DeveloperWeek Austin 2019

It’s critical that dev leaders continually inspire and better their teams for continued innovation and excellence. Mary Beth Westmoreland did exactly that when she helped lead process and cultural transformations that allowed for the evolution of Blackbaud’s technology strategy from a lagging, on-premises leader to an agile development model with solutions implemented on Blackbaud SKY®, the company's platform for social good cloud innovation, in just eighteen months.  

Mary Beth’s strategy was driven by the mantra “Be Brave.” She understood that bravery leads to innovation, innovation leads to company success, and company success leads to more company success.

Mary Beth will share the keys to managing dev teams to increased innovation and success, including:
-Creating a “safe” environment for productive disagreement
-Giving teams problems to solve, not solutions to implement
-Creating an environment of autonomy, mastery and purpose
-Celebrating failing fast
-Pivoting quickly

She’ll also share the lessons learned along the way, including:
-Ability for a team to release their bits at the end of a sprint is the #1 fundamental you must nail
-Modularity is your friend: Macro Services, Micro Services, Components/Containers
-Microservices are hard:
*You must invest a tremendous amount of energy into your
SDLS
*Unit testing w/ code coverage
*Automated testing
*Automated deployment
*Dependency management
-Non-Functional Requirements are hard: Find a friend doing it right and leverage their work

One of the biggest challenges to mass-market adoption of a true smart home experience has been the issue of standardizing different types of devices and presenting those types in a consistent way in an API. In this session, Yonomi CTO and co-founder, Joss Scholten will discuss best practices for building flexible, reliable, and secure APIs that enable device interoperability in the smart home.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the most widely used blockchain smart contract execution engine. It is core to the Ethereum protocol, which is now a $20 billion dollar ecosystem. From the developer point of view, the EVM enables cloud-native microservices on decentralized networks in the form of smart contract applications. The next generation of EVM is going to be based on the WebAssembly runtime, which supports mainstream programming languages and compile time / runtime optimizations. The next-gen EVM benefits the WebAssembly community, as it brings in many blockchain innovations, such as deterministic behavior, trustless consensus, digital currency infrastructure, formal verification, and zero knowledge computing. Subsequently, WebAssembly is positioned to become a popular execution engine for microservices in enterprise data centers, partially replacing the JVM, the JS VM, and containers like Docker.

In this talk, we will discuss the current state and future plans of the EVM and WebAssembly. We will give a live demo to show how you can deploy a decentralized microservice and a web frontend in 5 minutes. We will then discuss the future of the EVM and WebAssembly in enterprise IT.

The sad reality is, more than half of all companies implementing Agile fail to achieve business results like agility. In this keynote, David Hawks will share the most common reasons why Agile goes wrong and what you can do to avoid barriers to agility and unlock the full potential of Agile.