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.

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

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 “noise” 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.