Spooky Code Tales to Tell in the Dark

Join us for a special SPOOKY edition of our monthly gathering, hosted by Sider (https://sider.review/)! We will be featuring several spoOOOOooky lightning talks of your scariest coding tales, sandwiched with networking and food and drink. Bike parking is available at the venue.

We are dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone. All attendees are expected to abide by the Fog City Ruby Code of Conduct (http://fogcityruby.github.io/).

We'll ask you to write your pronoun on your name tag. Want to learn more about why we do this? Read this guide from Bryn Mawr (http://www.brynmawr.edu/pensby/documents/AskingforNameandPronouns.pdf)

Submit a talk for a future meetup: Fog City Ruby CFP (http://www.fogcityruby.com/cfp/)

Speakers of all programming and speaking experience levels are welcome to submit talks, and we're especially excited to host speakers who come from populations that are underrepresented in tech.

SCHEDULE

6:30pm — Doors open, food, networking

7:00pm — Talks begin

Jessie Young, Creepy Capybara: What I Learned Webdriving Spooky Government Websites
Code for America's Integrated Benefits Initiative leverages technology and design to demonstrate a more human-centered social safety net that enables access, improves efficiency, and promotes integrity. As a Ruby software developer working on this initiative, this meant creating a series of Capybara scripts to take the information that we gathered in our user-friendly website and fill in the hair-raising government forms required to receive benefits. This talk is about what I learned while figuring out all of the exciting behaviors of a government website in order to fill navigate it with Capybara.

Andy Bartholomew, Prune Me
A chilling tale of API data format requirements and unexpected client behavior!

Britta Gustafson, The VMsplosion
I'll never forget the day my team accidentally ran a command that deleted all of the 350 virtual machines in our AWS account, which took down our entire Platform as a Service that hosts several important government websites. We recovered in 6.5 hours because of our infrastructure-as-code practices and contingency plan tests, and I want to scare you into testing this scenario for your system and seeing if you can rebuild too!

Christine Yen, When Hardware Goes Bump in the Night
Christine will tell the spooky story of how her team debugged a mysterious outage involving Amazon RDS, and how that epic failure became a zombie that followed the team around forever.

8:15-8:45pm — More hanging out and talking to nice people

SPEAKERS

Jessie Young is currently a software developer at Heroku. She previously did work for Code for America, 18F, and thoughtbot. Her goal in life is to delete more code than she writes. So far, she is on track.

Andy Bartholomew is an iOS developer at Airbnb, where he works on the Trip Planner. When not working, he likes to play video games, read comic books, and snuggle with his cat, Mei. Mei's instagram is @imperatorcuriosa.

Britta Gustafson is a technical writer learning program management, including incident response! She is also a volunteer at Double Union (a feminist makerspace in Potrero Hill) and a harpist who plays folk music.

Christine Yen is a cofounder of Honeycomb, a startup with a new approach to observability and debugging systems with data. Christine has built systems and products at companies large and small and likes to have her fingers in as many pies as possible. Previously, she built Parse's analytics product (and leveraged Facebook's data systems to expand it) and wrote software at a few now-defunct startups.

SPONSOR

Thanks to Sider (https://sider.review/) for sponsoring this month's Fog City Ruby!