Boston Node 13

On Thursday, February 27th, at 6:00 pm, Boston Node returns for our second meetup of 2020. Join us at Kyruus - 51 Melcher St, 4th Floor in Seaport - for an evening of tech discussions, food, drinks, and networking.

This month we are collaborating with Women Who Code Boston to bring you tech talks from Katey Watson of PillPack, Veronika Kolesnikova of Rightpoint, and Jen Weber of Cardstack.

Excited to be back at Kyruus this month. We're looking forward to seeing you all there!

~ Brian @codemouse
~ Sam @hammmy_sammmy

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***Event opens at 6:00 pm, talks to start around ~6:45 pm ***

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CDK & TypeScript for easy, scalable Node.JS Serverless Applications, with Katey Watson @CategoricallyKT

PillPack's core is a large and very complex Rails monolith. To get our service up to Amazon-scale, we've been working on splitting functionality into microservices. These services are built in-parallel, without DevOps. By using CDK, my team was able to use something it already knew -- TypeScript -- to quickly build up infrastructure to support a serverless Node.JS application. That's the advantage of CDK vs. writing your own Cloudformation (or using SAM, etc.): it lets you work within a paradigm, if not a language, you already know, using traditional design patterns.

Katey Watson is a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon's PillPack, an online pharmacy that manages complex medication regimens for more than 32 million patients. Heading up transportation systems, Katey builds highly scalable and fault-tolerant solutions to ensure patients receive shipments on time, every time. Before getting into software engineering, she taught moral philosophy to college students, helped a politician write a book, and worked for a think tank in Washington, D.C.

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AI via Microsoft Cognitive Services, with Veronika Kolesnikova @breakpointv16

I'm sure you have heard about artificial intelligence because it's the next big thing, and all major tech companies are involved in its development. Now you can implement it too directly in all your websites, mobile and desktop apps using Microsoft Cognitive Services. In this session, you will gain basic knowledge about artificial intelligence and machine learning, get an overview of Cognitive Services and their groups. In the end, you will see a demo on how to create an image recognition web page using Custom Vision service.

Veronika Kolesnikova is a Web Developer at Rightpoint. She's also a Microsoft MVP (AI). Passionate about backend web development, mainly with Microsoft technologies like C#, .NET, Azure. She's curious about mobile, ML, and AR. Veronika is a public speaker, hackathon volunteer, book co-author, and a co-organizer of the Boston Azure user group.
Veronika holds a master's degree in Information Technology. In her free time, she likes dancing, traveling, and practicing aerial yoga.

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Security Story Time - what you can learn from npm security incidents to protect your own projects, with Jen Weber @jwwweber

Have you ever run `npm install` in a Node project and seen warnings about security vulnerabilities in the libraries you are using? What do they mean? Should you be worried? What can you actually do about them? In this talk, you'll hear the stories of some major security scares in the JavaScript ecosystem, we'll break down some security jargon, and you'll walk away with some things you can do in your own day-to-day coding to up your game.

Jen Weber is a maintainer of multiple open-source projects and a member of the core team for Ember.js, which is a front end framework. She works at Cardstack, where she builds apps that help other people build apps. (she/they)