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.

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.

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#.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.