Dev Talks

Join us for an afternoon of high-level dev talks focused around problem solving and innovative solutions. You'll hear from multiple dev experts talking about real world scenarios and the tools they're using. There will be a mix of 10 minute lightning presentations and 20 minute in-depth talks.

Lunch will also be provided!

Tentative Agenda

• 12:30 p.m. Registration, Lunch & Networking
• 1:00 p.m. Welcoming Remarks
• 1:20 p.m. Program Begins
• 3:10 p.m. BREAK
• 3:40 p.m. Program Resumes
• 5:30 p.m. Program Ends

Presentation Descriptions

Real-time Recommendation at Scale with Jonah Harris As a social discovery network with over 100 million registered members, performing personalized recommendations at scale is a challenge. Unlike one-way item-based recommendation systems, person-to-person recommendation is both reciprocal and behavior-based. Likewise, when you only have a member's attention in the application for a few seconds, the ability to make split-second decisions based on real-time information is essential. In this talk, we'll share some background regarding the challenges we've faced, the technology stack we've used to tackle such challenges, and the lessons we've learned. At this session, we will also be open-sourcing a system we've developed, which makes Elasticsearch much more developer-friendly.

3 Key DevOps Methods You Need to Know with Darrell Norton
The term “DevOps” is newly popular, but how can it rapidly improve your business? This interactive session highlights three key DevOps practices in action: automated deployment, A/B testing, and application performance management.

From Dream to Deployment with Tim Allen, IT Director of Advanced Initiatives, Wharton Research Data Services
It is easy for technical debt to pile up to the point developers are hamstrung by decisions made years ago. The Wharton School developed the DevTAP process (Development Technology Assessment Process) to get unstuck from a rut, unleashing our developers with local development, better testing tools, an automated deployment suite, and a collaborate-first environment. In this talk, we will explore the process we used, lessons learned, how we embraced DRY principles and show some of the tools we regularly use. We will also see how easy it is to get involved with open-source projects, from code contribution to hosting international conferences.

Transformation of X1: Learn how to ship products from the computer screen to the TV screen with Leslie Champman, Principal Software Engineer, Comcast

In this lightning talk, learn from one of Comcast's principal software engineers how to take a content product from legacy platform to cross-screen entertainment.

A Tale of Scale with Timothy Wenhold, Chief Innovation Officer, Power Home Remodeling Group

Possessing the skill of a veteran magician and the confidence of a super hero, we traveled the “Rails“ and changed an industry. Using Ruby on Rails (our weapons of choice), we took chaos and waste synonymous with home improvement enterprise technology and turned it into a robust digital platform that collaborates, communicates, markets and programs experiences for hundreds of thousands of customers, employees and recruits around the country - 24/7/365. Seven years later with command of "home management” and control of the second largest exterior remodeler in the nation…we're just getting started. With 1.2 million new appointments scheduled, 150,000 projects and more than 32 million telecom dials living within our digital solution, the stack has grown to include RoR, MySQL, Java Script, Ajax, Adhearsion, Asterisk, XMPP, Redis, Elasticsearch, StatsD, Jenkins, and more then a dozen servers.

Learn how cutting-edge business technology and an international team of tech ninjas (developers) built Nitro, Power's transformational digital platform — and how that single platform has enabled 300% revenue growth, a national expansion plan and vertical extension of our product mix.

Pushing Android app model updates: why and how with Kathryn Killebrew, Software Developer, Azavea

How to push model changes from a JSON schema in a web application to a native Android application without having to reinstall or update from the App Store. And, why do that?

Set it and Forget It: Automating Your Front End Style Guide with Jana Veliskova, Front End Engineer, RJ Metrics

In this talk, we will cover RJMetrics’ evolution from Bootstrap to a fully automated style guide system. With the introduction of an easy to maintain style guide, our product became more consistent, code became easier and faster to write, and engineers were empowered to contribute to this living document. We will explore the steps and code taken to implement this tool, encourage participation, and automate it to make it easy as pie to keep up to date.

Improving Efficiency Through Collaboration with Liz Brown, Co-Founder, Webjunto

Development before design can lead to dead ends. Collaboration between designers, developers, and clients can save time and money in the long-run. Learn what techniques and tools can help you to improve and maintain your team’s efficiency and client relationships.

Let's Go Crazy: What Prince Taught Me About Agile Web Development with Courtney Wilburn, Developer, o3world

Many musicians have unique ways of working, but no one has captured my imagination the way the Prince has. I've been a fan of his much longer than I've been a web developer, and I aim to share ways that looking at Prince's studio methods has shaped the way that I approach Agile development, and the creation of development workflows. I'll be citing specific Prince albums and records during this talk along with the specific things that I've learned as a software developer from these recordings. Prince's musical catalog is deep, and can be used as a source of inspiration for a developer or audiophile of any level.

Learning to survive the ever changing project. with Surera Ward, Analyst, Digitas Health LifeBrands

Change is an inevitable part of most projects; however we can find solutions to become more creative and less static as a developer in this agile age. We will discuss tips and tricks to prepare for the unexpected.

Listen to your Camera: Understanding Visual Communications with Computer Vision with Lou Kratz, Curalate

From memes to infographics; our online habits have made images a first-class form of communication. Programmatically analyzing images, however, presents a significant amount of technical challenges, especially at scale. This talk dives deep into multiple computer vision techniques Curalate has employed to understand what people are saying with their pictures, and the insights we have learned from them.

Decoupled Development: Feeding Your Application with Off-the-Shelf Tools with Mark Llobrera, Technical Director, Bluecadet

There’s a lot of talk about headless CMS architectures lately—but you may not realize that the pieces you need to go decoupled may already be in your hands. This session will focus on how Bluecadet uses Drupal and WordPress to power web apps, touchscreen kiosks, and native iOS/Android apps.

Getting Swifty in an Objective-C World with Jason Grandelli, Mobile Engineering Manager, URBN

Learning a new language is what we do. It’s fun, it’s reinvigorating, and it’s challenging. It’s why we do what we do. But it’s not often that you learn a brand new language and then implement it side by side in a code base with another language. Especially when the other language is sad because it knows you are replacing it and it doesn’t want to play nice with the new guy. At URBN, we made a decision to write Swift for all new code even though several of our apps are 100% Objective-C. There were challenges, like learning a new language while trying to still push production feature releases, or stumbling through interoperability. But we’ve figured it out (we think). We’ll take a look at some actual code and some of the things we did to make this process as seamless as possible without introducing too much technical debt for the long run.

Fail Fast - Protect Your Architecture with Hystrix with Chris Mathews, Software Developer, JP Morgan

Breaking down Monolithic Architectures into Microservices is all the rage these days. Microservices provide many advantages but, by their nature, lead to more distributed processes and therefore more things that can (and will) go wrong in Production. This session will talk about how we use some basic patterns and Netflix Hystrix to become fault tolerant, stop cascading failure and enable resiliency in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable. Trust No One.

More topics TBA

Enjoy coffee provided by FIS Global

This event is a part of Philly Tech Week's Dev Conference. Check out the full list of Dev Conference events.!