Meet the weirdos

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  Yehuda Katz

  Keynote

  Yehuda Katz is one of the creators of Ember.js, a member of the Rust Core Team, and a retired Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Team member. During the day he's CTO at Tilde, where he works on Skylight, the smart profiler for Rails, and does Ember.js consulting. He's best known for his open source work, which also includes having created projects like Thor, Handlebars and Bundler. He travels the world doing open source evangelism and web standards work, and has written several successful technology books.

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  Dave Herman

  Keynote

  Dave Herman has served on TC39, the standards committee responsible for evolving JavaScript, since 2006, and founded Mozilla Research in 2011. At Mozilla, Dave advised and contributed to the development of Rust, the parallel browser engine Servo, asm.js, and WebAssembly. Dave has recently joined LinkedIn's build tools team, where he is looking at finding new ways to help developers dare to be ambitious.

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  Elle Meredith

  Keynote

  Elle works as a consultant for Blackmill. Before Blackmill, she was a Development Director in the New York City office of thoughtbot. She believes in writing clean code, driven by automatic tests, with agile practices, an even work/life balance, and a respectful and inclusive team culture. She constantly works to improve her understanding of technologies, techniques, anti-patterns, and what is considered best practice. Her aim is to deliver clean, functional and user–friendly websites in an appropriate timeframe without wasting money or energy. Elle appreciates the value of strong communities. When she is not immersed in the Ruby community, she is probably immersed in water, or lately, in bread flour.

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  Rolen Le

  Dungeons & Collaboration: A Player’s Handbook on How To Work With a Distributed Team

  What can playing tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragon teach us about collaborating online? From general online etiquette to building meaning full relationships, I will discuss tips and tricks of roleplaying that have made me a better coworker.

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  Ben Scofield

  Learning to see

  The hardest part of learning to draw is figuring out that you have to draw what you actually see, not what you think you see. Draw a "face" and you end up with an emoji; draw shadows and shapes instead and you end up with a portrait. This talk takes that lesson and applies it to... well, everything.

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  Cecy Correa

  The Psychology of Fake News (and What Tech Can Do About It)

  Fake news is not a tech problem, it's a human problem. To build the tools necessary to combat fake news, technologists must think differently. We must understand the psychology behind fake news to arrive at a solution that is human-centric and attainable.

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  Brad Grzesiak

  kerbal_space_program.rb

  So there's this game, Kerbal Space Program. You basically create your own space program from scratch. Well, you can control it via TCP, and—using Ruby—we're gonna launch, orbit, and crash our brave Kerbins. You might even learn a thing or two about orbital mechanics and control theory along the way.

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  Chris Arcand

  An Atypical 'Performance' Talk

  A mixture of a talk on programming and a live classical music recital. Listen to a former-orchestral-clarinetist-turned-developer talk about parallelisms between music performance and programming - such as complexity, imposter syndrome, and true concentration - with live performances throughout!