{Keynote} {Architecture} {Agile & Lean} {Languages} {Mobile} {DevOps} {Security} {Innovation}
{AI/Machine Learning} {Cloud/Big Data} {GameDev/VR} {Front-end} {Back-end}
{Reactive Programming} {Motivational}
Keynote
Embracing constraints
In a time and culture where instant, near-unlimited access to unprecedented technological resources has
become as mundane as carrying a phone in your pocket, the idea of “constraint” takes on a negative spin. We constantly set our sights on more, bigger, faster! When we do encounter an unavoidable limitation, we view it as an enemy, something to begrudgingly endure until our budget and/or Moore’s law enable us to defeat it. But what if that constraint was actually a friend, something to respect and embrace as an ally in our quest for innovation and progress?
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Killing the Big Brother
In his keynote ”Killing the Big Brother” Santiago will talk about the importance of building new models for democratic governance that enable humanity to collaborate and address global issues in transparency. He will introduce Democracy Earth foundation and elaborate on how to fight the uneven distribution of opportunity around the globe by building free, open source software for incorruptible voting for organizations of all sizes to establish a true democratic governance for the Internet age.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Architecture
Evolution of message brokers: from helper to heart of a system
Message brokers have been developed to transfer messages between sender and receiver. But later many of them became more powerful and now can even rule an entire system. I would like to present practical examples of how to use such systems like Apache Kafka, Rabbit MQ or Google PubSub to store data persistenly, to sync data between different parts of the cluster, to search needed data and so on. All examples are real and has been discovered by me and my team at Funding Circle and now at Billie.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
HTTP/2 for dummies
HTTP/2 has been ratified for months and browsers already support it. Everything we hear tells us that the new version of HTTP will provide significant performance benefits while requiring little to no change to our applications — all the problems with HTTP/1.x have seemingly been addressed, we no longer need the “hacks” that enabled us to circumvent them. In this talk you will learn the story behind HTTP/2, its new shiny features (multiplexing, header compression and server push), how to enable it in jetty (live session) and a few tips to debug it in your local development environment.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Microservices Testing in the Docker Era
The introduction of Docker created a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we test and organize. Learn why the Diamond model replaces the Pyramid model. Get to know Testcontainers library, providing a complete toolset for controlling Docker in tests. Write integration and e2e testing self service without “throwing the ball” to QA team and move closer to Autonomous teams. Learn how all those concepts implemented from the production case study of Logz.io.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
The Machine-Internet – Hyperlinking API Resources
Where is the HTML link between APIs? The growing popularity of resourceful Hypermedia APIs, concepts like HATEOAS and standards like json:api lay the foundations for a Machine Internet. How do we get there and what do we have already? Learn about technologies and specifications available and what API maintainers need to know for the upcoming ecosystem of plug & play interconnectable API services. Getting there I will point out analogies in the design processes of HTML for the human interoperable web versus APIs for the machine interoperable web.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
JavaScript Frameworkless Development
Do you feel the JavaScript fatigue? Are you still trying to learn ‘the next big thing’? Does your code seem legacy just after six months because of that ‘next big thing’? Have you ever thought of building a software, even a complex one, without any kind of dependency on your package.json? During the talk we are going to see how to create your own framework and libraries with just standard ECMAScript features and W3C standard APIs.
Listen to the audio recording here.
The (accidental) political developer
When a user uploads a picture, posts on Facebook or searches on-line for the nearest event, location-based services are part of the equation. And they present unexpected challenges to the developer who targets an international audience and wants to rely on location data to control features. When a controversial decoding is in a disputed territory or a partially recognized states, the corner cases might become a support and PR nightmare. From Hong Kong to war zones, from Crimea to Palestine, we will cover examples and basic patterns on how to limit the impacts of the geolocation challenges.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Event-driven and serverless Applications with OpenWhisk
Serverless computing (aka FaaS, Functions as a Service) is one of the hottest topics in the field of cloud computing. OpenWhisk is one player in this new field. During this presentation, Frederic will talk about his journey through the world of serverless computing, the core concepts, the value proposition and differentiators, typical usage and real-world customer scenarios, and the underlying programming model of serverless computing in general and OpenWhisk in particular, latest trends and additions, and conclude his session with some fancy demos.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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Agile & Lean
Pair Programming: Does it really Work?
Pair Programming is an agile practice and numerous studies show its benefits for education. Does It really work? Is it really such a good methodology to have two devs on the same task? What are the best strategies to perform an efficient pair programming section? The presentation will show how pair programming could improve design quality, reduce defects and staffing risk, enhance technical skills and improve team communications. On the other hand it will discuss how this method causes an increase of development-time cost of about 15%, however reducing the need for bug fixing.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Building distributed Systems in distributed Teams
At Elastic — the company behind the open source tools Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash — everything is distributed; both the company and all our products. Building distributed systems is notoriously hard … building a distributed team even more so. This talk dives into the details how Elastic is thriving on its distributed model: * How Elastic started to be distributed by design. * Why we prefer the term distributed over remote. * What our core values are in which we believe. * How we make it work and what our tooling looks like. * What we have learned as we progressed.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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Agnes Scherzer & Dennis Schmidt
Beyond Scrum, moving from process to principles
After interviewing Berlin start-ups, our top finding was all teams practiced some form of Scrum, but are not realizing the real speed and benefits of an efficient process. In response to what we learned, we aim to give you a set of principles to rewrite your processes, and end the painful rituals you’ve inherited from Scrum. Make planning meetings short and crisp. Give PMs and engineers the ability to adjust priority in real time. Most importantly, peg quality at 10 out of 10, keeping technical debt off the chopping block each sprint.
Listen to the audio recording here.
How to be Agile in a StraightJacket
Why is it so hard to get things done in a bank? Why do banks think that an “Agile” team stuck in the middle of dozens of constraining forces can magically deliver results? I’ve worked in Agile teams that DID deliver results in highly constrained environments. I can tell you what worked well, what didn’t work so well and give you my 5 top tips for being Agile in a StraightJacket.
Check out the slides here.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Understanding software delivery with Equations
To escape the common delivery traps software development teams step into, we need to understand the dynamics of software engineering. This is not an easy task and we need solid help. We need maths! In this talk the speaker will explore a few equations that describe software engineering, which can help us see the forest from the trees. The speaker will also cover some modern practices – and show how we can get back control of delivery. The problems addressed include: • Deadlocked by Dependencies and Networks • Code-Degeneration and Tech Debt • Congestion and Flow • Firefighting and Slack time.
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Amela Teftedarija & Darko Nikolic
Think globally, act locally – build stronger distributed agile teams
Many companies today deliver software developed by teams distributed in multiple geographical locations.There is a real need for it since organizations get more and more global and it should not be avoided.In this presentation, we will explore some of the drawbacks as well as benefits of working in distributed agile team and some of our best tips and methods that helped us to increase team productivity. We would like to share with you some of the real case examples from our experience in being part of distributed agile teams on several international projects over the years.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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Languages
piladb: Doing a simple Database engine from scratch
piladb is a lightweight RESTful database engine based on stack data structures. We’ll learn the motivations of building a small database from scratch in the Go programming language, the benefits of using HTTP protocol to interact with the system, the use cases within the tech industry, and how it can help Computer Science students to understand how databases and data structures work together.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Let’s Take it Offline!
Giving our applications offline capabilities is becoming standard. In this session I will walk through everything you need to know about offline support: service workers, in-memory databases, common libraries, and best practices. Let’s take it offline!
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How do you create a programming language for the JVM?
The final dream of every developer is creating his own programming language. Today it is possible to realize that dream with a reasonable effort. In addition to that is also possible to leverage the JVM to make a language that can reuse a huge amount of libraries. In this presentation we are going to see what elements do we need to build our own language, with a compiler for the JVM. This is not only a lot of fun but it can be also useful in practice, to build Domain Specific Languages that compiles to bytecode and can be used together with mainstream languages in larger applications.
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Ansgar Schmidt & Niklas Heidloff
How to write your own Slack Chatbots in Javascript
Through conversational experiences people can interact with applications easier than ever before. For developers this means they have to understand how to build these natural user interfaces in addition to browser interfaces and mobile apps. In this session we will demonstrate live how to develop a chatbot for Slack. Via Node.js and the open source project botkit we’ll connect to Slack’s websocket API. In order to define the conversation flow we’ll leverage intents, entities and dialogs from IBM Watson’s Conversation service.
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Urban Legends: What you Code makes you who you are
If you were a carpenter, would your skills at building be more important than the tools you use to build? Skills, right? Tools are just a means to an end. So why do developers think the language they use defines the problems they solve? This talk will take a look at misconceptions across the board, some experiences, both positive and negative, people have had crossing barriers to new languages, and show some of the benefits thinking of one’s self as a coder and not a “Ruby coder” or a “PHP dev” can have on being a better problem solver.
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Coding in the Woods – Introduction to Coding with Ruby on Rails
This workshop is about taking a first step into coding – for woman and LGBT people. We will give a brief and basic but fairly interactive introduction into using the programming language Ruby. Your coach is member of the Rails Girls network and on a mission to teach females how to code because it unfortunately still is mainly a men’s territory. This workshop is a special edition of our weekly Potsdam based learning group „Rubies in the Woods“ for women who are interested in gaining a foothold in coding! You can join at any level of experience. Please bring a laptop.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Mobile
Developing for the Next Billion Users
The next billion people going online live in emerging countries, where the mobile phone is the main point of communication, the use of mobile apps and web is different and the infrastructure places limits on Internet usage. Getting a better understanding will improve the inclusiveness of your work towards people worldwide. In this talk the speaker will share her experience, from both researching and putting the learnings to practice in Nairobi. Some of the subjects we’ll cover include: the local tech ecosystem, common apps and devices, localisation guidelines and technical limitations.
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Check out the slides here.
Progressive web applications
Progressive web applications (PWA) are web applications that have the look and feel of mobile applications. they take the best of the two worlds (mobile and web) to create the next generation of applications. The main concepts I will talk about: What are PWAs, what are the problems with mobile applications and web applications today, how can we create a PWA (a small example with Ionic 2), service worker and manifest files, how to use Lighthouse (a tool to check how progressive is your web app) and can we use PWAs today.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Nicola Corti
Building UI Consistent Android Apps
Consistency is probably one of the best-known design principles. Consistent UIs are easy to use, easy to learn and frustration free. Nonetheless, they are also extremely easy to break! Just a few development iterations are enough to totally mess up your color palette or your icon sets. Yelp ships its experience across Android, iOS and Web apps used by millions of users. In this talk, you will get an insight into the challenges we face on a daily basis ensuring our visual consistency, and the solutions we adopted.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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7 Aspects that improve the UX of your App
In this talk, i will present a handful of my favorite aspects that are relevant for the user experience of mobile apps. Some of these are topics like push notifications, animation, navigation styles, situational accessibility and object-oriented UX. The talk is suitable for beginners but also provides valuable details, new stuff and reminders for experienced people, be it app developers, product managers or UX/UI designers.
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DevOps
Monitoring Big Data Systems done “The Simple Way”
Once you start working with Big Data systems, you discover a whole bunch of problems you won’t find in monolithic systems. Monitoring all of the components becomes a big data problem itself. In the talk we’ll mention all of the aspects that you should take in consideration when monitoring a distributed system using tools like: Web Services,Spark,Cassandra,MongoDB,AWS. Not only the tools, what should you monitor about the actual data that flows in the system? We’ll cover the simplest solution with your day to day open source tools, the surprising thing, that it comes not from an Ops Guy.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Resilient microservices with Kubernetes
Creating a single microservice is a well understood problem. Creating a cluster of load-balanced microservices that are resilient and self-healing is not so easy. Managing that cluster with rollouts and rollbacks, scaling individual services on demand, securely sharing secrets and configuration among services is even harder. Kubernetes, an open-source container management system, can help with this. In this talk, we will learn what makes Kubernetes a great system for automating deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized applications.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Private Newtworking as Part of the DevOps Pipeline
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360° Monitoring of your Microservices
“With microservices every outage is like a murder mystery” is a common complaint. But it doesn’t have to be! This talk gives an overview on how to monitor distributed applications. We dive into: * System metrics: Keep track of network and system load. * Application logs: Collect and parse your logs. * Uptime monitoring: Ping services and actively monitor their availability. * Application metrics: Get metrics from your application. * Request tracing: Use request tracing to show how long each call takes. And we will do all of that live, since it is so easy and much more interactive that way.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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TDD As If You Meant It
One of the difficulties of developers starting to apply Test Driven Development (TDD) is letting go of preconceived notions of design and allowing themselves to evolve it. TDD As If You Meant It is a set of constraints created by Keith Braithwaite that forces developers to let go of their set blueprints and allow the design to evolve instead. I’ve noticed in code retreats and dojos that the technique is very difficult to get right. In this session, I will explain how to start correctly, how to apply all the rules and how it shows the evolution of software design.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Security
Killing the Big Brother
In his keynote ”Killing the Big Brother” Santiago will talk about the importance of building new models for democratic governance that enable humanity to collaborate and address global issues in transparency. He will introduce Democracy Earth foundation and elaborate on how to fight the uneven distribution of opportunity around the globe by building free, open source software for incorruptible voting for organizations of all sizes to establish a true democratic governance for the Internet age.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Can we afford to ignore web security in the 21st century?
We all use the web, on sites handling sensitive data such as credit cards, medical data, addresses, intellectual property, contact information and a wealth of personal metadata. What would happen if our personal data was compromised? Can we trust the web? Can we afford to be insecure? In this talk we will highlight that security shouldn’t be an afterthought, how security can be integrated into the development process, focussing on quick wins that can make a significant difference and how sites can be hacked.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Innovation
Overview and Outlook of GeoIT Platforms and Components for Developers
Navigation is considered as a key technology in the upcoming revolution of autonomous driving cars. Berlin is a worldwide center of this development with HERE Technologies, recently acquired by Audi, BMW, Daimler, Navinfo and more. The development of GeoIT was pushed by both individual developers and worldwide companies who helped to co-create the modern world of GeoIT. This talk will give an overview of main navigation methods; we will discuss landing pages, main platforms and components of today’s navigation.
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Don’t be the Bottleneck!
This talk will be an introduction what Vox Pupuli is ; what we do. Basically we are a distributed team, self employed, hobbyists or from many companies, working on Puppet modules. Most of those modules were born in the wild, then their creators could not afford supporting them. We will emphase in this talk the steps we take every day to remove all the bottlenecks in those pieces of software, to enable smooth development and release as needed. All of that as distributed as possible.
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Agile UX: An Introduction to Desgin Sprints, from a Berlin Geekette
Introduced in 2016 by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures, the Design Sprint has been making waves within the product design community as the agile approach to UX Research and Design Thinking. A Design Sprint takes you from a challenge to a testable prototype. In just 4 days. Bruna Silva runs weekly Design Sprints at AJ&Smart, and will elaborate on how this framework can empower you and your company to democratize decision-making, reach clear product goals and lead to innovation while cutting out cumbersome processes.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Why we need more Hackathons in Healthcare
Medical technology innovations mostly benefits from direct end-user, physician, or patient feedback. Anyhow, these assessments are rarely involved in development processes which often result in underperforming healthcare solutions with a low acceptance of physicians or patients. In this talk, I will describe the challenges of conducting the first-ever health hackathon organized by the Charité – Universitätsmedizin – a large teaching hospital in Berlin, Germany. The event aimed at introducing hackathons in the medical and academic fields as an instrument to develop novel digital products.
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AI/Machine Learning
Demystifying Deep Learning with Elixir
All the cool guys are talking about deep learning pretending they are all geniuses. But the truth is that the basic concepts of deep learning are simple math algorithms based on simple calculations. This talk will give a quick intro into deep learning and presents how to build a simple deep learning framework with Elixir. Elixir, what? – Elixir is a cool, new programming language based on Erlang. This language is so cool that even deep learning is fun to implement as lightweight processes in Elixir. Come and enjoy some coding and AI.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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AI on a PI
In recent months, Artificial Intelligence has become the hottest topic in the IT industry. In this session, we’ll explain how Deep Learning — a subset of AI — differs from traditional Machine Learning and how it can help you solve complex problems such as computer vision or natural language processing. Then, we’ll introduce you to MXNet, an Open Source Deep Learning library and we’ll show you to run it on a Raspberry Pi. Then, using a camera and a pre-trained object detection model, we’ll show random objects to the Pi…and listen to what it thinks the objects are, thanks to Amazon Polly.
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My Bot can learn – Using reinforcement Learning to make my bot look smart.
A new star is rising at the machine learning horizon: reinforcement learning (RL). The concept entails an agent and an incentive-based training system. The agent learns via incentives and improves its behavior – a self-learning system using simple rules – leading to artificial intelligence (AI). The talk covers an introduction to reinforcement learning and its combination with deep learning to achieve an AI system – a smart, intelligent bot! Annotating data to create a base model and its refinement through RL mechanisms brings us to the next level. Let’s build our self-learning robot!
Listen to the audio recording here.
Cloud/Big Data
The quantum mechanics of Data pipelines
In a world where most companies claim to be data driven the ingestion pipeline has become a critical part of everydays infrastructure. This talk will explore the mechanics of past, current and future of data processing pipelines with special emphasis in common challenges such as how to scale data consumption across teams, assuring reprocessing, optimal performance, scalability and reliability, etc. During this presentation we will analyze architecture patterns, and anti-pattern, stream, batch and the complexities involved. By the end of it you will take home a tool box ready to be applied.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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The Power of Salesforce APIs
Have you ever tried to integrate your web app with a real time messaging app using Bots? In this presentation we will show how easy is to set your app in Salesforce and integrate it with Slack, using REST APIs.
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GameDev/VR
The Increasing Accessibility of Game Development: Drivers and Impact
The development of video games is often viewed as a highly specialized and complex activity. While this is true for big AAA titles, game development tools have evolved to the point that individuals with no technical background can create their own games with relative ease. These games may not have the same scale or complexity as larger titles, but they allow another type of development: rapid and individual. This talk focuses on such tools as well as distribution platforms and what they facilitate: a surge in highly personal, artistic games, created by small teams and individual artists.
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Sex, Drugs & Personal Games
We need more personal games. Games based on personal experiences that reflect the diversity of ideas and backgrounds in the industry. Games about being too shy to ask your crush out on a date. Games about the conversations you have in the endless bathroom line at clubs. Games about staring outside of the window. In this talk, I want to discuss why we need more personal games and what it means to design them.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Martin Förtsch & Thomas Endres
Project Avatar – Telepresence robotics with NAO, Oculus Rift and Kinect
With humanoid robots, virtual reality glasses and 3D camera sensors you can experience the world through the eyes of a robot and control it via gestures. The hardware hacking team of TNG Technology Consulting has built a telepresence robotics system based on a Nao robot, an Oculus Rift and a Kinect One. Using these components you can realize an immersive “out-of-body experience” – similar to that of the film “Avatar”. This talk shows how to program the Nao robot using Python or Java with live coding and a showcase session.
Listen to the audio recording here.
How I started an indie game team with a stranger from another country
After years of working at King Games on Candy Crush & AlphaBetty Saga, I met an artist on a Facebook group and fell in love with his artstyle I decided to quit a stable, wellpaying job to form an indie team with Alex Nae. Although he happened to be Romanian such as myself, I live in Berlin and he lives in Bucharest, which added some communication issues we solved after a lot of trial and error. I invite you to join my talk and find out what tools we use, how we organize information and how we divide up work in order to have optimal use of time and resources. There will be awkward jokes!
Front-end
Dip your toe in React Programming!
In the web world every couple of months there seems to evolve a new and shiny JavaScript framework. But one of them seems to stick around for longer: React. Becoming super popular in 2016 it got its official acceptance when major companies like Airbnb, Netflix, Paypal and Atlassian moved parts of their applications to React. In this talk you get an introduction to React and how it can take your web development to the next level. Be ready to put HTML in JavaScript with JSX and win back the control over your Frontend application with one-way data binding and declarative programming.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Build bridges, not walls – Design for users across Cultures
As Internet access expands to the far corners of the world, product makers have the chance to see their work used by millions of people worldwide. To create products for international users, we must be aware of the full range of human diversity with respect to language, culture and other forms of human difference. If the product doesn’t adapt to users’ differences and the rapidly changing world, our work will not truly meet the users’ needs. Join this talk to hear how Jenny designed for users in Europe, North- and South America, Asia, and Southeast Asia.
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Empaty in Design
Empathy is one of the key elements of a good design and delightful digital product experience. At the end of the day there are only two things that matter – if your product solved users problem and how it made them feel. What is empathy when it comes to digital products? How to be emphatic during the designing and testing processes? Because if you have no time to walk that mile in your user’s shoes, they won’t have patience nor interest in your product either.
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layerJS: interactive animated UIs simple HTML
This talk introduces layerJS.org, an open-source framework for composing interactive web user interfaces. A User interface is simply a set of 2D elements sitting on stacked layers. Upon user interaction parts of the UI are replaced, today mostly in an animated manner. layerJS allows to create such interfaces by simple HTML markup. Exchangeable parts are “marked” as frames that can be dynamically fit into “stages”. Such stages are responsive containers that define the positioning of the frames. Interactions are defined by regular links triggering animated transitions between different frames.
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Back-end
User Generated Content in an international environment – Challenges in the Open Source Project Speakerinnen.org
Speakerinnen.org is an international web platform that increases the visibility of female experts in a variety of professions. The project started as a Rails Girls learning project in Berlin in 2013 and grew rapidly around the world. The international growth had fundamental effects on the usability of the website and required a rethink of the infrastructure deployed to handle user generated content in the multi-language environment. In this talk we’d like to share some key insights we learnt in developing a technical solution.
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Reactive Programming
Why should a farmer in Amazon need to become an Internet provider?
The reasons for communities in Brazil to use mesh networks instead of single Internet access are manifold. In May 2017 I had several encounters and talks with communities in Brazil, to mention a few: feminist organizations, farmers associations in the Amazon region, traditional communities, hacker spaces. In this talk I want to give a short summary about the emerging trend to use mesh technology on setting up community managed networks among those territories.
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Motivational
A Summer of Foodsharing – Learn How to Code in an Open Source Project
RailsGirls Summer of Code is an award-winning scholarship program that aims to foster diversity in Open Source. We are one of the 11 selected teams in 2017 – and we would love to talk about the program: How does it work? Who can apply? And how can you benefit from open source projects? In the second part we will present our project – a Foodsharing platform where people share their food, time, skills and resources unconditionally. It’s built in Python, Django, with RESTful APIs and in Javascript, AngularJS.
Listen to the audio recording here.
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Design Thinking – The Secret sauce to growing our niche group to the largest women in Tech Community in the Netherlands
Design thinking is familiar to many designers as a framework in a product development process. Did you know that design thinking can help community managers solve their toughest challenges? From growing the membership base to standing out among hundreds or even thousands of other communities, to sustaining the community with sponsorships or monetization, design thinking is the secret sauce to growing our niche community. In this talk, you’ll learn how we overcame the biggest challenges for ‘Ladies that UX Amsterdam’ with design thinking, and how to put design thinking into practice.
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Ipshita Chatterjee & Prachi Manchanda
coala ‘Bear’ hugs from Rails Grils Summer of Code
Rails Girls Summer of Code is a program aimed towards increasing the participation of women in open source. With this lightning talk, we aim to present and talk about the program and our project, coala. We would be covering our project: coala, as a static code analysis tool, how to begin with coala, generating custom configuration files for running coala and tes driven development. We’d also include a small coding demo for writing a linter bear.
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Embracing Constraints
In a time and culture where instant, near-unlimited access to unprecedented technological resources has become as mundane as carrying a phone in your pocket, the idea of “constraint” takes on a negative spin. We constantly set our sights on more, bigger, faster! When we do encounter an unavoidable limitation, we view it as an enemy, something to begrudgingly endure until our budget and/or Moore’s law enable us to defeat it. But what if that constraint was actually a friend, something to respect and embrace as an ally in our quest for innovation and progress.
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Learning Through Mentoring
Someone has asked you to mentor them. Now what? And why should you? We’ll talk about the mentoring process, how it’s not teaching, and how mentoring someone can actually help you grow as a professional. And we’ll do it while talking about movies.
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You can read code. But can you read yourself?
Your mind is a child’s bedroom, full of play and growth. But… there are some monsters hiding under the bed. They can act stealthily in the background without us noticing. They cause us sleepless nights, frustrated days and lead us to act in ways we don’t recognise. This light hearted yet meaningful expose on the psyche will teach you how to spot and challenge your own monsters. In order to work more effectively and stay calm and focused, we must walk past the shiny toys and new gadgets and look where every child fears most: Under the bed
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How to keep a community thriving a few years in
The Women Techmakers Berlin community kicked off early 2015 at a nice event that held tens of attendees, cool food, shiny venue and promises for a cool community with many activities. 3 years later – our community has over 1000 members, we meet several times a month, an increasing number of our attendees is switching into tech, and we are engaging with more and more Berliner companies. However, many communities slow down or even stop their activity within the 1-2 years. In this talk we will share from our experience how to keep the community active and growing, even a few years in!
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Opening up election Data
Elections are events where data enthusiasts can get crazy about all the data, e.g. by providing insightful visualizations of election results. This year, Germany’s open data community Code for Germany focused on projects around election data as well as data availability. Who would have thought that detailed elections results for past Bundestag elections can only be accessed by purchasing a CD for 95 Euros? The talk will give a brief overview about the current state of election data in Germany as well as showcasing some of the current election projects from the Code for Germany community.
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Using technology to break down barriers and connect the leaders of tomorrow
ReDI school of Digital Integration provides IT courses to newcomers with refugee background to bring their talent out of the new-comers bubble into the job market through their IT skills which are the most required ones in Germany. In this session I am going to talk about ReDI school, our concept and our journey.
Listen to the audio recording here.
How to rock the Stage: Public Speaking for Geeks!
Speaking in public is not easy, especially for geeks, that tend to be too technical, or too shy, or too something… In this session we’ll start with some basic tips and we’ll see how to dramatically improve our results using well defined techniques. We’ll also see (with practical examples) how to deal with problems during speeches, elevator pitches, product presentations, interviews, and so on. Public speaking skills are not useful to conference speakers only, everybody needs to improve them, especially geeks!
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
The Power of blogging
Have you ever thought of having a blog? Then this talk might be interesting for you. There are several reasons that having a blog is beneficial to developers. Ayumi, a self taught front end developer as well as a travel blogger from Japan will tell you how to start a blog and develop your skills.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
Karsten Himmer & Nicco Kunzmann
Coder DoJo – volunteer-led programing clubs around the world
CoderDojo is a world-wide movement. Children of all ages learn to code to build their own games, apps, robots and websites. After this talk, you should know how to teach newcomers programming, where you can meet and how you can found a CoderDojo at your place.
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
GDG Golang Berlin
Once every month about 70 Gophers meet somewhere in Berlin. But who are they? What are they doing there? How are they kept happy? What does it feel like to be at such a meetup?
Listen to the audio recording here.
Check out the slides here.
