Building Your First Voice Experience with Alexa

In this workshop, we are going to build and deploy a modern cloud application from scratch! Using Visual Studio and Azure you will learn how to build a modern application from the ground up and deploy it to the cloud using the latest techniques. We will look at best practices in designing and building the application, testing your code, and deploying the application so you are set up for success later. After this workshop, you will have an established pattern to follow for future applications and in case you need to change the infrastructure of your application

Joseph Guadagno

Director, Technology at Rocket Mortgage

Joe Guadagno is a Director of Engineering at Rocket Mortgage, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, which is based in Detroit, Michigan. He has been writing software for over 20 years and has been an active member of the .NET community, serving as a Microsoft MVP in .NET for over 10 years. At Rocket Mortgage, I lead three software development teams building and modernizing our internal services. He has spoken through the United States and at international events on topics ranging from Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Azure, Ionic, Bootstrap, and many others. You can see the complete list at https://www.josephguadagno.net/presentations. When not sitting at a computer Joe loves to hang out with his family and play games. When not playing games with the family, Joe is checking out the latest in Home Automation. You can connect with Joe on Twitter at @jguadagno, Facebook at JosephGuadagnoNet, and on his blog at https://www.josephguadagno.net.

Gotcha Where I Want 'Cha: Building a React Native App with a GraphQL API

The majority of mobile applications need to use a backend API to connect it's users to it's services.

Building these types of applications often involves seperate developers, one for the frontend mobile code and one for the backend server code. The hand-off point for the API needs to handled delicately so as the developers do not block each other.

In this workshop, we will review how we built Gotcha, a mobile React Native application that gets conference attendees to meet each other in the real world through a mobile application.

The mobile application was built in React Native with the data coming from a custom GraphQL API built in the Elixir web framework, Phoenix. We will show you how a frontend mobile developer and a backend Elixir developer worked through API contracts to collaborate efficiently.

Jamie Wright

I am the one who knocks

Jamie Wright is a maker of internet things with a love/hate relationship for Redbull™, standing desks, and paintball guns. He has a love only relationship with teaching, learning, and building bots. Jamie runs Tatsu, a software bot that helps teams save time by performing standup meetings over Slack.

Workshop Duo:

Build an Online Store with Next.js, Snipcart, and Netlify

Ecommerce is an essential component of how our world works, but slow pages or downtime can make online shopping a nightmare, leaving us with an empty cart or frustrated when we can't find what we need.

As developers, it's our responsibility to deliver a great experience, but high premiums and complicated infrastructure can feel like building a store is out of reach.

In this workshop, we'll learn how to use Next.js to build a fast, reliable online store on the Jamstack using Snipcart to add a shopping cart with checkout all deployed to Netlify, giving our customers the experience they deserve.

Building Performant Experiences on the Visual Web with Cloudinary

Experiences on the web have grown increasingly visual, from displaying product images to interactive NFTs, but not paying attention to how media is delivered can impact Core Web Vitals creating a bad UX with slow loading pages, hurting your store’s conversion and potentially losing sales.

How can we effectively leverage media to showcase products creating engaging experiences for our store? We’ll learn about media’s role in ecomm and how we can take advantage of it while optimizing delivery.

Colby Fayock

Sr DX Engineer @ Cloudinary

Learning by doing is the best way to learn and it’s how Colby Fayock helps others learn about Javascript, React, and the static web. His work includes writing on freecodecamp.org, videos on YouTube, and courses on egghead.io as well as his first book 50 Projects for React & the Static Web.

Workshop Duo:

K3s - Half the Size, Twice as Awesome: Lightweight Kubernetes

Getting started with Kubernetes is a daunting task. Everyone you talked to said it was a pain to get started, but it eventually paid off. What if I told you there was a solution to the startup pain? What if it was something to get your feet wet with, cut your teeth on -- but just as conformant and production ready? Enter K3s – a lightweight Kubernetes distribution for us all.

In this workshop, we will not only get our feet wet with Kubernetes, we will get a production-ready instance of Kubernetes up and running.

(Learning materials will be provided via GitHub. A machine will be required with an up-to-date version of Mac, Windows or Linux)

Application Security, Basic, Intermediate, Advanced

Joe will be joining us to teach a dynamic course to help us think like an attacker and give us all the coding tips we need to stop them cold in their tracks. Even the most experienced developers are sure to pick up some new tips and tricks. This hands-on half-day workshop will have something for everyone. Before we start, there will be some setup for labs and tools – so plan some time in advance and bring your Windows, Macintosh, or Linux laptop!

We will cover problems and solutions as they relate to application security and principles of application security, demo a purposefully vulnerable web application, and work with tools. Then we will cover some specifics, at a pace for everyone!

Authentication: Covers all aspects of secure authentication, including building secure login screens, password storage, secure interactions between sites, and an overview of many other topics.

Injection: SQL, command, LDAP injection, just to name a few. Sending your commands to a backend system

Browser attacks: Finding and exploiting cross site scripting vulnerabilities

It will be easier if you bring a basic understanding of HTTP protocols and web applications.

Prior to the session, please install Burp Suite Community Edition from Portswigger.

Chris Houdeshell

VP of Engineering

As VP of Engineering at EnergyCAP Inc, Chris leads the research and technology innovation initiatives at EnergyCAP. Chris fosters emerging technologies to keep EnergyCAP an industry leader. His approach to team leadership and professional development is littered with positive reinforcement and hugs -- believing that technology can serve people and business while at the same time be enjoyable and rewarding.

Joe Kuemerle

Product Security Engineer

Joe Kuemerle is a security engineer, developer and speaker in the greater New York City area specializing in application security, development, database, and application lifecycle topics. Joe is active in the technical community as well as a speaker at local, regional, and national events. Joe blogs at www.kuemerle.com and is on Twitter as @jkuemerle.

Building Intelligent Enterprise-Grade Virtual Agents (Bots) using MS Power Platform & Azure

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has said: "Human Language is the new UI layer, bots are like new application". As more and more bots are getting popular in homes and enterprises, the demand for custom bots is increasing at a rapid pace.

The Microsoft Bot Framework is a comprehensive offering that we can use to build and deploy high-quality bots for our users to enjoy wherever they are talking.

Power Virtual Agents a SaaS offering from Microsoft empowers teams to easily create powerful bots using a guided, no-code graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers.

Microsoft Cognitive Services let you build apps with powerful algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication, with just a few lines of code. Easily add intelligent features – such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, language understanding, knowledge, and search - into your app, across devices and platforms such as iOS, Android, and Windows, keep improving, and are easy to set up.

In this hands-on workshop, we will cover how to build the no-code intelligent help desk bots using Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft Bot Framework, and Cognitive Services. The help desk bot will be able to answer questions related to employee benefits, open healthcare enrollment, etc. Access to SharePoint online site, Microsoft Team, and Azure will be provided to create the Bots. The target audience of this hands-on workshop is Power Users, IT Pros, and Developers. The contents of this workshop are applicable to SharePoint Online as well as SharePoint On-Prem as well.

You will learn:

• What are Power Virtual Agents?
• What is Microsoft Bot Framework?
• What is Microsoft Bot Framework Composer?
• What is Azure Bot Service?
• How to create bots using Microsoft Bot Framework?
• What are Cognitive Services?
• How to leverage Bot Framework and Cognitive Services to implement enterprise-grade bots?

Please note: Attendees will need to bring their own laptop with internet access and modern browsers like Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari. The tablets will not work.

Prashant G Bhoyar

Microsoft AI MVP, MCT, Cloud Solution Architect at AIS

Prashant G Bhoyar is a Microsoft AI MVP, Microsoft Certified Trainer ( MCT ), and Microsoft Certified Professional. He currently works as Cloud Solution Architect at Applied Information Sciences ( www.ais.com ). He is a trusted advisor and Subject Matter Expert in Conversational AI, Applied AI, Intelligent Business Process Automation, development, and post-implementation adoption of complex custom solutions in AI, Machine Learning, Bots, Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and SharePoint. Prashant has supported a multitude of government agencies and non-profit organizations in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Prashant is the co-author of the book “PowerShell for Office 365 “and is the technical reviewer of the book "Pro SharePoint 2013 Administration." He serves on the leadership committee for the Azure Data Fest conference, Artificial Intelligence Fest conference, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning User Group, Northern Virginia SQL User Group, and DC Metro Office 365 User Group. He is a renowned international speaker and actively speaks at technical conferences, most recently in India, Canada, England, Bangladesh, Peru, Washington DC, Austin, New York, Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Fun fact??, Prashant is a recipient of the "Antarctic Service Medal of the United States of America" for his outstanding service in Antarctica.