Past Events

  • From Buttons to Binary

    John Ezekiel, Wednesday, March 11th, 2020 (View Slides)

    Talk will be an exploration of how a button press on a website becomes 0s and 1s on the server.

  • Adventures In AI and JavaScript

    Gant Laborde, Wednesday, February 12th, 2020 (View SlidesView Video)

    More and more we hear terms like "Machine Learning" and "AI", but are those just terms for Fortune 500 companies and their SkyNet labs? Nope! It's cool stuff that's coming our way, and we can access it in JavaScript in the browser! Let's see some cool stuff in web pages!

  • Ignite Talks

    Multiple, Wednesday, January 8th, 2020

    Ignite talks are 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds and only 5 minutes long. They can be on any topic. Ignite talks are a great chance to share ideas that wouldn't typically take up a full talk. It's also a way to dip your toe into public speaking (anyone can bomb for 5 minutes). Here's the expected lineup.

    • Vulkan in 5 mins – Chris Parich
    • Don’t Discount the Developer – Tales from the Technical Dark Side – Mike Miller
    • Know your Audience – Brian Stanford
    • Intro to –ilities – Davin Smith
    • Improving Web Performance with Responsive Images – Steven Musumeche
    • Avoiding Burnout – Kristin Parich
  • Avoiding Burnout

    Kristin Parich, Wednesday, October 9th, 2019 (View Slides)

    Kristin Parich joked once about making this presentation and no one ever let her forget it. So, in this presentation you will learn what burnout is, how to tell if you are, or are getting burned out, and what to do to prevent it/treat it.

  • GraphQL for Neophytes

    Steven Musumeche, Wednesday, September 11th, 2019 (View SlidesView Video)

    This talk is geared towards GraphQL beginners and will cover why and how you might use GraphQL. We will take a shallow dive into both the client and server-side use cases and implementations. We will also discuss some specific details, such as libraries, caching, and writing performant resolvers.

  • Intro to Vue

    Raymond Camden, Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

    Raymond will be giving an introduction to the Vue.js framework and explain why it is so much better than React or Angular. (That's a joke.) (Mostly.)

  • Documentation: Nobody writes it; nobody reads it; when you need it, it doesn't exist

    Jay Bienvenu, Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

    Jay's Laws of Documentation: Nobody writes it; nobody reads it; when you need it, it doesn't exist. Jay will present a plan to help break these rules and develop a culture of documentation in your organization.

  • Typescript In Anger: Lessons learned from using Typescript to tame a large legacy application

    Alexander Songe, Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 (View Slides)

    Taming a large legacy application can be difficult. Typescript can help. But so can architecture decisions. How Typescript can enable you to implement concepts like DDD and SOLID to tame the wild excesses of a world gone mad in a large hard-to-maintain ball of mud.

  • Technical UX: User experience from a developer's perspective

    Hunter Miller, Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 (View Slides)

    Creating apps, products, and services with a good user experience can be extremely difficult for developers, even with the support of UX and design teams. Basic usability isn't typically part of the developer curriculum, but it's something we encounter every day. In this talk, I'll show you basic methods for improving the user experience of your software, how that parallels refactoring code, and how that may change the way you think of development.

  • Consequences of Reality: Navigation in the Real World with Robot

    Chris Parich, Wednesday, February 13th, 2019 (View Slides)

    The theory of navigation using landmarks, obstacle avoidance, feature detection, and geomagnetic heading are all well and good for simulated worlds, but everything changes once you have to rely on physical measurements to navigate. Chris will walk through the real-world problems of different kinds of sensors, and some of the ways we try to solve or reduce the errors they cause.

  • Ignite Talks

    Multiple, Wednesday, January 9th, 2019

    Ignite talks are 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds and only 5 minutes long. They can be on any topic. Ignite talks are a great chance to share ideas that wouldn't typically take up a full talk. It's also a way to dip your toe into public speaking (anyone can bomb for 5 minutes). Here's the expected lineup.

    • Chris Parich on “Things I didn’t know I hate about C++”
    • Davin Smith on “Serverless FizzBuzz: An Infinitely scalable FizzBuzz Solution in AWS”
    • Alexander Songe on “Why you should use ZFS"
    • Zach Byerly on “High Performance Computing"
    • Steven Musumeche on “GraphQL"
    • Corey Gaudin on "Servant Leadership: What is it and why is it important?"
    • Tre King on “Docker for Enterprise”
    • Andy Dye on "A Resume Talk"
  • Creating Reusable Libraries in Angular 6

    Aaron Lozier, Wednesday, November 14th, 2018 (View Slides)

    A common challenge for software developers is figuring out how to extract reusable code from their applications so that the same features and functionality can be used across multiple applications. In some cases, it may be desirable to release the code as an open source library or module such that the wider community can contribute improvements and bug fixes. In other cases, it may be preferable to host the code in a private repository owned by the organization, while still aiming for a similar goal: reuse and collaboration across teams or projects.

    While it has always been possible to create reusable libraries in Angular, the release of Angular 6 in May of this year introduces new features that make it easier than ever before. This presentation will walk through the basic process of building a library within a project, and leveraging the features of the library in the application code. The presentation will then go a step further by discussing how this library can be deployed as a standalone npm module. Various options for deploying the module to the open source community or via a private npm repository such as Verdaccio or Artifactory will be covered.

  • TypeScript: Writing JavaScript Without The Pain

    Steven Musumeche, Wednesday, October 10th, 2018 (View Slides)

    Most of today's developers have some exposure to JavaScript and some have experienced problems with creating and maintaining large applications over time. This presentation will provide an introduction to the TypeScript language and why you might use it for your JavaScript projects. Topics covered will include benefits, basic syntax, and a few advanced subjects. After seeing the presentation, attendees will have a high-level overview of the benefits of TypeScript, basic syntax, and where it fits in the web development ecosystem.

  • Design is CRAP

    Davin Smith, Wednesday, September 12th, 2018 (View Slides)

    Making products "look good" can be a real challenge. Most developers lean on UI Frameworks for help, but having a library of cohesive elements is only half the battle. In this talk, we'll go over a few simple design rules that you can use to create successful products.

  • HATEOAS - Hypertext as the Engine of Application State

    Johnathon Wright, Wednesday, May 9th, 2018

    Continuing his discussion of REST, Johnathon will discuss the last constraint, Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State" (HATEOAS). We'll look at how HATEOAS will "Make APIs Great Again" using ref tags, resource links, self-navigable APIs, and other mind-expanding stuff that may be too much overhead for real-life applications.

  • A guide to git: how understanding the tree model will give you version control super powers.

    Dr. Charles LeDoux, Wednesday, April 11th, 2018 (View Slides)

    This presentation will provide a simplified view of git's internal data model and highlight how understanding a few basic concepts will allow you to perform git wizardry. A computer science degree is not required for understanding this presentation.

  • Hello Wearable World!

    Dr. Charlie Cavanaugh, Wednesday, March 14th, 2018

    This presentation will provide a simplified view of git's internal data model and highlight how understanding a few basic concepts will allow you to perform git wizardry. A computer science degree is not required for understanding this presentation.

  • Aurelia Javascript Framework

    Davin Smith, Wednesday, February 21st, 2018

    Aurelia is an all-inclusive frontend JavaScript framework built on web standards. We'll take a quick tour through Aurelia highlighting its ease of use, its robust set of straightforward built-in features, and its powerful flexibility.

  • Ignite Talks

    Multiple, Wednesday, January 10th, 2018

    Ignite talks are 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds and only 5 minutes long. They can be on any topic. Ignite talks are a great chance to share ideas that wouldn't typically take up a full talk. It's also a way to dip your toe into public speaking (anyone can bomb for 5 minutes). Here's the expected lineup.

    • Gustave Lamperes on "This is Paddling"
    • Andy Dye on "Effective Resumes"
    • Charles LeDoux on "How not to do security"
    • Heather Ré Doucet on "How to Land Your Dream Job"
    • Benjamin Anding on "Composing an Enterprise Blockchain Ledger"
    • Davin Smith on "Design is CRAP"
    • Alexander Songe on "The End of Computer Science"
    • Geoff Daily on "How to Save Lafayette’s Economy"
  • Cheating on C# with Kotlin

    Chris Parich, Wednesday, November 8th, 2017 (View Slides)

    Kotlin is a new JVM language quickly growing in popularity. We'll talk about the major features of Kotlin that make it a direct improvement over Java, and let us not miss working in the .NET world.

  • Rails In Action

    Johnathon Wright, Wednesday, October 11th, 2017

    Learn about the basics of Ruby on Rails, a server-side MVC web application framework built on top of Ruby. See Johnathon Wright try NOT to make a fool of himself while live-coding a simple blog application.

  • Fun with Functions in ES6 and ES7

    Alex Songe, Wednesday, September 13th, 2017

    JavaScript has seen a lot of updates with ES6, ES7/ES2015, and ES2016. After a quick highlight reel of some notable ES6 and ES7 features that might’ve gone unnoticed, Alex will use and explain very basic functional programming techniques to keep your JavaScript understandable and to stop your project from devolving into a giant ball of mud within 2 months.

  • OpenWhisk

    Raymond Camden, Wednesday, June 14th, 2017 (View Slides)

    Raymond Camden will be giving an introduction to Serverless and then introducing the Apache OpenWhisk project, an opensource serverless framework supported by IBM.

  • React & Redux

    Steven Musumeche, Wednesday, May 10th, 2017 (View Slides)

    React and Redux are a powerful combination for building modern web apps. Both libraries push you towards a better understanding of JavaScript, and encourage use of good programming principles, without locking you into a rigid architecture or fixed approach. This presentation will give an introduction to building single page web applications using React and Redux.

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