DevFest St. John's 2023

Join us to learn the secrets to building smarter and shipping faster from the Googlers, industry experts, and experienced developers shaping the future of Mobile, Web, AI, and Cloud for billions of users worldwide, and advancing leading enterprises and startups!

With an amazing keynote, workshop, and demo DevFest St. John's will advance your expertise in cloud and web. Master the tools and techniques required to design, architect, develop, scale, launch, integrate, and maintain today’s advanced technology solutions. 

Agenda

9:00 AM: Registration and Welcome

9:15 AM: Welcome Address - AbdulKabir Sulaiman

GDG and GDG St. John's
Personality Profile

9:30 AM: From Web to Mobile Development - Shawn Chen

Explore how React Native seamlessly extends our web development skills to mobile app development. Uncover the inner workings of React Native, its advantages, and how it leverages a unified codebase and shared libraries. Additionally, delve into the challenges faced as a React Native developer and discover effective mitigation strategies.

10:15 AM: Design Thinking for Developers - Lesley Chard

Unlock the power of innovation with Design Thinking for Developers. Geared toward engineers eager to enhance their problem-solving skills, this session offers a comprehensive introduction to the principles of design thinking. Through this talk, participants will explore the iterative process of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing—a proven methodology to foster creative solutions. Get ready to unleash your creative potential and revolutionize your problem-solving approach!

11:00 AM: Intro to Technical Writing - Meagan Campbell

A crash course in becoming a better writer.

Even if you never plan to be a full-time writer, intentionally improving your writing skills is a powerful career move. Becoming a stronger writer helps make you a stronger developer, a stronger teammate, and a stronger candidate for whatever opportunities your future may hold.

This session will cover an overview of technical writing and different types of writing in SaaS, tips to improve your writing (with examples), and helpful resources you can explore on your own.

11:45 AM: Demystifying Prompt Engineering - Sushmitha Batchu

Prompt engineering is the process of structuring text that can be interpreted and understood by a generative AI model, such as ChatGPT. We'll explore what it is, why it's crucial to learn, the benefits it brings, and some practical tips. I firmly believe that mastering this skill can supercharge our ability to use AI effectively, create user-friendly software, stay ethical, and stay ahead in the ever-changing world of AI-powered technology.

This talk will cover What is Prompt and Prompt Engineering, Elements of Prompt, Prompt Parameters and Their Significance, Use Cases, Prompting Techniques, and Tips for Crafting Effective Prompts.

12:30 PM: Networking, Lunch and Social

1:00 PM: Intro to GitHub and Open Source - Mitchell Hynes

In this presentation, Mitch will cover the differences between Git and GitHub and what role they play in Open Source Software at large. Including the dos-and-don'ts of collaborating on GitHub, how to find a project to contribute to, and what contributing looks like from an Open Source Maintainer's perspective.

1:45 PM: Levelling up Git Rebase - Tim Oram

When working with Git, the rebase command is often stated as being an alternative to Git merge. While this is true in the basic sense, this is only scratching the surface of what Git rebase provides. Even when using a merge-based workflow, I believe there are features of Git rebase that could still be very useful in your toolbox of source control tools. This talk will run through what exactly Git rebase is, as well as some expanded functionality.

2:30 PM: Modern Server side Web Dev - Jack Harrhy

Navigating the many methods available and considerations to be made while deploying a website in 2023.

The web has existed in some form for the last three decades, and while some of its core remains the same, plenty has changed. Initially, since the browser was simple, most of the interesting dynamic nature of websites came from the server, but as JavaScript become more powerful, and people realized maybe doing more on the client would be better, the server in some cases is only responsible for shooting a small index.html alongside megabytes of JavaScript at the client. However, the bleeding edge of current modern web frameworks is rethinking this approach, and the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of the server, but with an interesting twist.

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Speakers

Gillian Mensah - Verafin (Team Lead)

Gillian is an experienced engineer leading the Software Development team at Verafin. She talks about tech careers, the tech community, and software development. Gillian is changing the world using code by teaching newbies and mentoring junior engineers in tech.

Meagan Campbell - IdeaFactory (Content Lead)

Jack Harrhy - C-CORE (Software Developer)

Jack is an experienced software developer with a demonstrated history of working on all aspects of web applications, command line tools, and miscellaneous projects. When Jack is not working, he mentors budding software engineers and volunteers with a lot of tech communities.

Lesley Chard - Carnegie Learning (Vice President, Design and User Experience)

Lesley is passionate about making the technology sector more diverse and leveraging technology to create a positive impact. She leads the design and user experience team at Carnegie Learning for both Canada and the United States.

Sushmitha Batchu - Egen, Inc. (Senior Principal Data Engineer)

Sushmitha is a software professional expert with more than 6 years of industry experience leading in Data related projects, specializing in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). She excels in tailoring GCP solutions, end-to-end application development, and bridges the gap between development and operations with strong DevOps knowledge.
She's passionate about knowledge sharing, empowering o…

Tim Oram - 1Password (Staff Developer)

Tim is the founder of CTS-NL, a community for computer enthusiasts and developers in Newfoundland and Labrador. Tim is passionate about upskilling the technology ecosystem is Newfoundland and Labrador.

Shawn Chen - Shopify (Senior Software Developer)

Hosted By

AbdulKabir Sulaiman, GDG Lead

AbdulKabir is an Innovative and award-winning Community Management Professional with multiple skills and experience across program management, communications (writing, speaking, presentation), product and relationship management.

He's also an experienced Software Engineering professional with over 4 years of experience delivering effective backend web applications that are fast, data-driven, and scalable, restful APIs, database integrations, deployments, and DevOps practices.

Radhika Thacker, GDG Organizer

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Partners

Google (https://developers.google.com/)

techNL (https://technl.ca/)
techNL provides visibility, business growth services and a collective influential voice to the tech sector in Newfoundland and Labrador with a vision to make Newfoundland and Labrador the most sought-after Canadian tech ecosystem, globally recognized for its collaborative community, diversity and quality of life.

Memorial University Computer Science Society (MUN CSS) (https://muncompsci.ca/)
Representing the voice of Computer Science students! We host social events and activities for students and society members.

JetBrains (https://www.jetbrains.com/)
JetBrains is a cutting-edge software vendor specializing in the creation of intelligent development tools, including IntelliJ IDEA – the leading Java IDE PhpStorm, PyCharm, WebStorm, RustRover amongst other tools and plugins..

Kodeco (https://www.kodeco.com/)
The best investment for your mobile development career. Kodeco is a publisher of high-quality mobile development tutorials for iOS, Android, Flutter and other platforms.

Memorial Centre for Entrepreneurship (https://www.mun.ca/mce/)
The mission at MCE is to inspire and enable Memorial University students from all faculties and diverse backgrounds to pursue a future in the exciting and dynamic world of entrepreneurship.

CTS-NL (https://ctsnl.ca/)
The Computer Technology Society Newfoundland Labrador, generally known as CTS-NL, is a community group for people who work in or have an interest in software development, technology, and computing in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-st-johns-presents-devfest-st-johns-2023/.