Prairie Dev Con Regina

Shamir Charania is a Managing Director at Keep Secure, and possesses in-depth expertise in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. With a strong emphasis on cybersecurity, he develops robust global cloud strategies prioritizing data protection and resilience. Leveraging complexity theory, Shamir delivers innovative and elegant solutions to address complex requirements while driving business growth, positioning himself as a driving force in cloud transformation for organizations in the digital age.

Adam Krieger is a Senior Security Consultant and Cloud Security Architect specializing in cloud security implementation. With a 15+ year background in security, solutions architecture, DevOps, development, and team leadership, he has implemented a wide variety of solutions across several domains. He loves a good scale problem and may be able to read off pages of cloud API documentation by memory. He has his CISSP and collects certifications like pokemon cards.

Kyle Geske is a programmer, teacher, artist, and father. He has worked as a support technician, an engineer in the telecommunications industry, a contract programmer and consultant, an entrepreneur, and a college instructor. He is also the executive director of Open Democracy Manitoba, a non-profit organization that builds digital tools for democratic engagement. Kyle's technical knowledge spans the entire stack, from hardware and FPGA design, to firmware programming in assembly language, through driver and network coding in C/C++, system and database administration, back and front-end web development, data visualization, generative art, and most recently game development. He is an open-source contributor and a champion of open-government ideas and open-data best practices. As a math and programming instructor at Red River College, Kyle challenges and inspires the next generation of Manitoban game dev innovators.

AJ is a Developer Advocate at Microsoft and a seasoned DevOps and Agile practitioner. He runs a program called Developer Support for clients across Canada focussing on increasing developer velocity for organizations who have development teams. AJ bridges the gap between executives and developers helping define long-term vision and empowering teams to attain that vision in a repeatable, secure, sustainable way. AJ is passionate about working with organizations to decrease time to value while modernizing workflow to free up time for innovation.

Mariam Brian is a senior advisor at OBS and a global speaker on Human Machine Futures and related topics. She is a strategic consultant to start-ups around the world as a neuro-tech philosopher with a focus on the long-term impact of new and emerging technologies. A quantum-analog artist and nonlinear thinker, she offers transdisciplinary systemic perspectives to the digital realm, perceiving transformations as a continual process. Connect with her today, on LinkedIn.

Well-rounded Solution Architect with over 10 years of hands-on experience in all areas of Software Development Lifecycle (Back-end, Cloud, Database, DevOps, Mobile, Desktop, Web) Passionate about building and leading technical teams to success, by cultivating a highly collaborative and efficient work environment where everyone can learn from each other and grow as a team. Alex has been working with Azure technologies for over 5 years now, focusing specifically on the Application Development using PaaS services.

Ashleigh is the Leader of the Product Team at Neovation Learning Solutions in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She manages a team of over 30 developers, UX designers and QA analysts who work to maintain and grow two separate products. Ashleigh is a vocal advocate for accessibility and inclusive design. She has spoken about accessibility to a variety of audiences, including at Prairie Dev Con in Winnipeg, Regina, and Calgary, Confoo Montreal, and at TedxWinnipeg 2019, where she brought the idea and foundations of digital accessibility to an audience of nearly 700 Winnipeggers. Ashleigh has also published articles on digital accessibility in Code Magazine. In her free time, Ashleigh consumes a truly frightening amount of pop culture media, including movies, TV shows, comic books and novels. You can usually find her with Pokémon Go and Pikmin Bloom open on her phone, no matter where she is or what she's (supposed to be) doing.

Cameron McKay is a Microsoft certified Cloud Developer/Architect with a background in web technology and business analysis; he has blended his expertise in these areas to deliver a variety of enterprise web and cloud applications using the Microsoft technology stack. Cameron has proven experience leading teams and delivering web and cloud solutions throughout the full software development lifecycle. Cameron is an advocate for defensive programming, Microsoft Azure development and integrating security into software development lifecycle. Cameron spends his off-hours as a tabletop board game enthusiast, cooking up delicious meals, watching anime and training his husky dogs. Cameron is always up for any tabletop game, but he especially enjoys strategy games such as Settlers of Catan and Go (Baduk). When he isn't playing board games, Cameron often spends time hanging out with his two huskys: going on walks, training them fetch, heel and spin on command.

Chad Green is a manager, software development, architect, community leader, Microsoft MVP, and most importantly a father and husband. Over his career spanning three decades, Chad has managed groups from 3 to 63 people, worked on projects in a wide range of markets including education, healthcare, military, government, workforce management, financial services, chemical research, and electronic commerce. Being a big believer in giving back and wanting to ensure that there are cool events for others, Chad founded and chairs the annual Code PaLOUsa conference, organizers the Louisville .NET Meetup user group and the Monthly Tech Leader Coffee and Discussion, and has helped other groups like the Louisville Tech Ladies and events like Cincy Deliver.

As the Azure Hybrid Solutions Technical Sales Lead for Canada on the Global Black Belt Team, I work with customers across Canada in all segments to help them leverage Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack Edge, Azure Stack HCI, Azure Stack Hub and Azure Arc to enable new business capabilities comprising IoT, intelligent edge and hypercloud. This allows organizations to increase agility, reduce costs and transform their business. I actively engage with our Azure Stack OEM Partners in Canada to provide our mutual customers a complete intelligent edge solution allowing them to meet regulatory and compliance requirements where their data must stay on premise, or help enable cloud computing in bandwidth and latency-challenged environments. Damir has over 30 years experience in the industry in roles including application development, consulting, enterprise architecture, sales, as well as leading a systems integrator with a focus on technology and public sector. He has spoken at many industry events including previous Prairie DevCon iterations, Microsoft TechEd and Ignite, Microsoft Management Summit, and others, as well as being the driving force behind Microsoft TechDays Canada for 5 years.

Dave is an experienced professional with 24+ years of experience in a wide variety of product development roles. As a developer, he brings deep experience in programming and architecture and demonstrate these skills at a senior level. As a senior professional with skills and experience beyond technical areas, Dave also helps implement or evolve software development processes and methodologies, business analysis, project management, leadership, mentoring and training. He is a passionate but practical Agile/Lean/Kanban practitioner. He has broad experience with Microsoft technologies and platforms, including deep experience with Azure. He helps organizations around the world realize their potential through maturing their software development technical and process practices. He loves DevOps tooling, techniques, and mindsets including CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, Telemetry, and information-driven decision-making during DevOps processes.

Andrew is an IT coordinator at the City, managing web, data services and GIS teams. Previously, he joined the city as its first Open Data Administrator, and still maintains that role in addition to other duties. As a web development nerd since the late nineties, Andrew has seen how the Internet has grown and evolved from a innovative marketplace of ideas into what it is today. As a True Believer in Open Data, he has advocated for releasing data from government entities as a mechanism to fulfill openness and transparency obligations, and to improve the trust of citizens with governments, as well as an exceptionally easy tool for building web applications.

Winnipeger born and raised, Craig has been a software developer for over 20 years. His interests include functional programming, playing video games and hockey. Craig is a Principal Developer at Canada's unicorn Fintech startup Neo Financial developing fraud-prevention solutions.

David Wesst, otherwise known as "Wessty" or "DW", is a Web Platform developer working as an enterprise software architect, defining technology strategy by day, and building cool web tech by night. When DW is't live-coding on Twitch or YouTube, working on side project, or being a parent, he's reading about video games and learning everything he can about video game development.

Frode is a Angular and .NET Core full-stack developer and has 15 years of development experience. He's built a wide range of software using a plethora of (mostly Microsoft) technologies including SharePoint, WPF, WCF, WinForms, MVC.Net, UWP, and even Windows Phone 8. He also has an avionics journeymanship, spends his spare-time playing video games with his kids, and doubled down on making 2020 a terrible year by tearing his ACL and MCL just before COVID shut everything down.

Grishma Jena is a Data Scientist with the UX Research and Design team at IBM Data & AI in San Francisco. She works across portfolios in conjunction with user research and design teams and uses data to understand users' struggles and opportunities to enhance their experiences. She earned her Masters in Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. She has spoken and facilitated workshops at multiple conferences including PyCon US (largest Python conference in the world) and O’Reilly OSCON. She has also taught Python at the San Francisco Public Library and was a mentor for AI4ALL's AI Project Fellowship Spring 2018 where she guided a group of high school students to use AI for prioritizing 911 EMS calls. In her free time, she writes, cooks and likes conducting workshops and delivering talks. She likes explaining things in an easy-to-understand format, drawing analogies from real-life (eg. using Uncle Scrooge to explain Greedy Algorithms).

Guy Barrette is a freelance Trainer/Developer based in Montreal, Canada. He is a Microsoft Azure MVP and a DigitalOcean Navigator. His focus is to train organizations in using Docker/Kubernetes at Kubernetes Academy Online, offering hands-on public and private corporate classes, and self-paced video training. He has been a speaker at developers' conferences like Confoo, Microsoft TechDays and DevTeach. Guy was the leader of the Montreal .NET User Group for more than 23 years and is the Visual Studio Talk Show French podcast co-host. Guy has the following certifications: Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), Terraform Associate, AWS Cloud Practitioner, Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer, Azure Fundamentals and Developer Associate.

I'm a project manager and a tools administrator. I specialize in small and special projects, and in the Atlassian tool suite. I love solving problems that teams have in terms of processes or tools.

I've been in project management since 2007 (first waterfall and now agile/scrum) and in the networking and infrastructure management space since 2010 in both technical and project management roles. I managed a variety of projects in both the infrastructure and software development space over the years after moving out of the construction industry.

Currently, I'm acting as the Atlassian Community Leader for Winnipeg while providing Project Management and Jira Administration services to my clients.

Jason Bock is a Developer Advocate at Rocket Mortgage and a Microsoft MVP (C#). He has over 25 years of experience working on several business applications using a diverse set of frameworks and languages. He is the author of ".NET Development Using the Compiler API", "Metaprogramming in .NET", and "Applied .NET Attributes". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. He is a leader of the Twin Cities Code Camp. Jason holds a masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Feel free to visit his web site.

Jeff is an Agile Coach who developed his skills consulting & working with both large and small organizations across a diverse range of industries. His experience includes technical, non-technical, and fully cross-functional teams. He is always looking for ways to disrupt & highlight inefficient processes & systems to enable & empower people's creativity, and maximize outcomes and value to organizations. His default approach to work, and life, is to turn pretty much everything into a game. He spends way more time than he should on Twitter, where he often engages on all sorts of agile and lean topics, including NoEstimates, Mob Programming, Kanban, Systems Thinking, Team & Interpersonal Dynamics, and other stuff, too. Jeff struggles to manage his own WIP. Jeff loves learning, and is always looking to expand what he knows. About anything and everything. Jeff thinks it's funny to write his own bio in the third person.

Paul is a serial entrepreneur who has founded, scaled and mentored various Winnipeg-based startups. He is currently the VP of Technology for Neo Finacial and holds a BSc, MSc. and PhD. from the University of Manitoba. Previously Paul was the founder and CEO of 151 Research Inc., the Innovation Manager for Canadian Tire Corp., Director of R&D for Seccuris Inc., and Sr. Researcher for TRLabs of Canada.

I am a software developer from Canada, based in Manitoba! During the day, I am currently work at Neo Financial where I lead a team of devs that work on internal operations tools for the non-technical employees at Neo; and at night, I work on my passion project, Minibase. Outside of software, I love to play all kinds of table-top, card, and board games.

# Justin Latta Hi there, my names Justin! I'm a software development manager over at Priceline, and I've been working within Manitoba as a software developer for the past 11 years. This is a snippet from my linked in that I think sums up myself fairly well. > I put myself above the rest by constantly learning, adapting, and being the best software engineer I can. I constantly challenge myself to solve increasingly complex problems, learning every possible framework and language time allows me to. Have been told by colleagues that I can solve problems others struggle with. That's my specialty; reverse engineering complex issues and coming up with the best solution. I take immense amount of pride in being a strong technical resource at any company I work for, even now as a development manager. I have experience in many industries, across many stacks, and different project management techniques. Like many other developers, I'm a pretty all around geek as well. I'm a big gamer, enjoy flying drones, and generally love anything tech related. I have two parrots at home, Reggie and Echo, who are my coding buddies. I offer a unique perspective many other developers cannot. I started development young, well before my career. I took an interest in systems, networking and hardware throughout my career which has bolstered my understanding of software development. I've been through quite a few positions, with different stacks, offering me many perspectives on what works and what does not. I'm a natural leader, which has afforded me the opportunity to work in multiple leadership roles. ### Career My career started with Varian Medical Systems here in Winnipeg, where I was responsible as a Project Manager managing over 100 different clients. Bit of a regret in my career, as I did not have the chance to really dive into development here. Eventually I moved onto Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation (MASC), where I gained a ton of knowledge that I still apply today. I helped the wonderful folks over there with architecting a .NET solution to get off their legacy AS400. We did a complete transition from waterfall, old school methodologies, into new agile methodologies with a modern stack. We primarily worked on a Microsoft stack, Azure, .NET, and SQL Server database. After a while I felt a change of scenery was needed to challenge myself, and I worked for a local company, RAPID RTC. I quickly dove into their stack and offered my expertise where I felt necessary, and was promoted into a team lead position. RAPID RTC was a .NET shop, but I'd say most of the experience I gained here was in both people and project management. After RAPID RTC, I moved on to work with a company called Laivly, which is a 24-7 In-Touch startup. I worked on a pretty cool electron application that took control of call centre agents computers and helped them speed up their process times. This was my first foray into typescript, nodeJS and electron. I've learned to thoroughly detest npm, and enjoy the performance gains of node. Now I worked for Priceline Partner Solutions, another Winnipeg company! I was offered a position here as a software development manager, and it has been a journey transitioning from a technical role to a people manager.

I'm a passionate technologist and lifelong learner, currently focused on helping Canadian organizations get up-to-speed and running in the public cloud. Most of my current work focuses on designing solutions around Azure, helping organizations automate their infrastructure provisioning with Infrastructure-as-Code and realizing the full benefits of public cloud by ensuring the right foundational elements are in place. My wife, our cat Penelope and I have made our home in the wonderful city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I spend my non-tech time involved in volunteer Search & Rescue, paddleboarding and enjoying our vibrant city.

Mark Arteaga is President of RedBit Development. He is leading a team of 17 technology professionals specializing who are driven to help organizations – from start-ups to non-profits to global enterprises - envision, design and implement mobile, web and desktop software solutions that drive value for those companies and their stakeholders. Mark has been writing code since the age of 14. His professional career spans more than 24 years. Mark has extensive experience in architecting, designing, and implementing software solutions for clients from public, private and non-profit sectors. Mark is a former 15-year Microsoft MVP and is actively engaged in the tech community, mentoring and sharing his expertise in software innovation and development.

Michael has a passion for bespoke solution development and improving solution delivery processes. He started his career as a developer implementing some of Canada's first e-commerce and B2B portals. Over the years, Michael has served various SDLC roles, including business analyst, solution architect, Scrum Master, product owner and program sponsor on a large variety of initiatives in the public and private sectors. Michael now leads MNP Digital's DevOps transformation practice and has over 20 years of solution delivery experience. Michael brings his unique expertise in helping organizations adopt DevOps. Typically the DevOps transformation includes helping organizations and practitioners adopt better business analysis skills. This aligns with Michael's background, having served 8-years on Winnipeg's International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) board, supporting the education of Winnipeg's Business Analyst Community. Michael is certified in DevOps, Scrum and Java development and is pleased to present this topic to bring some of the learnings to Winnipeg's development community.

Mike works with people who are crazy enough to believe they can improve their world every day. They do this by taking responsibility for whatever happens without blame, excuses or shame. Through this, they inspire others to do the same. Mike taps into his experience as a facilitator, mentor, teacher, and coach to activate the people he works with. Mike's equally comfortable working with executives as much as front-line teams. In his mind, it's all the same because of one factor: all teams are made up of people. Mike is the author of "Activate your Leadership," Host of the videocast "Empowered Until Further Notice," and co-host of the "Open Door Podcast." Mike is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CTI), Professional Certified Coach (ICF), Leadership Graduate (CTI), Organizational and Relationship Systems Coach (CRR Global), Responsibility Mentor (The Responsibility Company), and IC-Agile Expert-Agile Coaching (IC Agile)

Currently a Cloud Solution Architect for Microsoft, I love helping professionals and organizations understand the power of the cloud and how they can get the most out of it. I am a professional with more than 20 years of experience in software development and have worked as a developer, architect, and agile coach. I enjoy traveling with my family, playing video games, and learning new technologies. I love football (soccer) and enjoy talking about it just as much as I enjoyed playing.

Rod Paddock is the founder of Dash Point Software, Inc. a boutique software development firm, specializing in high-quality custom software solutions. With 30+ years of experience, Rod's current and past clients including Icon Media Direct, Premier Bankcard, Microsoft, The US Coast Guard, and The US Navy. Along with developing software, Rod is a well-known author and conference speaker. Since 1995, Rod has given talks, training sessions, and keynotes in the US, Canada, and Europe. Rod has been Editor-in-Chief of CODE Magazine since 2001. Rod is also a damn-fine dungeon master and has returned to writing articles about Dungeons & Dragons!

Kieran is a project and relationship manager who cares about empathetic communication and understanding across teams. He's found himself in a lot of "Swiss Army knife" situations, from building a department managing and marketing over 2,000 white label restaurant websites for SkipTheDishes, to helping grow travel products at Priceline.com with brands like Spirit Airlines and American Forces Travel, and many adventures in-between.

Now, he works at Northfield IT with the NFL, supporting projects across streaming video and digital video archiving infrastructure.

Outside of work, he speaks about mental health, sings in a choir, and plays what some might consider "too much" League of Legends. He's probably interested in whatever your job or hobby is and wishes he had time to try it.

I'm a problem solver. A software developer that loves applying software principles to infrastructure automation and web applications that have a purpose. I'm a former developer turned systems administrator turned network engineer who got back into software, which gives me a deep understanding of the technologies I work with and how they can drive more value for the companies I work with. TL;DR - Wanted to program most of my life, realized I didn't like it, spent 13 years as a network guy that wrote a lot of code, joined an awesome web startup as a web developer, and have rediscovered my joy for software development. After that ended I moved into a more devops type role where I can have my feet in both camps. I'm currently doing work for the NFL and Royal Caribbean through my employer, Northfield IT. I'm a Winnipeg expat living in Springfield, VA.

Simon has over twenty years of development experience and has worked on various projects, including object-oriented databases, police communication systems, speech recognition and unified messaging. His current focus is contributing to the open-source Architect project to enable developers to create functional web applications. Simon’s been building web applications since the days they were written using shell scripts, and he still has nightmares about those dark days.

Simon is a polyglot developer who has worked on everything from serial port drivers on an Android tablet, to NServiceBus, to processing tens of thousands of messages a second using stream analytics, to building Angular web applications. All that in the last year. He is the author of a number of books on JavaScript and ASP.NET and blogs far less regularly than he should on both the Western Dev's site and his on blog. He is also the least visible member of the ASP.NET monsters. His interests change as frequently as he changes his underwear. At the moment he is interested in F# and how AI is going to change how we develop software. He is a big picture specialist who can maintain a cogent view of an entire system and pick the right technology to solve a problem.

Coming Soon!

Hello, I'm Tyler Doerksen, a local Winnipegger and Cloud Solution Architect for Microsoft Canada. I work with companies in Western Canada to help them understand how Microsoft Azure can provide business value for their organization. I run design sessions or workshops for technical teams and use my Azure solution experience to accelerate time-to-value. As a Microsoft employee I participate in technology communities around Cloud, Machine Learning, Media Delivery Systems, and more recently Mission-critical Blockchain solutions. In my technology career I have been recognized as a Microsoft MVP by the Azure group, for my work in teaching about and implementing solutions using Azure services.

Sandy Liu is a Certified Scrum Master with almost a decade of experience working with many Toronto startups. She is the author of "Confessions of a Scrum Master" and is currently a Senior Product Manager at one of Canada's largest media and entertainment companies.

Dave is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft on the Azure DevOps team. Prior to joining Microsoft, he has built up over a decade of experience in developing software for financial, agricultural and energy companies where he has specialized in .NET and web development. He is also the orange member of the ASP.NET monsters (http://aspnetmonsters.com). Dave lives in Calgary where he enjoys exploring the nearby mountains.