Technically Speaking

Elle's Bio:

Evangelizing the growth of Universal Design and lean accessibility as best practices within large organizations, Elle works on behalf of Simply Accessible with enterprise level clients to build the foundation needed to integrate accessibility into every facet of corporate culture. She's worked first hand with design, content, development, and testing teams to create agile, scalable methods to ensure more inclusive user experiences. She's seen amazing things happen, where the user's needs are the primary driver for change and innovation in large scale digital projects, where teams meet and even exceed their specific product goals, and where companies leap ahead of their competition, all by putting accessibility first. Elle has a passion for all things agile, a fascination with emerging technology, and a healthy fear of zombies.

PRESENTATION - Lean accessibility: Building inclusive design into your agile workflow

Josh's Bio:

I work with teams to bridge the divide between the functional needs and wants, and the technological ability to deliver. I created offshore development teams and trained them on the Scrum development process to enable highly functioning, consistently delivering teams. My background in business process allows me to understand at a fundamental level what the business is trying to achieve, while my deep understanding of technology helps me hone in and guide the technological delivery to create desired outcomes. Employing agile development methods like scrum, test driven development (TDD), feature driven development (FDD), Kanban, and lean provide the transparency required to ensure the right product and features are delivered, at the right time.

As an agile coach working in agile transformations for the past year at Daugherty Business Solutions, I have worked in all of the roles required for an agile implementation. Coaching Product Ownership, scrum masters, dev managers, and the team on how to implement agile methods, how to determine which methods are a fit, all the way to the basics of how to write a user story. A lot of the implementation of agile methods is looking at the same problem from a different perspective, and then determining a new way of solving that issue.

Emerson's Bio:

Emerson Taymor is the managing director and co-founder of Philosophie, a digital innovation firm with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. It helps large organizations validate and develop their promising ideas through agile design, rapid prototyping, and software craftsmanship. Whether it’s to reduce costs, explore emerging markets, or improve the customer experience, Philosophie applies a startup mentality and toolset to deliver meaningful, rapid progress.

Emerson is a former instructor at General Assembly, where he helped craft its front-end web development and JavaScript curricula. Previously, he spent a decade as a freelance designer and worked at San Francisco and New York advertising agencies. He graduated cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles with bachelor’s degree in Design| Media Arts.

PRESENTATION - Playful randomness to spark creativity