Get moving with a 5K run to start your day. We will meet Friday morning at 7:15am in the Marriott lobby. Will have course for people when they get there. Will run together at a conversational pace for those who wish.

Working in a new role could be daunting and challenging for newcomers. It's not only about the technical challenges but could be a lot to learn about specialized domain knowledge and how effective team communication works. How do newcomers find answers to all these questions? How do they know what is the best path for the given problem? How can they be sure that they're challenged to think differently and guided toward professional growth?

Effective mentorship can help to answer these questions and make sure that the new person feels confident in their position. Mentoring is a process of teaching and growth - making sure to bring mentee to the speed of required team knowledge and expertise. The mentor acts as a guide and challenges mentee to think creatively about the given problem. It is essential for the mentee to discuss their questions with the mentor and get guidance if something is not quite clear. However, this should not be mistaken as a readymade path to the full solution. The mentee is expected to listen to mentor, clarify any doubts, research on its own and apply the advice to get to the solution.

I have previously worked as a mentor at my current organization and I would like to share some of the thoughts and experience I gained during the process. I was fortunate enough to get some of the best mentors when I first started working in the software industry a few years ago. As a person who worked as a mentor and mentee, I would like to share my thoughts from both the perspectives. My goal is to make this talk useful for people who are excited to be mentors in the future by letting them know the elements of effective mentorship and for mentees teaching them how to leverage mentoring to establish the strong foundation and planning for long-term growth.

WebAssembly is a new type of code that can be executed in modern web browsers through a compact binary format that runs **at near-native speed** without any plugins. This have a great impact for the web, because it gives a new way to run code from other languages into the web at near native performance, providing client apps with a technology to run high performance applications in such way that was not possible before.

WebAssembly lets you port your current code to the web. Using emscripten you can compile code written in C or Rust into WASM as target, so you can reuse your current apps or call part of the code from a JavaScript context and access browser functionalities using the same Web APIs accessible from JavaScript.

This talk will be an introduction of what's possible to do with WASM. I will discuss the following topics:

* Introduction of scenarios where high performance could be required.
* What is WASM, its components and features.
* What is tool chain to compile your code for WASM.
* Code interaction between JS and WASM (and viceversa)
* Code examples and a brief presentation of demos (video or live).
* Firefox's Dev Tools for working with WASM.
* Where you can get more information about it.

Attendees will learn the basics of this game-changer web technology, how to start to create high performance apps from scratch or migrate existing ones written in other languages like C/C++ or Rust to WebAssembly.

All by using open technologies!

Have you ever wondered how super globals get initialized or been curious what happens before your code is turned into an http response? Have you ever wanted to add a new feature to PHP that you could deploy across all the applications hosted on a server? 20k Lines Under the C dives deep into the source of the PHP runtime, extension APIs, and parts that make it translate your code into web pages. We'll begin by looking at how web servers provide PHP the request information. We'll follow the startup process making stops along the way pointing out the internal structure and key parts during execution where various data is initialized and processed. Through this journey we'll learn about some of the special data types that PHP exposes and the APIs used to interact with them. Finally we'll explore the the different types of PHP integrations and explore how to insert hooks into just about everything providing ways to inspect and change the behavior.

Progressive Web Applications have gained unparalleled momentum in the tech world and are currently one of the hottest trends in Web Development. Find out how PWA attempts to combine features offered by most modern browsers with the benefits of mobile experience and how service workers make them fast, reliable & engaging. In this session we dive into what's in store beyond providing the offline experience, push and background sync features. This talk examines how Service Workers fill the gap between web and native, and how they give better performance and user experiences.

In this talk, I'll convince you that your parents were wrong & procrastination is actually a best practice. I'll discuss: what caching is, what queuing is, why you (probably) don't need live data, why you should push everything off until later & how we can get our lazy on with Redis.

We often find ourselves designing against a tight deadline compromising how we get things done and the way we work together. We can lose sight of our client's needs if we focus only on the frontend interface. And can we call a newly designed website a success if the client resents entering content or is constantly confused by how to edit or add to the CMS? Ultimately, interface design is only one component of the full user experience and in order to design a system that truly meets a client's needs, UX thinking must be integrated through all phases of a website build.

This session will provide an overview of how we can apply UX thinking to our client's end experience and why it's important for UX designers and their teams. Using a case study of a large organization looking to create and manage their own content we'll explore the value of collecting client input, strategies for integrating client needs into your system UI, and understanding how and what to communicate to development teams as they build a back end structure for our designs.

Attendees will gain insight into strategies and tools that have helped our agency improve internal workflow and client that they can apply to their own projects.
-- The importance of collecting client input and how to document it.
-- Strategies for integrating client needs into your system UI.
-- How UX designers and developers can effectively communicate.

How do we ensure everyone feels welcome in the workplace? I say "we" to emphasize that the everyday decisions we make in how we interact with fellow coworkers largely impact how welcoming our workplace is.During this talk you'll learn how to become everyday change makers by implementing small changes to create a more welcoming workplace.

What makes you different makes you wonderful. The differences that make us unique and special whether they be our race, ethnicity,cultural traditions, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and/or personalities types can also be a source of contention.How do you handle talking to those who are different and not your typical crowd at work? Do your day to day conversations leave room for others or can they only be understood by a small group of fellow coworkers? Most importantly how can you make an impact on fostering a more welcoming workplace?

During this talk we will walk through these questions together by first defining what diversity truly is and how it impacts an organization. Secondly we'll take a close look at what it means to be an inclusive workplace be redefining what inclusion is and how to balance different ideals and mindsets. Next, we'l walk through detailed steps on how to best evaluate to what level your workplace promotes diversity and inclusion and last but surely not least provide guidance on steps you can take to influence your workplace culture from the ground up.

Participants of this talk will walk away with a greater understanding of what it means to be a diverse and inclusive workplace. Participants will also step away with individual steps they can take to become advocates of change to create a more welcoming work environment.

This unconference session will be an attendee-driven community discusion for anyone interested in PHP development.

The tech talent shortage continues. Some experts predict that the push toward automation will only exasperate the challenge and create a generation of workers that may struggle to keep pace. This talk is designed to offer a case study of seven years of virtual self-study group training offered by Boston PHP Meetup that contributed to membership growth from 1,000 to 3,700 members. This talk will explain the concept of a virtual self-study group -- blended learning using existing resources at virtually no cost. These groups include the following:

~ PHP Percolate
~ jQuery jAM
~ HTML5 Brunch
~ Git Lunch
~ Drupal Diner
~ Agile Appetizer
~ Angular Stew
~ AWS Snack
~ WordPress Dressing

GraphQL is the hottest new way to retrieve data from the server in bite-sized chunks. One main issue is, how do you paginate the data that is returned? In this talk, I will go over the most popular method for pagination while using GraphQL and PHP and how we are using those concepts at Wayfair and how you can utilize them to build performant and fast APIs for your application. If you have been curious as to what the Relay Cursor Connection Specification is all about, this talk is for you!

If you're like the 2016 version of me, then you think you have a decent handle on web accessibility. You put alt attributes on all your images (though you don't give much thought to the actual text) and you make sure your sites can be used with a keyboard (except for overlays sometimes). Then the day comes when you're given a 100 page accessibility audit from a client and a deadline for all issues to be fixed. What is high contrast mode, you ask yourself, and why does it matter if these links are implemented in a list?

The fact is that we take for granted that people are able to use the sites we create. As governments pass legislation enforcing accessible standards, the web is playing catch up to the physical spaces we use every day. User interfaces are becoming more sophisticated, and it's easy for developers & designers without disabilities to overlook the simple things that many rely on to make sense of your site.

In this presentation I'll share some of the hard lessons I've learned over the past few years, from both a development and a project management perspective. Topics discussed will include an overview of common accessibility problems, tools I use to validate accessibility issues, and best practices for training your team.

In this community discussion about the hiring process, get insight into one manager's thought process and learn how to ace your next interview.

Remember when setting up an auth system was easy? Me neither. From the signup form, the login form, password reset form, and all the validation in between it can easily take weeks if not months to get something basic up and running. Then you have to deal with all the security considerations. No thanks. During this presentation, the attendees will be introduced to OpenID and OAuth. They will learn how to leverage these technologies to create secure applications, but most importantly, they will learn why and how to delegate authorization and authentication so they can focus on their real work and forget about all that security stuff.

Virtual Reality has a fun, wow factor, and in this talk, attendees will experience sample interfaces for themselves as they learn about design for VR. Desera.com will provide all conference attendees google cardboard compatible plastic headsets that work with most Smartphone devices.

VR is emerging as a viable medium for communication, entertainment, and marketing with growing adoption of the the Vive, Rift, Google Cardboard, and their competitors. Projects ranging from Niantic's augmented reality games to the New York Times' experiments with VR storytelling are bringing the technology into the mainstream.

User experience design challenges arising from 3D environments, headsets, and new controller designs are significant. This talk will introduce, demystify, and cover solutions to these challenges.

* Introduce a workflow for designing non-diegetic, spacial, and diegetic UI for virtual reality apps.

* Share "React VR" code for developing interfaces.