#DevTO: Shanta Nathwani & Naomi Bower

A Different Kind of DX
UX and product designers use a range of tools, techniques, and processes to help end-users succeed with (and hopefully enjoy!) the products they design and build. In recent years, there’s also been more thought given to developers as end-users of things like platforms and dev tools, and the importance of providing them with a good developer experience (DX).
Product design techniques can also help support a different kind of DX: the day-to-day experience of working on a project team. They do this by enabling developers to focus on work that’s high-value and high-priority for a product’s success. After all, who wants to spend months (or years…) of their life building something that no one will ever use?
In this talk, Naomi explores the ways that designers can help improve developers’ experience of working on a team that’s building digital products. No designer on your team? No problem. These are techniques that anyone can learn and use to improve their team’s DX.

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Naomi is a Product Designer at Rangle. She’s worked in tech since 2003, and believes that great products and user experiences are built on successful collaboration. At Rangle, she works with a wide variety of clients to design innovative, engaging products that solve problems for users and drive business value. Naomi can neither confirm nor deny that she's memorized a few phrases in Dothraki and High Valyrian. She can often be found musing about things like design, working in tech, and ghost signs on Twitter at @ergosomething.

Everything I Need To Know About Life, I Learned in Coding School
Hacker and Coding Schools are all the craze these days, whether you have dabbled in code before or you’ve never seen a “For Loop” in your life. Is going to a hacker school the right move for you? What kind of person attends these schools? What should you look for when researching for a school?

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Shanta is a full-stack web developer and educator in web design. She has spent the last five years at Sheridan College heading up the Web Design and Capstone track for the CCIT program, a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga.Most recently, she graduated from the Full-Time Web Development program at BrainStation in Toronto, where she studied Full Stack in JavaScript. Her latest project, An Affordable REST, helps people find subsidized housing based on need instead of location.Shanta studied Information Technology Management at Ryerson University and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce. She is a regular speaker at WordCamps (WordPress Conferences), and DevTO, and has spoken at FITC Web Unleashed and is scheduled to speak at Full Stack Conference Toronto, 2017. She blogs at shanta.ca and can be found on Twitter @ShantaDotCa