hand because they extend ownership of the network infrastructure to those marginalized communities. For the second part I will share, as a participatory network case study, the approach and lessons of the Detroit Community Technology Project in facilitating the design and implementation of multiple Community Wireless Networks.

Note: For those unfamiliar, design justice is an approach to design that focuses on avoiding common design practices that bring harm to marginalized communities.

Kelly Albrecht (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyalbrecht/)

Every organism, to every organization, will be affected by a disruption to its existence some how, in some way. Disruption is a fact of life. How can we be prepared to survive and thrive in the face of it? Will we have sufficient awareness of a coming disruption? Will we be able to deliberate effectively and, if so, decide and act in time to survive? Further, just surviving is not enough. We also need to be able to be the disrupters.

In this session, we'll take a step back to first explore how nature itself survives and thrives in disruption. We'll explore this in light of important discoveries made in physics over the latter half of the 20th century which are seen as the new explanation of how nature works. Using this as our foundation, essentially learning from nature about how surviving and thriving in disruption works, we'll extract the key mechanisms and show how to implement them in our organizations.

Finally, we explore what this all might mean for us, as individuals on teams large and small. Disruption is coming for us too. All the same questions apply, but how might we answer them as a community?

Learning Objectives

At the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
- Apply an understanding of Self-organized criticality to foster innovation
- Apply an understanding of Beyond Budgeting, Sociocracy, Liberating Structures, and agility to implement next steps to start transforming their organization to better survive and thrive
- Take new actions in our community to further its thriving, and improve its resiliency

Target Audience

This session is for:
- Stakeholders
- Leaders
- Managers
- Team members

Prerequisites

Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with:
- Agile methodology in general
- Agile frameworks like Scrum
- General business management techniques and challenges

Jim Fisk

You've probably heard terms like microservices, pre-rendering, and atomic deployments thrown around quite a lot in the dev community these days, but what's all this buzz about? Is this all marketing fluff or is it something I should pay attention to? The JAMstack Boston meetup alone has grow to almost 1,000 members in less than 2 years, and many world class organizations including Smashing Magazine, Nike, AirBnB, and IDEO have already moved over a substantial portion of their infrastructure to a JAMstack architecture.

In this talk we'll explore why people are so excited about the JAMstack, we'll take a look at the current state of this new ecosystem, and even try to pull back the blinds on where it's headed in the future. This session will cover:
- How the JAMstack can make your dev life easier
- Understanding what the limitations are
- Exploring how popular solutions (like Hugo and Gatsby) differ
- Looking at managing content in the browser (NetlifyCMS and Tina)
- Introducing new technology to get even more excited about

Elena Sharnoff (https://b-strategic-communications.com/)

Surprise! Writing for the web is different than writing for other media. There are many reasons for this: users might start on an interior page and never see the message on your home page. Search engines highlight parts of your site that don’t reflect what you think are the most important. Users flick through your site on the phone. I could go on, but I’d rather show you how to maximize written content so that you’re getting great search and browse traction and that key messaging as well as detailed content both get noticed and propel users to the right destination. I’ll walk you through how to strategically create content that is skimmable, scrollable, and memorable.

Melissa Frydlo (bio below)

I have recently learned and begun to focus on the power and necessity of technology for evolution. I am of the opinion that AI is nothing to fear but absolutely a necessity of human kind in evolution. AI can be replaced with dangerous construction jobs such as welding nursing as we are currently experiencing for RNA and DNA viruses that do not have immunizations.

After writing this statement or when communicating these idea/s or products to an interested individual as well as during this summit, I quickly learn about similar products and advancements. This is reminiscent of Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey said; “…you don’t have to start from scratch to have a great idea…”

Three Questions:
1. Do you fear AI? What are advantages of bringing AI to market?
2. How are data sets collected for AI? Has anyone been involved in machine learning? How is smart evaluation criteria gathered?
3. What data would be collected for project managers to reduce redundant tasks for efficiency-sake?

Suggested Upcoming Meetups/Conversations /Agenda:
- MUT - The Happy Valley as a tech sub hub of Boston or even Silicon Valley.
- Hackathon Formats/Project Tournaments – Themed and un-themed, monetary rewards and no rewards
- Technology for innovators
- Communication between the clients and tech companies

Funding and a solid core and periphery contributors is needed to pursue these endeavors. Moreover communication and breaking the tech/client language barrier is the most difficult part of the process.

About the Speaker:
Melissa has been an entrepreneur since November 2017 and has been learning and working in the construction industry for a total 29 years. Melissa has a one-person construction management consulting company and is fortunate to join fantastic teams with incredible vision, expertise, dedication and persistence to build physical things and build them well.

Robin Guidry (https://talentcounseling.com/)

Slides with: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P28xbTm9XmaLBfZ4JVKTXSdbVgQpxC82RITLPq9LaPM/edit?usp=sharing

What if recruiters could understand the value that you would add to their organization within 6 seconds of looking at your resume?

That's what this talk is designed to teach you.

Résumé writing is not just a task aimed at helping you take the next step in your career. It is a journey on which you get to discover your value and learn how to market and use the one thing nobody can ever duplicate. You.

Being able to communicate your true value will arouse a sense of quiet confidence, energy, and vitality in you. It will turn recruiters into advocates, hiring managers into fans, and the competition into dust.

Includes real world examples for UX and Software Engineers.

Join in at NERD Summit at UMass Amherst for this Atlassian Community Event covering how the NERD organization uses Jira Software, Service Desk, and Confluence to run its operations, including organizing each NERD Summit.

We'll cover the organizer, staff, customer, and presenter experiences across the Atlassian suite of products, including:
- Confluence Spaces, with Team Pages and Tasks, with an escalation path to Jira.
- Jira Projects and Boards, relating back to Confluence and rolling up to Portfolio
- Service Desks for Help Centers, Sponsor portals, Session submission/selection, all with Confluence integration
- Using Jira Boards to select and schedule conference presentations