Tag: conferences

TsunamiCon 2018 – A Look Back

“And now for something completely different…”

I know it’s completely unprecedented in my profession, but I’m a big fan of gaming.  When I’m not looking down my nose at console gamers, I can be found with zero or more people, huddled around a tabletop game.   And as I’ve done for the past three years, I had the pleasure of attending TsunamiCon 2018.

TsunamiCon bills itself as “Wichita’s premiere tabletop gaming convention,” and I’m inclined to agree.  Over the past few years, it’s grown to attract a new following with more attendees every year.  My experience this year was intended to be mostly as a guest, but I just couldn’t resist the call to run some tables myself.  And this year, my son even stepped up to share some games he enjoys with other gamers.  Here’s a quick run-down of our sessions:

Friday

Shadowrun Missions : Welcome to the Sixth World – Shadowrun is a dystopian near future science fantasy setting.   Basically, if you took Gibson’s Sprawl setting and added magic and fantasy races like elves and orcs.  That’s Shadowrun.   Shadowrun Missions is the organized play version intended for individual players to show up for a one-off adventure.  Our host walked us through a (challenging) character creation before throwing us into the streets of Seattle.  Can’t wait to try the setting again.

Liberty or Death : The American Insurrection – I grew up on Avalon Hill wargames, meaning lots of cardboard counters and poring over dense rulebooks with ubiquitous reference numbers.  GMT’s CounterInsurgency (COIN) series definitely scratches that itch for me.  Liberty or Death allows players to choose a faction within the conflict to wrest the American colonies from British rule.  Rather than simplify the conflict to being an isolated series of battles between Redcoats and Colonials, this game expands on the historical place of the American Revolution as just another theater in the global conflict between great powers like Britain and France.

Eschaton –  This was an interesting deck builder with area control elements.  Players take control of a cultist faction struggling for control over minions and against each other with an eye toward ultimate dominance.  Great way to end the day.

Saturday

Embarassing my son

Pixel Tactics –  A good friend of ours hosted a tournament for this game last year, which I’m proud to say my son won all on his own.   This game merited another tournament this year with promises of even greater glory and prizes, some supplied by the game publisher themselves!  Players have a single leader that guides various ranks of heroes in battle against their rivals.  Simple stats are buffed by intricate and seemingly limitless combos based on their position on the field and their proximity to the leader or other heroes.

Arthur, Queen of the Britons!

Mounting Pitons to Hold the Grill – ‘Tim the Enchanter’ is a regular fixture at TsunamiCon.  This time, we ran into him while my daughter was exploring the con and noticed several distinctive props for an upcoming LARP game, based not-so-loosely on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  After Tim regaled her with promises of high adventure and treacherous challenges, Queen Arthur took up the quest for the Holy Grail, leading her Knights of the Round Table to ultimate antics and silly success!

Ethnos – In Ethnos, players call upon the support of giants, merfolk, halflings, minotaurs, and other fantasy tribes to help them gain control of the land.  This is another one that doesn’t make it to the table at home very often and we were delighted to have a full table.  The game seems like there should be much to it as it largely consists of card draws and playing sets.  The fun and intrigue crops its head up when players time their plays in attempts to gain the upper hand before the end of the round.  Lots of stare downs and trash talk at this one.

Pathfinder Society : Trial By Machine –  Pathfinder Society is the organized play version of the Pathfinder fantasy setting.  This was a chance for players of any skill level to try out the game and meet other players in a one off adventure, and let me test my GM skills on a new set of victims in the process.

Sunday

Free Play –  Even for the most fanatical of gaming enthusiasts, cons invariably take a toll.  My family and I had hit the wall by Sunday morning but we braved the floor again for some pick up card games and to say goodbye to old and new friends.  As exhausting as it was, it won’t take long before each of us is brimming with ideas and counting the days until next time.

See you all next year!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

 

hack.summit() 2018 – A Look Back

Another excellent hack.summit() has come and gone. This time around, the conference had an overarching theme on blockchain technologies, specifically cryptocurrencies. Since I’m not a block chain developer, I found myself googling terms from time to time as the field is very jargony. Still, I feel like I came away with a better understanding of what all the buzz has been about and look forward to learning more.

Here’s a sampling of the sessions I attended:

Opening remarks, introducing hack.summit() – Ed Roman – Like most keynotes, this was an overview of the conference in general and the blockchain theme. Also a reminder that it’s intended to be technical and the intended audience is developers or other creators. Also, some general information of how to navigate the interface and what to expect during these three days.

What is Byzantine Fault Tolerance? – Leemon Baird – This session starts off with a classic logic problem called the Byzantine Generals Problem. Essentially, how do you coordinate consensus in a distributed system with delays in messaging and suspicion of maliciousness or compromised communication. The presenter walked us through several stages of solving this piece by piece and how complexities have been added over time to resolve man in the middle and other attempts to interfere with trusted communications.

De-centralized Exchange Panel – Alan Curtis and John Piotrowski – This session was an open token exchange discussion on centralized exchanges versus decentralized exchanges. Mostly, there were points raised about the trade-offs between outsourcing some security management tasks such as handling keys to a centralized exchange versus maintaining agility and independence without committing to such a system. I’ve always been interested in the trading field and so much of blockchain is currently focused on monetization before application. While trading isn’t the only application of blockchain, you owe it yourself to understand the current primary driver for innovation in this space.

Engineering an Algorithmic Central Bank – Nader Al-Naji – A session specifically talking about the benefits of Bitcoin decentralization via Basis. Basis purports to offer a system that sources external pricing on itself, referenced to a fiat currency like the dollar. However, it can also key to things like commodities to trend values and control the supply of tokens, much like how the Consumer Price Index works. This results in Basis auto-adjusting much like how the Federal Reserve moderates the money supply to ensure currency instability doesn’t result in over-contraction or inflationary disruptions.

Liquidity, Regulation, and Exchanges – Tammy Camp and Sean Bennett – A compsci and datasci heavy session focusing on the blockchain technology itself. For example, how having a complete dataset of all transaction history built in is hugely advantageous for utilizing transactional systems. Also some caution about how this is still such a new technology that the regulatory landscape isn’t quite clear and that allows the legal market to seek rent in the cryptocurrency space. Some discussion about how by using Stronghold as their anchor/bank/brokerage, depositors grant rights to Stronghold to execute trades on Stellar on their behalf. Currently, in order to access a decentralized exchange, you need a point of access or ‘on-ramp’.

Parity Technologies Presentation – Jutta Steiner – Founder and CEO of Parity – Parity is intended to be a framework or platform for developing blockchain tools and technologies. In this session there was discussion around how in looking at the computing side of blockchain, the various chains and tools and their work product end up comprising a larger computing structure with its own emergent properties. Also, in attempting to make the technology more accessable, Parity is incorporating a vision of improving UX/UI for their toolset.

Building software in a fast-changing ecosystem – Antonio Salazar Cardozo – Technical Lead – Keep Network – I was really looking forward to this session but it got a bit of a late start. Some common sense reminders about how to deal with continuous delivery at a breakneck pace. The session motto was ‘Use Your Pockets’ which refers to the presenters experiences as a young builder and literally means to put your hands in your pockets and think for a second before making a change you can’t unmake. Basically, a nice riff on ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ I’ll need to go back and watch the entire session.

Speaking of, in case you missed a particular session or day of activities, the content is available freely for review. As for me, I’m looking forward to delving more into this space as time permits.

I’d love to hear from any other attendees to share information and opinions about this year’s hack.summit(). If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

hack.summit(“blockchain”) 2018

It’s that time again..

It will be my pleasure to once again attend hack.summit() next month. Hack.summit() is a bi-annual not-for-profit virtual conference bringing together IT experts, professionals and enthusiasts from around the globe. My previous experiences there have been very valuable both as a professional developer and as a technology hobbyist.

This year’s theme is blockchain, with headline speakers including technical founders of projects including ZCash, Ripple, Mt.Gox, Kadena, Stellar, DFINITY, Monero, Oasis Labs, Orchid, Bancor, Basis, and more. Previous years have attracted over 80,000 attendees, holding world records for both the largest developer conference and largest virtual conference in history. It’s kind of a big deal and worth the time, even if you choose to attend just a couple of sessions.

One cool addition this year is a global virtual hackathon, giving developers the opportunity to “hack for good”, with both the chance to win tokens donated from blockchain foundations, as well as help raise funds for charitable causes via sponsorship donations.

If any of you are interested, and I hope that you are, you can use the code *JBTECH* to redeem a free pass to hack.summit() for this year. One thing to bear in mind is that donations aren’t required, but are much appreciated. Should you choose to donate, the event will forward all proceeds to causes including Women Who Code, Black Girls Code, Free Code Camp, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Coder Dojo, Bridge Foundry and more.

If any of you are curious about (or may have attended) previous hack.summit() events or have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

“See” you there!

Knowledge 18 – A Look Back

Last year, I was privileged to attend and present at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 17 conference and was definitely looking forward to another opportunity.  Luckily, someone was asleep at wheel when screening presenters as I was invited back!

This was my first time presenting all on my own at Knowledge.  It’s a bit intimidating but also very rewarding.  If you’re interested in presenting, ServiceNow submits an open request for presenters leading up to the conference.  Some of the things to consider when building your presentation are as follows:

  • What will the attendees learn and why will they care?
  • What are the problems you faced?
  • What was the objective?
  • What was the solution?  How long did it take?
  • What did you learn?
As is common to conferences, there will be a keynote presentation to set the tone and share the overall theme.  This year brought a renewed focus on the user experience within the platform and not doing tech for tech’s sake.   Many promises of new features as well as a road map for our next six major releases.
 
Of course, we need to hit the ground running on our first day.  This had to be one of my favorite sessions and one of the most challenging.  The presenters took the hands-on experience of the workshop to the next level by having each of our instances visible from the stage as we walked through simulations of events and alerts.
 
Another very enlightening session walking attendees through creation of a custom CI Class and then building Discovery criteria to identify nodes fitting this new class and merging it into our CMDB.  A great primer for those of us who do any work in Service Mapping
 
This was a fun one focused on reimplementing ad-hoc Powershell and SSH activities in the Workflow Engine.  For anyone who does much scripting in Microsoft environments, having the ability to integrate your existing scripts into Orchestration activities is invaluable.
 
This keynote brought more substance to the promises of the first day’s session.  Much emphasis was placed on new mobile and user specific features as well as interpretation of user needs and virtualization of first responder sessions using AI and bots.  Some of the skits were a bit corny and stilted but the message was clear.  People shouldn’t dislike or be frustrated by their work tools.
 
This was a fun tutorial on one of my favorite tool sets for the platform.  Seriously, if you’re a ServiceNow developer, you should be using Xplore like yesterday.  Great inline tools that give an intelligent code completion feel to the global libraries available on the platform and might help you learn about a few things you weren’t even aware of.
 
This guy was a complete jerk and never should be allowed to present ever again…
 
…But seriously.. thanks to all who attended for asking great questions and making this a great experience for me.  It’s very rewarding to see this experiment through additional points of view.  I hope you got as much out of it as I did.
 
This was my only breakout session since I tend to favor the hands-on workshops.  Still, some great improvements are being promised for Discovery and Service Mapping to make it less opaque and more accessible to the layperson.  If you want to get the full value of an IT implementation of ServiceNow, something as fundamental as node discovery and aggregation should be as basic and straightforward as practical.
 
Using Event Management to Monitor Your ServiceNow Instance Health
This was a fun little session that introduced us to a front-to-back implementation of Event Management as it applies to monitoring the ServiceNow environment itself.  Might seem like a Catch-22 to have the watchman watch itself, but it’s honestly a scenario that gets overlooked when you think about critical applications and monitoring their health and availability.
 
Another fun hands-on experience, this time integrating event monitoring to an AWS environment.  This also covered the idea of anomalies and other ‘odd behavior’ on monitored nodes and the ability to configure monitoring thresholds based on deviations from a baseline instead of express limits.
 
Summary
This was a much shorter conference for me as I chose not to attend pre-conference training.  Still, those three days were filled with the requisite fire hose of information as well as meeting a few old friends and making a few new ones.  Can’t wait for next year!
 
I’d love to hear any feedback on this post, especially if you attended Knowledge 18 and would like to discuss your own experiences.  As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

Quick Update – Knowledge 18

After having a great experience at ServiceNow’s global conference last year, I’ve made it a point to keep it on my radar.  I’m happy to announce that not only will I be attending again this year, but I’ll also be hosting my own presentation!

The session is entitled Integrating Service Portal With Amazon Lex and it’s based on a demonstration of Amazon Lex I attended with a local developer community in Wichita followed by some tinkering on my own time.  The result is an open source application which can be plugged in to an instance of ServiceNow with minimal effort.  Considering the ongoing move towards hosted solutions, this is something I hope implementers of ServiceNow will find useful.

If you happen to be attending Knowledge 18 and have an interest in AWS or integrations in general, I’d love to see you there!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

 

Knowledge 17 – A Look Back

What is the purpose of a conference?  

To some it’s an opportunity to get out of the daily grind for a few days and see some cool new tools and make some new connections.  Ultimately, it’s an opportunity to ensure that you’re heading in the right direction and to come back armed with knowledge to guide conversations about existing work streams and inspire new ones.

Knowledge is an annual conference put together by ServiceNow intended for any individuals that use or build on the platform.  My involvement this year started with an invitation from a colleague to help with a presentation he was working on for this year’s conference.  After a live rehearsal at our local SNow User Group, I was very excited to attend and both learn from and share with others in the field.

Sunday, May 7th – Monday, May 8th

My conference journey began with a 2-day pre-conference seminar on Business Application Development.  While not highly technical, the course provided valuable information to guide decision making and recommendations for applications on the platform.  Additionally, they provided strategies for identifying and solving pain points or broken windows on the platform in general.

Other guidelines for improving our approaches to development touched on defining measures, such as return on investment or solving common business challenges by hiding or streamlining complexity.  Additionally, we were reminded about how important it is to establish and drive the narrative of solutions built on the platform.  Essentially, to tell our customer base what we’re doing and why and to solicit feedback and adapt our approaches accordingly.

On the development side, we spent some time on effective user story writing as well as best practices around extending the existing core modules and organizing any customizations or new features we implement.   We were introduced to some new features for upcoming releases such as UI/UX functionality and improvements to automated testing and the resurrection of a previously deprecated debugger which will be an extremely useful tool for developers.

For architecture, we went over some basic tasks like table creation and decision making around when to build new and when to extend existing tables.  Also,  we were coached on how important it is to define the scope of a new feature before beginning work.  Applications should have a clear purpose that can be reconciled to the measures of business value and customer feedback covered previously.  You might enjoy building something cool in a new way, but that’s never a guarantee that it’ll see any adoption beyond curiosity or superficial interest.

Tuesday, May 9th

Tuesday marked the official beginning of the conference and the ServiceNow CEO’s Keynote did not disappoint.  A record setting 15,000+ attendees were challenged to improve the customer user experience, protect the value that we’ve created and continually work to reclaim wasted time and resources that can be better utilized elsewhere.  Members of the ServiceNow community were informed of additional efforts to continue to address the gender gap and reminded to challenge preconceptions about career paths for anyone and everyone.

My first class of the day was Angular2 applications for the ServiceNow Platform.  While I’ve been working in Angular for a couple of years now, I had zero experience in Angular2 or deploying a ServiceNow application from a GitHub repo.  This session gave us a walkthrough on staging and testing an Angular app locally using NodeJS, publishing to GitHub and then directly installing the app from a hyperlink on GitHub itself.  This spawned quite a few ideas for myself around better organization of code and sharing that code with others.

Next, I attended a course on Testing Inbound REST APIs.  This is a possible feature for Jakarta that will allow developers to use SNows Automated Testing Framework to simulate HTTP calls against tables and services they build and establish expectations around functionality and behavior on those calls.

My labs were done for the day, so I attended a business oriented breakout called Enabling Enterprise Architecture Decisions Through the ServiceNow Platform.  The session overed ideas and justifications for consolidating existing services and data into the platform to eliminate wasteful and repetitive practices throughout the enterprise.  The idea is that, by removing many of the seams between various layers of stand-alone solutions, ServiceNow simplifies the conversation around enterprise architecture by assembling it into a unified platform.  Additionally, the platform can allow stakeholders to focus on managing and prioritizing services rather than keeping track of nodes and their dependencies separately.

To cap off the day, we had our own presentation on Service Portal. Our topic specifically covered challenges and lessons learned when integrating 3rd party platforms into the Portal itself and providing a seamless and positive user experience.  This was my first time actually presenting at a global conference so it was a bit nerve-wracking.  But, our presentation was well received with excellent Q&A from our audience.  Thanks to all who attended!

Wednesday, May 10th

I started off the day with an interesting session on certifying applications for the ServiceNow Store.  While I haven’t personally built any public applications, the standards SNow establishes for their store can easily inform standards for internal applications as well.  They covered a Top 10 list of common mistakes made when developing, mostly around roles and security.  Additionally, we were reminded of their built in module for certifying applications, which can be useful for spot checking applications or other features in progress or already in the wild.

Next was a breakout entitled Defining your App Development Methodology for ServiceNow.  This was basically an outline of steps to follow when proposing or accepting new work.  Questions around demand and identifying key stakeholders and sponsors and maintaining their interest throughout the process.  Also, there was a reminder that new features always include a subsequent cost of support and maintenance throughout the life of that feature.  One last thing: ‘Have a Testing Zealot!’  Not my term, but I’m using it anyway.

My first lab of the day was on Advanced Service Portal Widget Techniques.  We covered several implementations of a list view in the portal incorporating conventional server-side GlideRecord calls and client-side API calls.  Combined with configuration level constants like table name, we were given a template for a reusable widget that can be easily cloned and tweaked for multiple uses.

Lastly, I attended a session on Analytics and Machine Learning.  This is an equally arcane and fascinating topic for me and it will be interesting how application of AI will inform the ServiceNow platform going forward.  We were introduced to automated Virtual Agents that can act as first responders to customers and learn from previous customer engagements to guide and improve future sessions.  Additionally, machine learning can be applied to data within our existing systems to derive additional meaning from data points that human analysts might miss.

Thursday, May 11th

The last day of the conference definitely finished on a high note with the CreatorCon Keynote.  Developers and other creators were reminded that expectations are constantly changing and growing.  The sheer volume of data and the speed at which the meaning of that data needs to be communicated will only continue to grow.  We should not only be thinking of automation for customers, but also every edge we can gain in our own processes to increase our velocity without compromising effectiveness and overall quality.  Tools such as native automated testing and integrated debugging can only help.

Our last lab and session of the conference was Managing Team Workload and Collaboration with VTB and Connect.  Most of the information on Virtual Task Boards was already familiar territory for me but it was neat to see some new improvements and features, including Connect integration for live collaboration among team members.

Summary

Needless to say, this past week has been a whirlwind of people and concepts and generally drinking from a fire hose of information with maybe a small respite now and then to let those ideas breathe.  What’s most rewarding for me is to see so many people in one place excited and passionate about what they do.  Our work has a soul.  It’s necessary to recognize the value in what we do and continually strive to improve.  Conferences are good for a spot check (sanity check?) on where we’re at and where we’re headed.  I highly recommend them.

I’d love to hear any feedback on this post, especially if you attended Knowledge 17 and would like to discuss your own experiences.  As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

Thanks for looking in!

My Experience @ Hack.summit() 2016

And now for something completely different….
 
HackSummitHome
 
I wanted to share some details about a vitural conference I attended this past week called hack.summit(). https://hacksummit.org/  This wholly online conference is in its second year and is a good resource for people who would like to attend a conference and take advantage of some Q&A and workshops with leaders in our field.  The cost for registration is mostly free, either a share on social media or a small donation
 
I attended the debut session of hack.summit() in 2014.   The format is a combination of talks, Q&As and short workshops.  One of the more memorable ones for me last year was an hour long session building a coffee shop locator from scratch in about an hour.  Link
 
Here’s a short summary of the sessions I attended this year:
 
Floyd Marinescu – CEO of InfoQ.com – This session consisted mainly about how to establish suitable cultures for virtual teams, meaning teams that aren’t necessarily bound to the same office but must collaborate on projects from separate physical locations.  There are suggestions around patterns and the myriad of tools that are available to virtual teams.  This was interesting as I’m already working on a virtual team covering at least four separate locations.  Additionally, there was mention of InfoQ and a recommendation to spend some time there to read up on current issues and have an opportunity to collaborate with others.
 
Kent Beck – Created Extreme Programming, created TDD, co-created Agile, authored 9 books – It’s ironic that this talk was the day before a half-day lunch and learn my team had on TDD and Dependency Injection.  TDD is not a new paradigm but understanding the need for unit tests and structuring your code so that it’s testable on a granular level is vital for long term supportability of your codebase, especially if you’ve got multiple individuals working in that code base and for any inheritors of your code.  I’m sure we’ve all inherited examples of stale (yet production) code with documentation with multiple birthdays and wish we had at least some insight as to why certain sections of code even exist.
 
Gregg Pollack – CEO, Codeschool – This was another ‘soft skills’ session presented by the CEO of Codeschool (recently acquired by Pluralsight) titled ‘ The Developers Path to Success and Winning’.  This was a general discussion of components that would help you build a successful career as a developer, including  how to seek out a mentor, attending meetups and conferences, knowing what’s important enough to demand your attention (being deliberate about your work and learning), how to seek out work to stretch yourself, etc.
 
Janet Weiner – Engineering at Facebook, big data expert – Open Data Challenges at Facebook – I’ll admit that the bulk of this talk was way over my head.  Overall, it was a case study on how data availability presents problems as it scales to unprecedented quantities, using Facebook’s architecture as an example.  While I’m not very familiar with ‘Big Data’ yet, it’s definitely on my radar as something to become familiar with in the near future.  This was a good example of a presentation showing me exactly how much I don’t know!
 
Mostly I enjoyed the ability to attend virtually and the ability to go back as needed to cover things I might have missed.  If you’d like to register and access the content, it’s not too late!   All you’ll need to is go through the registration process at the hack.summit() website and you’ll have access to all of the talks and reference materials.
 
If any of you is curious about (or may have attended) hack.summit() 2016 or have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.
 
Thanks for looking in!