Northeast PHP 2018: Full Schedule

8:30am EDT

Registration

Wednesday September 19, 2018 8:30am - 9:00am EDT
Reception Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

9:00am EDT

Containers, Kubernetes, and OpenShift Full Day Workshop by Red Hat, Part 1

Building apps on OpenShift

This workshop prepares web and application developers to build applications using containers, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. We’ll start with a short introduction to containers and Kubernetes, which are the foundation of OpenShift.

Using hands-on exercises, we will walk through use cases for OpenShift: How easy it is to deploy existing containers, how health checks work to make OpenShift automatically heal your application, and how to build containers just by providing a git repository. Want to see easy application scaling - no problem! Wish you could do A/B (aka blue/green) deployments - your wish is our command.

Bring your curiosity and willingness to code, and learn what you need to know to start building pure awesomeness on OpenShift.

Speakers

Ryan Jarvinen

Developer Advocate, Red Hat

Ryan Jarvinen is a Developer Advocate and Open Source Evangelist, focused on app development and security in the Kubernetes community and container space. Ryan works remotely from Sacramento, California, as a part of Red Hat’s OpenShift team. Ryan is a frequent conference speaker... Read More →

Josh Wood

Developer Advocate, Red Hat

Josh has worked in a variety of roles in innovative startups throughout his career, holding diverse titles from systems admin to product director and CTO. He is passionate about constructing the future of utility computing with open source technologies like Kubernetes. When procrastinating... Read More →

Wednesday September 19, 2018 9:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development

9:00am EDT

Solving Complex UX Design Challenges with Confidence Full Day Workshop Part 1

Our goal as professionals is to improve the user experience of our projects for our clients. The tools and techniques of our trade help us reach that goal. The real world, however, introduces complications that increases the difficulty of the solutions.

In this workshop, learn how to handle these challenges with confidence. Be prepared to workshop solutions to case studies, using methods you already know like reverse card sorting and using testing, in the following areas:

► Information Architecture: Identifying and eliminating ambiguity, vagueness, and polysemy in content semantics.

► Resolving conflicts between accessibility and business, aesthetic, security, and sustainability goals.

► Bridging the Gap between developers and designers in project design workflows.

► UX Design Debt: Review the causes and solutions for "design debt" that creeps into our projects.

Speakers

David Kelleher

Founder, Desera.com

David Kelleher is a Northeast PHP organizer, college professor, multimedia artist, and freelance PHP/MySQL and UI developer with 15 years of industry experience. He has taught courses and given talks on diverse topics ranging from database optimization to visual effects production... Read More →

1 IA Source rtf

2 matrix png

3 groups pdf

User Experience pptx

4 kiosk jpg

Wednesday September 19, 2018 9:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

12:00pm EDT

Lunch

Wednesday September 19, 2018 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Cafeteria Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

1:00pm EDT

Containers, Kubernetes, and OpenShift Full Day Workshop by Red Hat, Part 2

Speakers

Ryan Jarvinen

Developer Advocate, Red Hat

Josh Wood

Developer Advocate, Red Hat

Wednesday September 19, 2018 1:00pm - 4:00pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development

1:00pm EDT

Solving Complex UX Design Challenges with Confidence Full Day Workshop Part 2

Speakers

David Kelleher

Founder, Desera.com

Wednesday September 19, 2018 1:00pm - 4:00pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

8:00am EDT

Breakfast and Registration

Thursday September 20, 2018 8:00am - 8:45am EDT
Reception Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

8:45am EDT

Welcoming Remarks

Thursday September 20, 2018 8:45am - 9:00am EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

9:00am EDT

Opening Keynote: Why Designing and Engineering the Future is So Damned Hard

Speakers

Ethan Zuckerman

Director, Center for Civic Media, MIT

Ethan Zuckerman is Director of the Center for Civic Media and Associate Professor of the Practice, MIT Media Lab. Ethan is also cofounder of the citizen media community, Global Voices. Prior to MIT, Ethan worked with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 9:00am - 9:45am EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

9:45am EDT

Coffee Break

Thursday September 20, 2018 9:45am - 10:30am EDT
Cafeteria Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

10:30am EDT

Refactoring CSS bloat — [dev]

We've all been there. Whether it's inheriting a codebase with a lot of CSS debt or just careless mistakes from the past coming to haunt us in the present. In this talk, I will share some strategies my coworkers and I have taken when refactoring CSS bloat. Through this talk, you should expect to learn from my mistakes and have a better understanding on what approaches you can do to manage CSS technical debt.

Speakers

Clement Ho

Frontend Engineering Manager, GitLab

Thursday September 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Frontend

Skill Level Intermediate Level

10:30am EDT

APIs, Chains, and Graphs — [php]

Let's face it, REST APIs can be problematic, and hypermedia hasn't quite proven to be the answer we've looked for. GraphQL has quickly become more popular offering a solution to the problems REST created - but opens back up the very problems REST was created to avoid (remember SOAP?). But what if there was a way to take the best of both: enter API chains. In this session we'll take a look at the pros and cons of REST, GraphQL, and a new specification and library for chaining numerous resource calls into a single HTTP request.

Speakers

Mike Stowe

Developer Relations, RingCentral

Author of Undisturbed REST, Michael Stowe has spoken at conferences around the world. An active advocate for creating better architectures and interfaces, his work has also been featured on ProgrammableWeb, DZone, and InfoQ. You can view his past talks and slides at http://www.mikestowe.com/slides... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, API

Skill Level Intermediate Level

10:30am EDT

Inclusive Design: Thinking Beyond Accessibility — [ux]

There are many differences that impact the way people experience the digital world. From age and gender, vision and dexterity, to location and education. Each difference affects digital inclusion and experiences. As technologists it is our job to build products that are usable by, and inclusive of, as many people as possible. To do so, it is important that we plan for the many differences that make up our users.

This session details the importance of having an inclusive mindset in the creation of our digital projects. It explains how Inclusive Design allow for producing positive experiences for a wider audience. Attendees will learn four simple guidelines that they can follow to apply Inclusive Design principles across all project phases including: ux, development and content creation. Attendees will leave with the tools they need to reach a bigger user base while also building towards an accessible and inclusive digital world.

This session is intended for anyone who wants to build digital products that reach as many people as possible.

Speakers

Michael Miles

VP of Technology, Genuine

I am a Senior Technical Solutions Manager at Genuine (a digital marketing agency in Boston) who plays an active role in scoping, architecting and building many of the PHP development projects that run through the agency. I have over 14 years of agency experience working with and leading... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

UX, Accessibility

Skill Level Beginner Level

11:30am EDT

Do More, Server Less — [dev]

A tour through different useful applications of serverless computing and tools to use across different cloud providers. Follow up with a walkthrough of a completely serverless application that I built to demonstrate some of those uses.

- Initially go through what serverless computing really is and clear up some confusion that arises around serverless computing vs frameworks that have adopted the name.
- This would lead into a brief tour of the popular serverless frameworks that are out there and how useful each one is.
- A tour of cloud provider's serverless offerings (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, IBM Whisk)
- A high level overview of the application I built and what it consists of.
- Things to watch out for when you build a fully serverless application

Speakers

Richard Moot

Developer Advocate Lead, Block

Developer Advocate Lead @ Square. I have a love/hate relationship with JavaScript.

Thursday September 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:15pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Frontend

Skill Level Beginner Level

11:30am EDT

Shipping Better Software Faster, and Having Fun Doing It — [php]

Software Engineering can be extremely difficult and maddening. But it doesn't have to be. We will explore leveraging various principles to make Software Engineering fun again. We'll make a case for "Better Code" fueling "Faster Development".

Toward building our case, we will explore 5 areas:

* Bad Code vs Agility - What it means to be "Agile" and the impact of Bad Code on Agility.
* Better Code: Enablers - Enabling Concepts for Better Code such as TDD, Clean Code and Patterns, with an eye toward adapting them to various programming paradigms such as Functional and OOP.
* Empowering OOP - If OOP is to be chosen as a paradigm, we'll explore what it means to play to the strengths of this paradigm.
* Web Application Architectures: When building Web Applications, we'll explore various architectures that may hinder or promote a sustainable business fueled by better code.
* TDD: Better Fuels Faster - Leveraging preceding topics, we'll put it all together in describing a workflow leveraging test-driven development for shipping better products ... faster, and having fun doing it.

The end of this talk will showcase code examples of a real-world Kata for building the service layer of a "Ride Hailing Application". It will also link to recorded Kata videos, as well as a "clean slate" branch in my git repository to follow along.

Having made this case, we'll conclude with the positive impact this workflow will have on a team's ability to ship new products and new features at a sustained pace, with high levels of predictability.

While PHP, Symfony and Doctrine are used for code examples, concepts in this talk are applicable to all PHP frameworks and environments, as well as other programming languages such as Java, PHP and C#.

Speakers

Chris Holland

Director, Engineering, TriNet

Chris Holland leads a small Software Engineering Team at an HR company. Throughout a career spanning more than 20 years, Chris has held Sr. Engineering and Leadership roles for small and large successful publicly-traded companies such as EarthLink and Internet Brands, serving business... Read More →

better and faster pdf

Thursday September 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:15pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Development

Skill Level Intermediate Level

11:30am EDT

5 essential UX lessons you can learn from art history — [ux]

Discover how you can take the stress out of building website and app designs by understanding design concepts and principles from the past. Starting in the early 1900's design principles were established to help those dealing with usability and information design. See how you can take those same principles and apply them to modern visual art and design.
1. Form follows function
Form follows function is a principle associated with 20th-century modernist industrial design which states that the shape of an object should be primarily relate to its intended function or purpose. See how this concept applies to website and app design of today.
2. Less is more
Less is more was made popular by industrial designer Dieter Rams. With all the information â€œnoiseâ€ out there this mantra is more important now than ever. Find out how you can iterate your content to show less distractions, and offer your user more relevant information.
3. Always use a grid
During the time of the International typographic style era, grids were heavily used for a purpose. Using a grid is the best way to organize a great amount of content in a manner that is easily interpreted by viewers. Discover how to use grids for both layout and type.
4. Really understand typography
Early in the 20th century Jan Tschichold set forth rules for standardization of practices relating to modern type usage that are still relevant today. At the time he condemned all typefaces except for sans-serif types, advocated standardized sizes of paper and set forth guidelines for establishing a typographic hierarchy when using type in design. Find out how to use these same concepts in your designs.
5. Follow proportions that work
Some designers may intuitively know where to place objects and text on a screen, but many also rely on basic principles of math that allow them to place type and images quickly and with confidence. Discover some of the proportional rules that you can apply to your layouts.

Speakers

Jennifer Smith

Vice President, American Graphics Institute

Jennifer Smith's expertise bridges the gap between design, and development of print, web, and interactive design.Jennifer's career started when she was one of the first creative directors to push the limits of technology and its integration with design. She has since managed and developed... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:15pm EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

UX, UI

Skill Level Beginner Level

12:30pm EDT

Lunch

Thursday September 20, 2018 12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT
Cafeteria Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

1:30pm EDT

Building Your First PHP Application in Docker — [php]

Whether you're just starting out or an expert PHP developer, you've probably heard the dreaded line, "Works on my machine." Docker is quickly taking hold as the answer to this problem by making virtualization faster and more flexible than ever before.

In this walk-through, we'll take a step-by-step look at exactly how to set up a PHP application using Docker. Along the way we'll explore how Docker works, why containers are an improvement over virtual machines, and how this setup can eliminate differences between local and production environments.

Speakers

Karl Hughes

CTO, The Graide Network

Karl has been building software and teams for education technology startups in Chicago for the past six years. He is currently the CTO at The Graide Network where he oversees architecture, testing, and product planning.

Thursday September 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:15pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Development

Skill Level Beginner Level

1:30pm EDT

Dr Sheldon Cooper Presents: Fun with Flags — [php]

No no, not country flags, feature flags! Feature flags are a powerful technique that allows teams to modify a system's behaviour without changing code. They can be used several reasons - canary releases and A/B testing to name a few.

This talk will show you how you're already using feature flags in your application without realising it. Next, we'll take a look at some of the best tooling out there to help you take feature flags to the next level. Finally, we'll cover strategies for removing feature flags before they become technical debt that you have to manage.

Speakers

Michael Heap

Developer Advocate, Nexmo

Michael is a polyglot software engineer, committed to reducing complexity in systems and making them more predictable. Working with a variety of languages and tools, he shares his technical expertise to audiences all around the world at user groups and conferences.Day to day, Michael... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:15pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Development

Skill Level Intermediate Level

1:30pm EDT

Customer-Centered Tech: A Radical Strategy — [ux]

On the East Coast, our startups are known for being able to solve hard tech problems, but often companies get more excited about their technology than in the customer value they're creating. In this talk, we introduce practical framework for building customer-centered tech products. You will learn how to craft and communicate a far-reaching vision and strategy centered around customer needs, and balance that vision with the day-to-day needs of your company.

In this talk, we'll cover the following:
- Intro & Radical Vision: What's a "good" vision? How do you craft a good vision and align your team to that vision?
- Product Strategy: What are the elements of a product strategy? How do you translate your vision into an actionable strategy?
- Prioritization into a Roadmap: How do you translate strategy into a roadmap, especially with the revenue pressures you face as a startup? How do you recognize and pay down "Vision Debt"
- Metrics That Matter: Many of the popular metrics may not apply to your tech product. How do you align metrics & measurement to your product strategy and vision, so you can measure what matters.

Speakers

Nidhi Aggarwal

Co-Founder, Radical Product

Nidhi Aggarwarl is an entrepreneur who is passionate about building radical products. She co-founded cloud configuration management startup qwikLABS. qwikLABS was acquired by Google and still remains the exclusive platform used by AWS customers and partners worldwide to create and... Read More →

Geordie Kaytes

Director of UX Strategy, Fresh Tilled Soil

Geordie Kaytes is the director of UX strategy for Boston-area UI/UX studio Fresh Tilled Soil and a partner at Heroic, a design leadership coaching firm that helps growing companies scale their digital product capabilities. A digital product design leader with deep experience in design process transformation and cross-functional expertise in design, strategy, and technology, Geordie has helped companies in a broad ran... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:15pm EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

UX, UI

Skill Level Intermediate Level

2:30pm EDT

Break Things to Fix Things: Testing more than what "should" work — [dev]

Let's change the quality assurance mindset. Application testing plays a critical role in the application development process, what good is a product that doesn't work? Though, how should we test? What should we test? and when should quality assurance play a role in the process?

In an ideal world users would use applications we build in specific predefined ways allowing us to build for the happiest of happy path scenarios. Though in reality, that doesn't always happen. This talk will dive deep into how testing your application in unexpected ways at different points of the development process can allow you to discover bugs and hidden vulnerabilities and will conclude with a live demo inviting members from the audience to try and test some applications in the wild. It will be exciting, it will be daring, and most importantly it will highlight the true joys of quality engineering.

Speakers

Ijeoma Ezeonyebuchi

Test Engineer, NPR

Ijeoma currently works as a Mobile Quality Assurance Engineer at NPR validating mobile applications and the backend services that power them. Outside of work you can often find her mentoring women in tech as a Java/Android Lab Lead for Women Who Code DC or volunteering. For fun you... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:15pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Testing

Skill Level Beginner Level

2:30pm EDT

The Beginner's Guide to Alternative Authentication — [dev]

It's pretty common for developers to go with the same kinds of authentication handling when they're creating their applications with permissions and groups. Unfortunately, as applications grow in side an interact with other systems, this kind of system sags under the weight of its own technical debt. Follow along with me as I talk about some alternatives to the typical RBAC authorization including attribute-based, multifactor, pattern-based and federated identity providers.

Speakers

Chris Cornutt

Application Security Engineer, Duo Security

For the last ten plus years, Chris has been involved in the PHP community in one way or another. These days he's the Senior Editor of PHPDeveloper.org and lead author for Websec.io and the Securing PHP ebook series. He's written for several PHP publications and has spoken at conferences... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:15pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Security

Skill Level Beginner Level

2:30pm EDT

Unconference Session: UX Topics — [ux]

This unconference session will be an attendee-driven community discusion for anyone interested in User Experience Design.

Thursday September 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:15pm EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

UX, Unconference

3:30pm EDT

Refreshment Break

Thursday September 20, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Cafeteria Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

4:00pm EDT

Mental health in tech: Storytime — [career]

Jenna Quindica was working at her third startup when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her journey has been a rocky one, marked by medication changes, mental health days, and more. She wouldn't have been able to maintain her full-time software engineering job without help, support, and encouragement from her manager and coworkers. Jenna will share how she navigated a diagnosis and now a chronic, mental illness. This is a story with a happy ending. Attendees will walk away feeling more comfortable discussing mental health in the workplace and everyday life.

Speakers

Jenna Quindica

Software engineer, Basis

Jenna Quindica is a multiracial woman, born and raised in Hawaii, who has worked at startups exclusively her whole career. She's a Cornell- and self-taught software engineer whose focus is on product and data scale. Jenna loves Broadway and is seen in her natural habitat rapping Hamilton... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:45pm EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Career, Mental Health

Skill Level Beginner Level

4:00pm EDT

The Rise of the Distributed Database — [dev]

With the advent of distributed systems with such as Docker and Kubernetes, it was truly only a matter of time before our data solutions obtained the same structural needs. This talk will take a look at the history of databases, from relational databases like PostGres, to NoSQL solutions, to sharding, and truly distributed databases like Crate.io.

With each step, this talk will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each system with an eye toward security, sanity, and the future.

Speakers

PJ Hagerty

Developer Advocate, Spotify

PJ is the founder of DevRelate.io and a board member of Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMIhelp.org). He is an organizer of DevOps Days Buffalo, CodeDaze, and ElixirDaze. PJ is a developer, writer, speaker, musician, and Community Advocate. He is known to travel the world speaking... Read More →

Thursday September 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:45pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Database

Skill Level Beginner Level

4:00pm EDT

Pulling on the seams of dependancies (Testing older code) — [php]

Even legacy code should have test coverage.
Finding the right places to put those tests, however is really hard. How do you add support unit tests when most of your code is tightly coupled?

We'll discuss a number of strategies to find seams in your existing legacy code, which libraries make this easier and help us test more and deeper into our legacy codebases.
We also will cover valuable metrics to measure for progress, how we should approach the issue of continually improving our tests.

By the end of this talk the audience should have a better understanding of what a seam is, how to leverage them to test code, how to use mocking libraries and runtime replacement to help get better test coverage.
Most importantly we'll all walk away feeling like we can tackle refactoring and new features with confidence.

Speakers

Joe Vieira

Senior Software Architect, Ovia Health

Joe Vieira is a software architect, engineering manager, and speaker with an overwhelming desire to building maintainable and easily extendable software and in many ways finds teaching other people how to do the same the most rewarding aspect of building. He's currently the Senior... Read More →

UnitTesting pdf

Thursday September 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:45pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Testing

Skill Level Intermediate Level

5:00pm EDT

Event Night: Trivia Games

Join us at the kickoff of this year's social event night for activities, fun, and prizes

Moderators

David Kelleher

Founder, Desera.com

Thursday September 20, 2018 5:00pm - 5:30pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

5:30pm EDT

Event Night: Appetizers & Social

Northeast PHP's event night will continue in the café with free appetizers and time for networking and socializing

Thursday September 20, 2018 5:30pm - 8:30pm EDT
Cafeteria Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

6:00pm EDT

Event Night: Security Hackathon

Chris Cornutt and websec.io host a "Capture the Flag" security game. Bring a laptop, join a team, and get hacking to sharpen your security skills

Moderators

Chris Cornutt

Application Security Engineer, Duo Security

Thursday September 20, 2018 6:00pm - 8:30pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

7:15am EDT

Morning 5K Run - from Mariott Copley Lobby

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.

Speakers

Theodore Stepanoff

Director of Web Services, UJA Federation of NY

I have been working with PHP since 2003. I started in college on my own projects. Since then, I have upgraded from PHP 5.0 all the way to PHP 7.2. Today I manage a small team of developers for a non-profit. We use AWS, ZF3, Angular4, MongoDB, MySql, Haproxy, and other technologies... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 7:15am - 8:00am EDT

8:00am EDT

Breakfast and Registration

Friday September 21, 2018 8:00am - 9:00am EDT
Reception Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

9:00am EDT

Effective Mentorship — [career]

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.

Speakers

Jayesh Kawli

iOS Engineer, Wayfair

Friday September 21, 2018 9:00am - 9:45am EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Career, Education

Skill Level Beginner Level

9:00am EDT

High performance Web Apps with WebAssembly — [dev]

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!

Speakers

Miguel Useche

Web Developer, Mozilla TechSpeakers

Miguel is a Operating Systems and Programming professor at Universidad del Táchira, whom has been a web developer for more than half of his life. Volunteering in local open source communities as coder, translator, blogger, speaker. He has been involved with Mozilla since 2010 and... Read More →

wasm nephp zip

Friday September 21, 2018 9:00am - 9:45am EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Frontend

Skill Level Intermediate Level

9:00am EDT

20k Lines Under the C: A Guide to the PHP Startup Process and Hooking Absolutely Everything — [php]

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.

Speakers

Joe Rozner

Software Engineer, Prevoty

Joe Rozner is a software engineer at Prevoty where he has built semantic analysis tools, worked to develop new methods to more accurately detect SQL injection and Cross Site Scripting (XSS), and designed novel integration technology leveraging runtime patching. His focus on LangSec... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 9:00am - 9:45am EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Internals

Skill Level Advanced Level

10:00am EDT

Service workers and their role in PWAs — [dev]

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.

Speakers

Ipsha Bhidonia

Tech Speaker, Mozilla

Ipsha is a software engineer at Gemalto by profession, a Mozilla tech speaker by heart, and an advocate for a free and open web by passion. She likes traveling to new places and meeting people with different perspectives of the world. When not at work she speaks at technical conferences... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 10:00am - 10:45am EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Frontend

Skill Level Intermediate Level

10:00am EDT

Procrastination as a Service: Caching & Queueing — [php]

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.

Speakers

Lawrence Shea

PHP Developer, Verizon Digital Media Services

I am primarily a PHP Developer, with over 6 years of real world experience. I'm always working on the bleeding edge, with modern frameworks like Laravel. I love to learn; mostly by regularly attending PHP conferences, spending time helping jr. developers & moderating Reddit's /r/PHPHelp... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 10:00am - 10:45am EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Development

Skill Level Beginner Level

10:00am EDT

Behind the Scenes UX: The client is an end-user too — [ux]

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.

Speakers

Cara Guappone

Senior User Experience Designer, Genuine

I believe in creating clear, delightful, focused designs. I approach my work with a unique perspective and sensitivity, drawing from my background in human factors and theatrical design. Working closely with both creative and development teams, I help deliver products that clients... Read More →

Nancy Maya

Senior Experience Designer, Genuine

Nancy Maya is an experience designer, content strategist, and tech-enthusiast. She believes in taking a holistic approach to digital experiences and focuses on helping her clients successfully navigate the digital future by building agile brands that stay culturally relevant. Nancy... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 10:00am - 10:45am EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

UX, UI

Skill Level Beginner Level

11:00am EDT

Becoming an everyday advocate for diversity and inclusion — [career]

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.

Speakers

Ijeoma Ezeonyebuchi

Test Engineer, NPR

Friday September 21, 2018 11:00am - 11:45am EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Career, Diversity

Skill Level Beginner Level

11:00am EDT

Unconference Session

Friday September 21, 2018 11:00am - 11:45am EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, Security

Skill Level Intermediate Level

11:00am EDT

Unconference Session: PHP Topics — [php]

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

Friday September 21, 2018 11:00am - 11:45am EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Unconference

12:00pm EDT

Lunch

Friday September 21, 2018 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Cafeteria Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

1:00pm EDT

Anatomy of a Virtual Self-Study Group — [career]

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

Speakers

Gene Babon

Tech Lab Instructor, Maverick Landing Community Services

I serve as Co-Organizer of Boston PHP Meetup where I launched and manage nine virtual self-study groups:~ Agile Appetizer~ Angular Stew~ AWS Snack~ Drupal Diner~ Git Lunch~ HTML5 Brunch~ jQuery jAM~ PHP Percolate~ WordPress Dressinghttp://webapprentices.org/My current role as Tech... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Career, Education

Skill Level Beginner Level

1:00pm EDT

Powering a Six Billion Dollar Business with GraphQL — [dev]

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!

Speakers

Leo Kin

Software Engineer, Wayfair

Leo is currently a full-stack engineer at Wayfair on the Storefront Engineering Team. He is involved with many technology initiatives at Wayfair including GraphQL. He has done extensive backend and frontend work using PHP, SQL, and React. He loves to dabble with both hardware and... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Development, API

Skill Level Beginner Level

1:00pm EDT

Learning accessibility the hard way; what you think you know but don't — [ux]

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.

Speakers

Ian Forrest

Manager, Software Engineering, BiblioCommons

Ian is a full-stack developer based out of Toronto. Currently he works at BiblioCommons, where he leads the development of a multi-site WordPress application used by public libraries in over twenty cities including Chicago Public Library and Boston Public Library (soon). He has also... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

UX, Accessibility

Skill Level Beginner Level

2:00pm EDT

Unconference Session: The Developer Interview — [career]

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

Moderators

Theodore Stepanoff

Director of Web Services, UJA Federation of NY

Friday September 21, 2018 2:00pm - 2:45pm EDT
Baluster Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

Career, HR

2:00pm EDT

I Don't Care About Security (And Neither Should You) — [php]

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.

Speakers

Joel Lord

Developer Advocate, MongoDB

Joel Lord is passionate about the web and technology in general. He likes to learn new things, but most of all, he wants to share his discoveries. He does so by travelling at various conferences all across the globe. He graduated from college in computer programming in the last millennium... Read More →

Friday September 21, 2018 2:00pm - 2:45pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

PHP, Security

Skill Level Beginner Level

2:00pm EDT

Virtual Reality Experiences and Interfaces — [ux]

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.

Speakers

David Kelleher

Founder, Desera.com

Friday September 21, 2018 2:00pm - 2:45pm EDT
Wingback Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

UX, VR

Skill Level Intermediate Level

2:45pm EDT

Refreshment Break

Friday September 21, 2018 2:45pm - 3:30pm EDT
Cafeteria Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

3:30pm EDT

Closing Keynote: Pop Songs... For Fun and Profit

Speakers

PJ Hagerty

Developer Advocate, Spotify

Friday September 21, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116

4:00pm EDT

Closing Remarks

Friday September 21, 2018 4:00pm - 4:15pm EDT
Banquette Wayfair, 4 Copley Place, 7th floor, Boston, MA 02116