Sessions

NEOPIXELS and LED MODULE HANDS-ON WORKSHOP
Come on in and learn to code an Arduino to light up a ring of Neopixel lights. We will make the lights blink and chase, and change colors. Then we will add a sound detector and program the Neopixels to react to the beat of the music. It’s up to you how the lights will react, you can make them blink, chase, change colors, or dream up your own combination. Finally, we will code an 4X1 Dot Matrix LED module to light up a short word or design. Read more about NEOPIXELS and LED MODULE HANDS-ON WORKSHOP
Does your house Slack you? Mine does. The crazy sensors I built -- IoT-style
Over the past four years, I’ve built a ton of crazy sensors to monitor and control different activities around my house. I have sensors that are currently monitoring temperature at multiple locations around my house include two freezers. My garage has a garage door sensor to know if it is open or closed as well as a light sensor, complete with Slack/Discord integration for alerts and alarms. I also monitor my washer/dryer and HVAC. Read more about Does your house Slack you? Mine does. The crazy sensors I built -- IoT-style
Introduction to Web Components
While JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React and Vue dominate the conversation around web user interfaces, there’s a native solution slowly gaining browser and developer support. “Web Components” is the umbrella term for several powerful browser APIs that have come together to give us componentized UI. These native technologies imbue web developers with some of the same superpowers that modern frameworks provide, yet they do it right out of the box. Learn what Web Components are, how they work and how to use them in your next project. Read more about Introduction to Web Components
Introduction to NodeJS
In this session we will learn what NodeJS is, and how we can use it. We’ll cover installing it on various platforms, using it to write Shell Scripts and Workflow Programs,and more importantly moving to use it for writing Web Applications, Servers, and deploying code to multiple locations thanks to the V8 Engine. Read more about Introduction to NodeJS
Who needs stinking servers!? Not you! Introducing the Basics of the Serverless Framework on AWS
An introduction to the Serverless Framework on AWS. This will show how to use the Serverless Framework to deploy some simple API endpoints with interactions with a NoSQL database. Using Ruby, these simple “run only as needed functions” will allow you to maintain a highly available and cost affordable API because you will no longer need to maintain servers to keep your APIs available. You can rely on AWS (or maybe another cloud provider) to do that heavy lifting for you. Read more about Who needs stinking servers!? Not you! Introducing the Basics of the Serverless Framework on AWS
{Everything}-as-Code: An introduction to managing multiple AWS Accounts with Infrastructure-as-Code and CICD
Thanks to Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), spinning up resources for testing, development, and production workloads takes seconds instead of hours. Because of this flexibility and availability there is a significant increase in potential budget expenditure, resource sprawl, and overlooked security considerations. How does one manage all these resources at scale while ensuring budgetary restrictions, security compliance, and good housekeeping practices?
Read more about {Everything}-as-Code: An introduction to managing multiple AWS Accounts with Infrastructure-as-Code and CICD
Tell Web Ads to Shut Their Pi-hole!
Speed up your browsing and protect your privacy and security by setting up a Pi-hole! It is free small DNS server that is “a black hole for Internet advertisements” that runs on a Raspberry Pi. We’ll talk briefly about the Raspberry Pi, then learn how to setup Pi-hole on your network for use with all of your devices. With a low cost Raspberry Pi and an hour of setup time, we now surf faster and more securely, with nearly 40% of our DNS queries blocked. Read more about Tell Web Ads to Shut Their Pi-hole!
What the Heck is Tailwind CSS?
Backstory: Similar frameworks that inspired it, and others it departs from - What does “utility-first” mean? Bits of audio from the creator Adam Wathan Use cases: Long-term projects that are passed around among a good number of developers - Examples of sites that have adopted it Arguments against: Tons of unused CSS if you don’t include something like purge-css in your workflow, etc. Future of the framework: Proposed changes as well as others’ ideas for improvement Read more about What the Heck is Tailwind CSS?
An Introduction to Typescript
Javascript isn’t a pet language anymore and sites have grown in new ways. Typescript will help organize your code and handle problems with clean solutions. Adding great error detection and stronger typing lets you move faster and more accurately through the development process. In this introduction to using TypeScript, we’ll dicuss why it’s great, how to incorporate it into your project, and what you can do with it. Learn all about types, enums, classes, and how to expose errors and typos before the console can. Read more about An Introduction to Typescript
Clean Architecture : The Software Way
Software Architecture affects our lives every day. The lack of good components and boundaries will cause stress for everyone. You will probably see more bugs, higher cost to change and add features and less happy customers. We’ve read Clean Architecture by Uncle Bob Martin as a large group at Omnitech. We’ve learned a lot and there is still much to learn. John and Kevin will be sharing take aways and leading some discussion. Read more about Clean Architecture : The Software Way
Getting Started with Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Flutter and Dart
Flutter is a new UI Toolkit developed by Google for natively compiled cross-platform development across mobile, web and desktop. We will specifically explore mobile development on Android and iOS using this toolkit, get familiar with the Dart programming language and related design patterns. We will also explore the pros and cons of using Flutter vs React Native vs Native development. Finally, we will explore what the future potential of Flutter is and how it relates to Google’s Fuschia OS project. Read more about Getting Started with Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Flutter and Dart
[Web] Application Security
Application security can no longer be an after-thought in the application development process. The OWASP Top Ten has not really changed much over the last few iterations. Why? There are a number of things we can do to ensure the applications we develop and deploy are more secure and we can do them in a way, and at a time in the development process that helps to ensure they are done more efficiently, are less expensive, and actually get done. Read more about [Web] Application Security