Thunder Nerds

Eva Sofianos is ​an ​energetic, ​disciplined ​and ​highly ​motivated ​individual ​with ​over 15 years of experience ​in IT, ​diligently ​leading ​teams ​to ​success. She began her career by providing IT services for Weill Medical Center of Cornell University. Soon after, Eva participated in research projects with the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York, before joining IBM as a Software Engineer at the T.J. Watson Research Center, where she led numerous successful projects in IBM’s Global Technology Services(GTS) as well as Global Business Services(GBS) before transferring into IBM’s Federal Cloud Computing Division as an Advisory IT Specialist, and co-authoring an IBM-Redbook. In the past few years, she realized her love for teaching and during her transition from industry to academia co-founded ​a ​technical ​training ​program ​that ​provides ​trainees ​with ​real ​world ​hands ​on ​experience ​by ​guiding ​them ​through ​solution development ​for ​small ​businesses. Eva is now a faculty member in the ​Computer ​Science ​department at ​Lehman ​College, CUNY who enjoys exploring upcoming technologies as the founder and organizer of GDG ​Bronx.

Talk: Nailing the Tech Interview

How to overcome the challenges of the technical interview, and impress your potential employer. This talk will include tips and tricks from the initial screening phase through the in person interview and the post-interview follow up.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/eva_sofianos* Twitter: https://twitter.com/evasofianos* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-sofianos-a48a7047/

Michael Prentice is a senior software engineer with experience in Angular, Material Design, Firebase, Google Cloud, NodeJS, software architecture, and Agile project management. He founded GDG Space Coast and DevIntent. He is part of the Angular team where he leads the AngularJS Material project.

Talk: Composing Accessible UI’s With Angular Material Components

Angular Material provides core components and a Component Dev Kit. However, it’s up to developers to integrate the various core components when creating an application. The docs are focused on individual components (behaviors, APIs, etc). In this talk, we’ll dig deep into the code with concrete, real-world examples of how to compose a quality, accessible user experience with Angular Material.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/michael_prentice* Twitter: https://twitter.com/splaktar* FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/Splaktar* GitHub: https://github.com/Splaktar* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaellprentice/* Website: https://blog.devintent.com/

Chris has worked at Comcast since 2007 – currently as a Distinguished Engineer. He enjoys building/motivating teams and ramping up new projects including XFINITY Home and XFINITY xFi using the latest patterns and web primitives. Besides coding in Javascript, he loves spending time with his wife and two children and helping out in the community.

Talk: Performance Optimizations for Progressive Web Apps

Struggling to get your website to load in less than 5 seconds on a mobile phone? Switching pages are a little sluggish? You’re not alone! Most web developers can build a responsive site, but fail to meet performance requirements for mobile. Using the latest PRPL pattern and Progressive Web API’s, you can provide a compelling alternative to native apps, as long as performance remains your top feature.

This talk will cover the architecture for Xfinity xFi, an enterprise PWA for Comcast, built with Google Polymer. We’ll then dive into the Chrome performance tools to optimize xFi loading time down by more than half. You’ll walk away knowing what it takes to create a successful PWA and how to find slow downs in your app startup.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/chris_lorenzo* Twitter: https://twitter.com/chiefcll* Website: https://www.chiefhacker.com/

Faisal is a Google Developer Expert, Entrepreneur, and Engineer. He is a programming language enthusiast and loves solving software engineering challenges across the stack. Currently, you can find Faisal working on mobile applications in Flutter, building services with Tensorflow and writing backends in Dart or Node.js.

Talk: Introduction to Flutter

From the writer of Flutter for Android developers on Flutter.io comes Introduction to Flutter!

Flutter is one of the most talked about technologies this year. Flutter is Google’s mobile UI framework for crafting high-quality native interfaces on iOS and Android in record time.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/faisal_abid* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faisalabid/* Twitter: https://twitter.com/FaisalAbid

Jared is the organizer of Orlando IoT and a full-stack developer at Nebbia Technology. As the Orlando IoT organizer for the past two years, he’s helped connect people who connect things by organizing a monthly meetup. As a software developer at Nebbia, his mission is to make software projects be more successful by leveraging DevOps and the cloud.

Talk: IoT + DevOps

Deploying to a server or the cloud is difficult enough. What about when there are hundreds or thousands of devices, spread across the globe, with limited connectivity and no one around to reset them? When it comes to the Internet of Things, having an understanding of the people, processes, and tools it takes to provision and update devices is a key part of success.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/jared_porcenaluk* Website: https://jaredporcenaluk.com/blog/* Twitter: https://twitter.com/jporcenaluk

Mike Herchel is a front-end web developer at Lullabot and has worked on prominent projects such as the Syfy network, SpaceX, Principal Financial, and more. He’s been passionate about web development since creating his first website in 2001. Outside of the digital world, Mike loves everything outdoors including hiking, fishing, kayaking, college football, and hammocking. He owns an awesome telescope that’s over 30 years old and uses it as much as Florida’s swampy weather will let him. Mike lives with his perfectly wonderful little daughter and two very bad dogs that have a habit of sneaking stuff off the kitchen counters.

Talk: Debugging, Profiling, & Rocking Out with Browser-Based Developer Tools!

Browser based developer tools have become an indispensable tool for modern front-end web development. New features and changes are being added at a rapid pace, and keeping up with all of the changes is difficult, but well worth it!

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/mike_herchel* Website: https://herchel.com/* Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikeherchel

Dr. Aygul Zagidullina is a passionate Actions on Google developer. Her work experience includes Google, Todoist, MotaWord. She holds a PhD in quantum chemistry and prior to Google dedicated 6 years to scientific research at the University of Stuttgart. Aygul is a very active member of the London digital ecosystem and has been involved in many innovative projects. She is a Google Developer Group (GDG)/ Women Techmakers (WTM) London lead, Google Top Contributor (TC)/ Trusted Tester (TT), and UK STEM Ambassador. Aygul has been a distinguished speaker at numerous international industry events in the US (at Google HQ), UK, Germany, Ireland, UAE, Greece, Turkey, Poland, Georgia, and Russia. She was named as one of The NEXT 100 Top Influencers of the European Digital Industry in 2013.

Talk: Beyond Smart Speakers: Get Your Google Assistant Apps Ready for Smart Displays

In an ever-expanding world of devices for the Google Assistant (smart speaker, smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, earphones, smart TV, car, smart display, and the list goes on and on), developers face today completely new challenges in creating effective and consistent experiences for users. In this talk, we’ll take a closer look at our user’s daily journey as they’re moving from one device to another and cover some key considerations for designing Actions on Google across surfaces – with useful tips to understand when and how to leverage visuals alongside voice interactions, to create rich, delightful conversational experiences for smart displays and more.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/aygul_zagidullina* Twitter: http://twitter.com/aygul* Medium: https://medium.com/@aygul

Michele is an in-house Front-End Engineer for Vox Media, building innovative software solutions enjoyed by the millions of fans of websites such as Polygon, The Verge, Recode.net, SBNation, Eater, Vox and more.

Talk: Shifting to Vue

In the world of software engineering, there are those of us who work daily on iterating-over, and improving, a single legacy application.

You might be interested in moving your UI toward a modern reactive framework; but how do you leverage this on an older system without dumping your original product entirely and starting over from scratch?

I’ve recently done this very thing – adding a VueJS front-end as the new face of an old Rails App, shifting the UI in piecemeal while supporting both old and new architecture with VueJS components.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/michele_cynowicz* Website: http://cynowicz.com/* Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/michelecynowicz* LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/michelecynowicz

Siva is working as Architect in Computer Enterprises Inc, delivering Mobile and Cloud solutions. I offer talks to technical groups on ML and AI solutions to motivate them to get involved in it and empowering them to impact change in the world by sharing.

Talk: AI Adventures with AutoML

Let’s take a look at how Cloud AutoML’s technology helps us on building vision models. Cloud AutoML is a suite of machine learning products that enables developers with limited machine learning expertise to train high-quality models specific to their business needs, by leveraging Google’s state-of-the-art transfer learning, and Neural Architecture Search technology.

Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/siva_kumar* Twitter: https://twitter.com/ksivamuthu

Emily Fortuna is a developer advocate on the Flutter team at Google. When not educating about the awesomeness of Flutter, she can be found working on improving fairness in machine learning or acting on the stage and screen. She is an avid member of the nerdy joke appreciation society.

Lara Martin is a self-made Android developer based in Berlin. Her passion for Android made her transition from her background in science to software development. When she’s not attending a tech meetup, you will find her playing videogames.

Their Talk: Flutter: Mobile Development for Busy People

All too often, mobile development is not for the casual developer. Creating an app that works well on iOS and Android can be a time-consuming process, requiring separate teams of programmers for each target platform with different frameworks, languages, and programming tools. This is made worse by the trend toward highly customized user interfaces. Fortunately, Flutter is an SDK that puts the power to create beautiful, customized, cross-platform mobile apps back in the hands of every developer. In this session we will live-code a mobile app on stage to highlight how easy and fast it is to develop with Flutter, while showing off the latest new features. Flutter allows programmers and designers to experiment and play with their app’s user interface; new features can be added quickly and tested immediately; and the resulting app runs at 60 fps on both iOS and Android, while keeping the look and feel for each platform.

Lara Martin – Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/lara_martin* Twitter: https://twitter.com/lariki* Website: http://laramartin.eu/* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laramartincarretero/* GitHub: https://github.com/laramartin

Emily Fortuna – Links

* DevFest: https://devfestflorida.org/speakers/emily_fortuna* Twitter: https://twitter.com/bouncingsheep* GitHub: https://github.com/efortuna* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-fortuna-30a201b9