Prairie Dev Con Calgary

Modern HTTP APIs run the contemporary tech world. As a result, every organization is now required to produce and consume APIs in some way. The need for your organization to productively design, build, deploy and operate RESTful APIs is higher than it has ever been for you to stay competitive. Developing the processes and tools to design and deliver hundreds of APIs within your organization is fraught with manual checkpoints and inconsistencies. This friction makes standard API Governance slow, uncollaborative, and non-iterative. To succeed in building modern APIs in the enterprise, you will need both an effective and productive API Governance strategy to support your API Design First processes.

In this talk, we will dive into the principal areas of the API Design lifecycle as we discuss how to succeed with API Governance using non-traditional approaches including collaboration, stewardship, and automation. Real-world examples from SPS Commerce, off-the-shelf tooling, and custom solutions will drive our journey through API Standards, Design, Development, and Publishing to demonstrate highly productive API Design First capabilities to rally your teams around.

GitHub Copilot is a coding assistant that uses AI technology to analyze code context and suggest intelligent code snippets that can lead to increased productivity and improved code quality for developers. In this presentation, we'll provide a high-level overview of how Copilot works and showcase a live coding demo to highlight some of its capabilities, along with reviewing some challenges. Time permitting, we'll also look at its next offering and review what GitHub Copilot X will bring to the coding landscape.

By now we've all heard all the new buzzwords in the AI world: ChatGPT, OpenAI, Dall-E, Codex, etc. But what do they actually mean for you as a developer or for your organization? In this session I will try to demystify the tech behind buzzwords and explain what each of them mean and how to use them.

First you need identity, then you need authenticity, you probably want your messages delivered as written and in order. Maybe you’d prefer only you and your recipient can read or derive information from the communiqué, and neither of you can (easily) override this privacy. Perhaps you’d like parties to be unable to track or profile you based on interaction. Let’s explore identity, authenticity, privacy and security in messaging. After all; “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”

Still designing in the dark ages with interface design docs and outdated documentation. Come see how SwaggerHub and API Management can enable you to utilize API First Design to create live documentation that allows the designers and stakeholders to design software together for those intended to use it. Lastly, we will look at the code generation features of APIM/Azure Functions and Swagger Hub which will aid with the API First methodology.

Are you investing in team-building activities and not seeing an improvement? With the thousands of workshops, books, and tools available, it can be hard to know what will work and what won't. The science of teamwork tells us what is needed to make any group of people a great team. The good news is it's not rocket science, and you can learn the five steps to building high-performing teams. Join me for this session and learn the five steps for building great teams. You will leave with a practical understanding and be able to start applying it the next day.

Unlock the real power of Cypress E2E testing by setting up automated runs with your pipeline. In this session we'll take a look at how to create a new Azure Pipeline and have it execute the Cypress tests in your project. We will start with nothing more than a basic Angular application with Cypress installed and end up with a pipeline very similar to what we have in our current environment.

During the talk we'll quickly explore how to separate configuration for different environments, how to publish test results to DevOps that your testers won't hate, capturing screenshots/videos and attaching them to test runs (including some gotcha's), and we'll touch on running tests in parallel and automated scheduling.

Coming Soon

We'll delve into the critical aspects of integrating security practices into the development and operations lifecycle. With the growing complexity and frequency of cyber threats, organizations must adopt a proactive approach to application security. This talk highlights six key practices that can significantly enhance the security posture of applications within a DevSecOps environment. From implementing automated vulnerability scanning to fostering a culture of security awareness, attendees will gain actionable insights to mitigate risks, fortify defenses, and ensure the resilience of their applications in an ever-evolving threat landscape.

Metrics are the bane of many organizations, getting fascinated on measurements that don’t matter or can drive improper behaviours. In this session, we walk through a simple grouping for metrics where the groupings not only call out the metrics, but their limits, and help guide to better metrics.

This session is a walk through of a popular blog post we did on metrics. In general, we are leading transformations where the standard questions around metrics (velocity, bug, mttr, come up) - and we use these groupings to help organizations to get some answers for questions they want, but also understand their limits. I.e. if code coverage goes up, that might be good directionaly but does not say we are getting code coverage of the important code paths. We wrap up the session giving examples of more impactful measurements and walk through process behavior charts to help separate signal from noise in data.

Azure Logic Apps is a powerful platform for building automated workflows that can run anywhere. It offers a low code experience that enables you to create complex integrations using a graphical designer and a rich set of connectors. But what if you need to extend your workflows with custom logic that is not available out of the box? How can you leverage your existing .NET Framework skills and investments to enhance your Logic Apps solutions?

In this session, you will learn about the new .NET Framework custom code feature for Azure Logic Apps (Standard), which allows you to call compiled .NET Framework code from a built-in action in your workflow. You will see how this feature provides a no-cliffs extensibility capability that gives you the flexibility and control to solve the toughest integration problems.

By the end of this session, you will have a better understanding of how to use low code and pro code together to create powerful and scalable integration solutions using Azure Logic Apps. You will also learn how to take advantage of the latest features and updates in Logic Apps (Standard) to improve your productivity and performance.

Dive into the world of confidential computing as we explore this cutting-edge technology that’s revolutionizing secure data processing in the cloud. Learn how confidential computing isolates sensitive data within hardware-protected enclaves, ensuring privacy even from cloud providers and administrators. Understand the key concepts, such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and their role in safeguarding data during processing. Discover real-world applications and benefits that confidential computing offers across various industries. Join us as we unlock the potential of confidential computing and redefine the future of data privacy and security in the cloud.

Many applications were not designed for the cloud. They were not designed for the scale that cloud workloads encounter. And many of the developers and architects on our teams have no experience with cloud deployments or cloud-scale workloads. In this talk, we'll discuss why event-sourcing and CQRS are the patterns that you should add to your toolbox when building applications that need to be resilient, reliable, and performant. We'll have a sample application demonstrating this in C#/.NET Core.

For years we have been sold the benefits of microservices and in some circles monolith has become a dirty word. Like anything in software development, it depends. At small to medium scales, you can reap the benefits of monolith and microservice architectures while avoiding their drawbacks by building a modular monolith. Refactoring an existing monolith to a modular monolith involves employing principles of both continuous architecture and evolutionary architecture. This talk will provide an overview of those principles and how they were applied to an existing monolith (including code samples) to support splitting some functionality into a separate sidekick application.

Introducing agile to a business or team can be a challenging task, whether you are a manager or a team member advocating for it. It's crucial to understand the benefits that agile can bring to your organization or team, and the concerns and needs of those who are new to agile. This talk aims to provide attendees with valuable insights such as what is at the foundation of agile, the potential points of resistance and fears that team members may have when transitioning to agile, how to adapt to the new agile context and the importance of creating an environment that encourages learning, experimentation, and iteration. By covering these key points, this talk aims to provide a comprehensive overview of introducing and embracing agile practices successfully.

Too much design up front and you are bumping into the design all of the time (and losing time). Not enough design and your system can crumble in reality. How do you blend architecture so you have the right decisions at the right time, and give them enough due dilligence? How do you embrace cloud and microservices and not risk getting into different failure scenarios or overly complicated maintenance and ripple effects?

In this session we will walk through visualizations that help teams blend product thinking with architecture. Along the way, we will look at microservices and domain modeling as well as chaos engineering and fault tolerance - blending all of these into a context that is consumable by all and gives the right emphasis at the right time.

Leave this session with simple visualizations and approaches that you can apply immediately to start blending product with architecture, especially if you are looking to run in a cloud world.

GraphQL is an exciting technology which challenges the dominance of REST for building APIs. It shifts the work of selecting fields and applying filters from the back end to the front end.

In this talk we'll look at Hasura: a server which makes building GraphQL APIs super simple. We'll also look at how we can integrate .NET code with Hasura both using .NET to query Hasura and using .NET to run complex workflows which Hasura isn't designed for.

When building out the frontend for an application with strong real-time requirements, there are many considerations to make. How do we get initial data? How do we get subsequent updates? What happens if they lose connectivity? Web components provide an excellent model for progressively enhancing initial markup. Workers allow us to move, rendering off the main thread. In this talk, we’ll demonstrate an architecture that scales down to any device with a spotty internet connection while scaling up to a fully realized real-time application. This talk hangs on the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle metaphor: Reduce the amount of JS Reuse features from the platform Recycle old technologies in a new way.

Does your boss keep telling you to contribute to the team by presenting on a topic? Have you thought about public speaking but you’re a bit nervous and not sure where to start? Come join Frode in this session where he talks about all the things he’s learned about speaking over the past 15 years.