Dealing with conflict as a developer

Conflict is good and it is awesome for a team to have but it's not always easy to be on either side of it.

Theo Bohnen

Hi, I’m Theo. I’ve been programming professionally for 7 years and have loved it for many more. I’m extremely passionate about programming and all things related to software development. I love helping others become better programmers & problem solvers.

tbohnen @tbohnenjnr

Prototyping for Perspective

This talk is about UX, Usability, and user centric design. It introduces the concepts of UX and prototyping when finding solutions to problems. This talk challenges us all to analyse perspectives and change perspectives when looking at problems. It also goes through some prototyping tools and techniques that can be used to express ideas and engage with stakeholders and users.

Rishal Hurbans

Rishal Hurbans is a software engineer with interests in web development, mobile development, algorithms, and UX design. He is currently fulfilling the role of a team lead at Entelect. Rishal and his team have been responsible for a variety of projects in the web and mobile space for various blue chip corporates in South Africa. Rishal also enjoys exploring innovative ideas, game development, and pondering bad pun jokes in his spare time.

prolificidea.com @RishalHurbans

High-performance Nodebots with Raspberry Pi

Did you know that you can control a robot with JavaScript and Node.js? If you thought robotics was too hard and that you needed to learn a low level language to get started, think again. Nodebots has been around for a while using the Arduino and libraries like Johnny Five, but it just isn't suitable for some robots. What if you need internet connectivity or to interface directly with computer peripherals? Maybe you want to use computer vision or have other computationally heavy algorithms you need to use?

A better alternative in this case is using the Raspberry Pi, which has all the power you need and can easily interface with other hardware. The downside? Getting Node.js and Johnny Five working on Raspberry Pi requires some effort.

The first part of the talk will touch on how to get everything set up (Which OS you want to install, configuring the Pi for headless access via SSH and getting Node.js, NPM and Johhny Five working). The second part will then focus on developing code for a working robot, simulating the hardware on a laptop and finally seeing it running live on a real robot.

Riaan Cornelius

I'm a software developer who develops mobile apps for Discovery by day and tries to find ridiculously interesting projects to tinker with by night.

My decade of work experience includes setting up an SMS service for USAID in Afghanistan, Consulting on a mobile CRM system in Costa Rica and helping out with systems for a SMS campaign during presidential elections in Zambia.

My tinkering has included computer vision, robotics and home automation projects.

riaancornelius @riaancornelius

Dockerizing a Node.js Application: Give a sysadmin a fish for the day

This discussion for you if you, no matter what side of the server-side JavaScript line you walk. Are you a developer who has full control of your environments from end-to-end? This talk will appeal to your need for self-contained environmental rollouts. Are you an enterprise developer? Answer your compliance officers with a “VM” which they just need to host and lock down to their heart’s content; no need to explain that JavaScript is more than a web browser only thing!

Justin Lovell

Justin is a software developer who is currently located in the Johannesburg area by day, and a learner by night. Never satisfied that he has perfected the art of software development, he is always learning from others; Justin also likes to share his learnings with others too.

justjuzzy.com justin-lovell @juzzy_za

Real-time Collaboration at Scale with Firebase

Luke Venediger

Luke is CTO of DVT Durban, a development centre in KZN that works on a high-performance presence and messaging system for SMART Technologies. Born and bred in Durban, Luke and his team are huge fans of representing SA in everything they do. At work him and his team use Java, JavaScript, AWS, Firebase, Redis and MongoDB. At home he enjoys building lego with his son.

StaticElastic: An Elasticsearch and Backbone SPA

Jurgens du Toit

I've been hooked on computers ever since I played some or other dungeon game on my father's XT. From there on in I played games until I figured out how to hack the code, then I actually started writing code, and now I try and write good code. While I'm trying to write good code, I use Elasticsearch and Logstash to come up with effective and creative solutions to problems out there.

@jrgns

How to make your CSS not suck

Let's face it. All websites need CSS and yours is probably awful. There's too much of it. There's a bunch of duplication. It's like a delicately spun spider web, tightly coupled and fragile. It has more patches than a bicycle wheel. Socrates and Rouan are going to show you that it doesn't need to be this way. They're going to show you some common CSS code smells and share some CSS coding tips. They're going to introduce you to the concept of component-based styling and show you how to curate a kick-ass style guide. Somewhere along the way, Rouan may even convince Socrates that writing CSS doesn't always suck.

Socrates Hlapolosa

Socrates is a developer at ThoughtWorks, with over ten years experience working at small and large organisations. He focuses on being a polyglot software craftsman, with emphasis on repeatable software delivery, quality and most importantly the joy of writing code.

socrates-hlapolosa

How to make your CSS not suck

Let's face it. All websites need CSS and yours is probably awful. There's too much of it. There's a bunch of duplication. It's like a delicately spun spider web, tightly coupled and fragile. It has more patches than a bicycle wheel. Socrates and Rouan are going to show you that it doesn't need to be this way. They're going to show you some common CSS code smells and share some CSS coding tips. They're going to introduce you to the concept of component-based styling and show you how to curate a kick-ass style guide. Somewhere along the way, Rouan may even convince Socrates that writing CSS doesn't always suck.

Rouan Wilsenach

Rouan is a software developer at ThoughtWorks. He has experience consulting to clients in the financial services, health, media and education sectors. He's worked as an agile coach, helping teams learn and adopt agile engineering practices and has helped businesses with organisation-wide agile adoption. He's created web apps in Java, Python, Ruby and .NET and now he's helping a large corporate with their first single page JavaScript app.

@rouanw rouanw rouanw.github.io

ngResource Scaffolding: A tale of too much work

The presentation is about some of the growing pains we’ve faced in building large, non-trivial Angular applications at Entelect, and how we’ve overcome them. We’ve come up with our own project structures, build processes and design patterns that make our day-to-day development a lot easier.  We’ve also built a new tool to scaffold more boilerplate code for us. It works as part of our build process,  generating Swagger JSON specifications off our backend API, then scaffolding Angular ngResources off that specification. Basically, we think we’ve got a great time saving tools and approaches that we’d like to share.

Matthew van der Velden

Matthew van der Velden is a Software Engineer at Entelect working on various large AngularJS projects. With his background in Electrical and Information Engineering, he spearheaded Entelect's first enterprise AngularJS project in the form of in-browser electrical circuit simulators. Matthew is a part of the greater team at Entelect forming best practices and conventions for AngularJS to help usher in a new era of next-generation web applications. Matthew likes his JavaScript raw, his coffee black, and never shall the two mix. Matthew like his JavaScript raw and his coffee black, and never shall the two mix.

Event Sourcing: How, Where, Why

Most projects I've worked on have needed a way to see data over time and at any given point in time. I have been involved in architecting solutions like this for many years and only when I learnt about event sourcing did I realise that I am not a unique snowflake with this challenge. The biggest question i come into contact with is "Why would I use an event store?". To answer this question we will explore how and where an event store could work and then take a look at the why you would choose it. We'll see how the GetEventStore steps up to the challenge and where to look to get started. I hope to add a useful tool to your toolbox.

Terence Kruger

Like you, developer coach and co-founder of the developer user group, Terence has been working in both agile and not-so agile teams over the past 13 years. With the word Agile meaning so many different things Terence strives to bring an attention to the principles and allow teams and individuals to reach beyond their own expectations. Terence appreciates, and shares with listeners, that bringing change to their teams is a moment-to-moment choice and not about positions or titles.

@tjmkruger tjmkruger

Javascript and WebGL

In the last few years we've seen something of renaissance in the world of Javascript. We're able to do wonderful things with it; local storage, text to speech, even fully fledged back ends. But none of these is perhaps so impressive and so cutting edge as its ability to render 3D environments.

Thanks to HTML5's WebGL API, we're able to realise fully rendered 3D environments, interactive experiences and even games. This talk will involve going through a number of interactive examples, from personal projects creating our solar system to in-browser games that are pushing the future of the web forward. It'll also be going through ways we, as developers, can use WebGL now, what kind of support it has, and where we.

Byron Houwens

Byron Houwens is a designer and developer who enjoys focusing on front end technologies and UX. He currently works as a front end developer in the burgeoning edtech environment, and lives in sunny Cape Town, South Africa.

@BHouwens BHouwens

Using LocalStorage for Progressive Saving

As application developers we often provide users with ways to capture complex data via a UI. What we often don't cater for is when that user is halfway through capturing a record and need to stop what they are doing. This talk will cover how we as developers can leverage LocalStorage in the browser to make our users' lives easier.

Daphne Calitz

Daphne Calitz has been developing at Chase Software for 3 years. Worklife includes ExtJS, Web APIs, Database normalisation, Entity Framework 6 implementation and writing bulk data import services. She is a determined individual and a fan of pair programming (even though it can sometimes leads to homicidal thoughts).

@DaphneCalitz

JavaScript Security

We focus on the power of JavaScript a lot but as we know “With great power comes great ability to ruin your day.”
This talk focuses on the security side of JavaScript – classic attacks that malicious users perform in order to steal sensitive information / real cash, as well as the techniques that we need to keep in mind to prevent them. We’ll have a look at some famous examples of JavaScript attacks, and focus in on modern methods used to attempt to prevent attacks like these, such as unique response tokens as well as JSON web tokens.

Evan Knowles

Evan's been exploring computers since the days when he had to dictate commands for his mother to type as he couldn’t read yet. He eventually pushed his interest far enough to pick up a Masters in Artificial Intelligence, and now spends his days playing with new tech, coding Java and Javascript and fencing.

He is a Systems Architect at Discovery life.

@EvanJKnowles www.knowles.co.za

ChatOps

To move fast and maintain stability in development and operations, it is important to have a culture of automation, measurement and sharing. ChatOps helps form this culture by moving all your everyday tasks into one place, making your tools part of your conversation.

Pieter Koornhof

Pieter is a senior .net developer at entelect.co.za. He is passionate about Domain Driven Design, Clean Code and anything that makes the developer experience better. He runs numerous training initiatives for these at Entelect and blogs about them at sneakycode.net. He is interested in creating new ways for teams to collaborate. He digs knockout.js, angular.js and javascript in general.

@PieterKoornhof SneakyPeet sneakycode.net

Zen, burnout and the art of computer programming

Over the years I thought that to be a good developer I had to be passionate ninja that spends hours and hours researching, learning, and contributing to open source. While at the same time going the working loads of over time and going the extra-mile to make sure my team succeed.

I was wrong… most of this advice led to frustration and depression. This started a decade long journey to find happiness and fulfilment as a developer.

With this talk I will share some of my lessons which may help you on your quest to be a better happier developer.

Martin Cronjé

I'm a software developer who spends most of my time coaching and mentoring software teams to help them master their craft. During my career I've contributed to projects ranging from mobile apps, data analytics, high volume systems integration to mission-critical systems. The most notable projects directly affected the South African economy and democracy. Programming makes me happy. When not coaching I spend my time building software products on anything from C#, ObjC, node.js or Ruby.

martincronje.com martincronje @martincronje

Visual Studio 2015 - the ultimate web dev tool

Robert MacLean

At age 13 he got his first computer and broke it. He has spent much of his adult life devoted to helping others not to break computers; first as an IT Pro and now as a senior software developer.

His work in helping others has earned him numerous Microsoft ALM MVP awards in the past and many opportunities to speak at major software developer events.

sadev.co.za rmaclean @rmaclean

NB attributes for great developers to have

Paul Sainsbury

I’m a Developer who became a Development Manager who became the "Ops guy" for our company. Development wise I’m currently learning Meteor, experiencing .Net on a Mac and trying to wrestle with data from multiple disconnected systems to gain better insight into our people and processes. Also I’m slowly learning that people are harder to program than computers and, as a consequence, am beginning to look forward to the day that AI and robotics replace us all.

Rathlan @Rathlan

Developing, Fast and Slow

One of the daily challenges we face as developers is staying focussed on the problem we are trying to solve.

A solution came to me from a book by a Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman: we have to increase our thinking stamina by automating everything that adds cognitive load.

With this talk I will take you through some of his ideas on how the mind works, and then share my views on how they apply to developer workflow. Finally, I will show how to free up our brains to focus on what's important.

Jacques de Vos

I'm a software engineer who divides my time between coaching software development teams and building software products, mostly mobile. Most of my experience has been in developing crucial font-end applications in the financial industries: online trading, online banking, insurance and branch banking.

@jacdevos