Minnebar20 Session Schedule

Stop by to play some locally made games!

This year the arcade will have:

🎮 TVs running a selection of locally made video games

🎲 Tables with locally designed board games

🧠 Information about how to get involved with game development in the Twin Cities, including our chapter of the International Game Developers Association (igdatc)

💪 Volunteers on-hand to talk about all of the above

This thing is going all day long!

New to Minnebar? Come find the Newbie Table outside of Sandy's Place (the cafeteria)!

The Newbie Table is your home base to ask questions, meet friendly faces, and get the lay of the land.

Whether you’re flying solo or just want someone to chat with between sessions, stop by and say hi. We’ll have longtime community members on hand to help you navigate the day, make connections, and feel right at home.

This table is open all day.

Do you crave feedback on your project/product/service/hobby/idea?

Stop by and chat with experts in UX, Product, Marketing, and much more. Topics are open and varied. We're here to provide feedback and answer questions. But be warned, we like to ask "why". You may be challenged to think differently. And we might even discuss unexpected solutions. This is your chance to get feedback or ask questions in a small conversational setting.

If you're asking, "What might I get out of attending?" Past UX office hours have touched on topics like:

• How do I get my users to...?
• Help me identify my audience
• What's the best way to get feedback on my product?
• Do I have product-market fit? If so, how do I know?
• Would you give me a UX review on my project?
• How do I hire a good designer?
• I haven't identified competitors. Do I have a valid service?
• How do I work with my engineering team?
• How do I work with my design team?

Where to find us: The UX Office Hours will be staffed throughout the event. Find us in the B1 building near the "living room", in the pods (small rooms with tables/whiteboards), or nearby. Look for volunteers wearing orange mentor badges.

Minnebar is a great place to catch up with old friends, the Networking Lounge is a dedicated place to meet new people. Join us to chat about anything and everything.

What happens when digital communication systems go down or simply aren't available?

While that might sound like a worst-case scenario, it’s also a practical problem. Communication can become unreliable or inaccessible for all kinds of reasons, ranging from infrastructure outages and remote environments to situations where networks are congested, limited, or impeded.

In this session we’ll explore Meshtastic, an open-source, off-grid communication platform that uses low-power LoRa radios to create decentralized mesh networks. These networks allow devices to send text messages and share location data without relying on cellular service, Wi-Fi, or traditional infrastructure.

You’ll learn how Meshtastic works, what makes it unique, and where it fits into real-world use cases from outdoor adventures to emergency preparedness, as well as grassroots communication with privacy in mind.

I’ll also demo a personal project I built which extends Meshtastic’s capabilities by bridging it with a modern messaging platform, opening up new possibilities for resilient and adaptable communication systems that can operate across network boundaries.

Whether you're curious about off-grid tech, mesh networking, or building resilient systems, this talk will give you a practical introduction and a look at what’s already happening in Minneapolis and across the world.

Whether you're founder-curious or you've already taken the plunge, this one's for you.

You finally have the freedom to build something on your own terms. So why does the business you're planning look suspiciously like the job you just left?

In this session, we'll walk through real stories of people who started with the obvious idea and ended up building something far more interesting, far more profitable, and uniquely theirs. Along the way, you'll reflect on your own business idea, stress test it, and leave with a clearer sense of what you should actually be building.

Fair warning: You might walk out of here with a completely different business than the one you walked in with. That's kind of the point.

Back by popular demand! ...FYI "Computer Science" used to be called "Decision Science". Save yourself hassles with better decisions. If you don't know what to do, try a diagram. Bring some scratch paper etc. if you want to work along.

1- Consulting daily grind; What do people (customers) actually WANT from me?! Solve this with a User Story! "As a __, I want to _, So I can __."

I'll walk you through the classic format, share a couple real world examples, and expand that into white boarding like a professional. After 13 years in the tech community, I still do this literally every single consulting call.

2- Gird the loins of your mind; Iron clad communication for boundaries and positions. "When you _, I feel _, what I wanted to feel is __. If you keep doing _, I will __."

Sometimes confusion is intentional. Cut through that bull$hit like butter. Know your own mind, and communicate it so clearly you can determine if the other person is acting in good faith. Plus, how to clear your mind in 5 minute with quick-and-dirty journaling. This one will fix like half of your interpersonal stuff, more if this stuff is brand new to you.

3- Hard bull$hit like; Should I leave or should I stay? This is not actually a binary decision, this goes in a 4-square box... Because inaction is still a choice. It will help you trick yourself into bravery.

I'll show you how to map out the hard stuff, so you at least SEE what you are facing. Sometimes the possible outcomes can have VERY different weights and your choice gets simple. Sometimes it just gives you enough mental distance that you can work up the guts to do the needful thing. At very least, you name the monster.

In 1985, Commodore shipped a home computer, the Amiga, with a hardware operation queue, a scanline-synchronized display coprocessor, and a four-channel audio engine, all running in parallel without touching the CPU. We've spent forty years reinventing it.

The Amiga is remembered for the extraordinary games, graphics, and music people created with it. We'll dive into the hardware and learn what made this custom chipset remarkable, tracing how the architecture that made a 1985 home computer feel like magic also incorporates many of the same ideas as the GPU pipelines, async patterns, and parallel processing models we as technologists work with today.

Still not hyped enough? Watch this.

Let's talk about cybersecurity warnings! 😳 Security warnings - and many other computer warnings - are terrible, and there are so many examples...but why is that and does it really have to be that way? I'm lucky to have worked on a project to explain what makes a good cybersecurity warning for product designers, security professionals, and lawyers, and I can tell you that it doesn't!

Come join us in mocking a gallery of bad security and not-security warnings, in screenshots and emoji. Along the way, we'll talk about the history of security and traditional product warnings, what we know about making good warnings, celebrate a (small) gallery of good warnings, and talk about how we can all get better!

Most people don’t have an organization problem. They have a “saved it… never used it” problem.

Screenshots. Saved posts. Notes. Ideas. You save everything… and use none of it.

In this session, you’ll learn a simple system using Notion AI to turn what you capture into something useful—fast.

Think:

turn notes into clear next steps

turn screenshots into content ideas

turn old thoughts into actual drafts

finally follow up instead of forgetting

We’ll also use custom AI agents + personalities trained on your saved content—so your ideas don’t just sit there, they actually get applied to your workflow.

No complicated “second brain.” Just a clean system: Capture → Organize → Apply

If your camera roll and notes app are a graveyard of good ideas… this is for you.

Don’t Let AI Eat You Alive: What Workers Need to Know Now Short Description / Abstract AI isn’t coming for your job, it’s already reshaping how work gets valued, measured, and rewarded. Most workers are unprepared, and most organizations aren’t helping. The real issue isn’t AI. It’s that organizations have never been good at measuring what people actually contribute. They track what’s easy to count hours, outputs, titles and AI is now optimizing around those flawed metrics. Workers who can’t clearly articulate and evidence their contribution are the most exposed. This session introduces the Contributive Value (CV) framework, a new way to understand why performance systems fail most workers, and OUTSMART, a practical eight element model individuals can use right now to navigate AI disruption, assess their value, and communicate it effectively. This isn’t a doom session. It’s a clear diagnosis—with a survival guide attached. Session Format • Problem framing (10 minutes) • CV + OUTSMART frameworks (15 minutes) • Open discussion and Q&A (15 minutes) Interactive and discussion driven.

Most AI productivity talks focus on one person doing one thing faster. What happens when you're responsible for a whole team and you start weaving agents into how everyone works?

That's where I've been for the last six months. Turning meeting notes into Jira stories. Automating compliance checks. Building tools that work for engineers, QA, product, scrum masters, analytics, and non-technical team members alike. The pattern is always the same, find the thing you do over and over, teach an agent how you do it, and get that time back.

I'll share how I built the tooling, standardized it across roles, and what happened when people started managing workflows instead of just executing them.

This isn't about replacing anyone. It's about giving every person on your team leverage they didn't have before. I'll be honest, the job looks different now. People on my team don't just execute tasks anymore. They orchestrate, review, and decide what ships. If you're a leader trying to scale your team's impact, or someone in a hands-on role wondering why your day suddenly feels different, this is what's working for us right now.

Your superpower is the unique expertise or characteristic that defines you. It’s what your colleagues, family, and friends recognize you for. Discovering your superpower helps you understand your strengths and build trusted relationships. When you know what you bring to the team, you can leverage your superpower when issues arise that require your unique talent.

By understanding and utilizing your and your team’s unique superpowers, you can unlock everyone's full potential. This leads to greater success in your endeavors. When people feel respected and valued for their skills, they bring their authentic selves and are motivated to do their best.

In this session you will learn: - How to discover your superpower - What to do if your manager doesn't value or tries to suppress your unique gift - How to unleash your superpower to inspire the people around you - How to start seeing superpowers around you, to build the best teams

You have a phone. You have photos. Have you ever tried editing your photos on your phone... and just got frustrated?

This session is for you if:

• You have experienced this frustration and gave up
• You didn't even know there were editing tools available
• You are experienced photographer but found the little sliders on the phone fiddly and gave up after approximately 68 seconds of fiddling

(That last one was me! I had a fair amount of experience editing digital photos when I got my first phone with a "real" camera, and the default editing experience drove me up the wall.)

In this session, I'll be covering:

• A meta-method for learning how to use photo editing software
• Filters! What they are, how they work, why only three of them are any good
• Every single photo adjustment slider on an iPhone and what they are used for (If you have an Android phone, your sliders are mostly exactly the same but, depending on the Android version and phone, you may be missing sliders or have extra ones)
• HDR (High Dynamic Range) and how it fools you into thinking your photos are better than they are
• A general workflow for editing photos
• Any questions you might have

At the end of this session, you'll know more about photo editing, especially on phones. And hopefully you'll have a few new guidelines and tricks up your sleeve when you take a photo of something and it just looks a bit blah.

I'm excited to present a live workshop for founders who want to turn LinkedIn into a real source of leads and sales—without posting or sending spammy messages.

⸻

What You’ll Learn:

• ✅ The exact LinkedIn philosophy I’ve used to generate millions in revenue
• ✅ How to build a network of real buyers—not just connections
• ✅ Proven campaign strategies to turn LinkedIn into a consistent source of leads and sales

⸻

What This Is (and Isn’t):

This is a no-fluff, strategy-first session.

We will NOT cover:

❌ Optimizing your profile
❌ Posting schedules
❌ Chasing likes, comments, or “engagement hacks”

We WILL focus on:

✅ How to grow an audience of ideal prospects
✅ How to create opt-in interest instead of chasing people
✅ How to turn LinkedIn into a repeatable system for conversations and revenue

⸻

Who This Is For:

• Founders who know LinkedIn matters—but aren’t seeing results
• Builders who don’t want to become “content creators”
• Anyone who wants a clear, practical system they can actually use

⸻

What to Expect:

Come ready to:

• Rethink how LinkedIn actually works
• See real strategies you can implement immediately
• Ask questions and apply this to your business in real time

⸻

Why I’m Doing This

I’ve spent years running LinkedIn campaigns that drive real business results.

This session is about sharing what actually works—so you can:

• Stay authentic
• Build trust with the right people
• Turn LinkedIn into a growth engine for your business

For a bootstrapped hardware startup, traditional injection molding can be painfully slow and expensive. In this session, I’ll walk through a faster path: first 3D printing the mold to validate the part, then machining an aluminum mold on a Genmitsu Pro Ultra desktop CNC, and finally using a roughly $700 desktop injection molding machine to start producing plastic parts the same day.

I’ll talk through the real tradeoffs, what this workflow can and can’t do, and why it can be a huge advantage for founders trying to move fast without spending thousands on tooling, waiting weeks for overseas suppliers, or getting hit with extra costs like tariffs and shipping delays. If you’re building physical products and need a scrappy, practical way to prototype and iterate faster, this talk is for you.

Everyone is talking about models, prompts, and agents.

That’s not where the real shift is happening.

AI is rapidly becoming infrastructure; embedded into how software is built, how decisions are made, and how companies operate. But most teams are still treating it like a tool, and that’s why so many AI initiatives stall out.

In this session, we’ll cut through the hype and focus on what actually matters:

• Why AI projects get stuck between demo and production
• Why model choice matters less than you think—and context matters more
• What “context engineering” really is (and why it’s becoming a core discipline)
• How companies are quietly becoming AI platform builders, often without realizing it

This is a mental model reset.

If you’re a builder, leader, or just trying to make sense of where AI is headed, this session will give you a clearer picture of what’s actually changing and what to do about it.

Come ready to challenge assumptions, ask questions, and share what you’re seeing.

Learn how to package your expertise into digital solutions that generate recurring revenue streams, attract better clients, and give you the breathing room you deserve.

• 📦 Package your expertise into digital solutions clients can access immediately
• 💰 Build multiple revenue streams from the work you've already perfected
• 🎯 Attract the right clients—the ones ready to invest and succeed

There are three ways to get into a company: The front door, the side door, and the window.

Everyone initially tries the front door because it only requires a resume and a LinkedIn. However, the front door’s low barrier to entry makes it competitive and strips you of your leverage.

Getting in through the side door or window, on the other hand, requires an unconventional set of beliefs and techniques that make most developers uncomfortable. 90% of them refuse to approach these entry points, making them less competitive for the few who can tolerate the discomfort.

This talk is about narrative: how it works in the hiring process, how to craft yours, and the types of stories to avoid at all costs.

During the first half, I’ll explain the difference between the side door and window and why choosing an archetype is a non-negotiable prerequisite for both.

During the second half, I’ll offer 10 archetypes you can choose from, along with a popular engineer who embodies it. Some examples:

• The Principled Prince (Bret Victor)
• The Guinea Pig (Fireship)
• The Craftsman (DHH)
• The Sailor (Linus Torvalds)

Finally, we'll apply the theory with a quiet, individual writing exercise.

By the end, you’ll have the outline of a remarkable story that will make you stand out and get the job offer you deserve on your terms.

If you already get tons of interviews from the LinkedIn Easy Apply button, then this talk isn’t for you. If you’re committed to grinding Leetcode and blindly applying to hundreds of jobs until you get lucky, this talk isn’t for you.

This is for those who are sick of brute-forcing their careers. They’re good at their craft, but aren’t getting enough opportunities. It’s for those who pass the first few rounds, but don’t get offers. More than anything, it’s for those who recognize that humans make decisions based on emotions and good stories.

On the fence? Think of this talk as the offspring of these two videos:

• is it impossible to get a junior developer job in 2026? (me)
• Inventing on Principle (Bret Victor)

Sol LeWitt wrote that "the serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.” This premise could be a set of axioms, a geometric constraint – or a roguelike level generator! From this viewpoint, the enumeration of all outputs from a procedural content system is itself a type of artwork.

Rogue, a text-based dungeon crawler from the 1980s, is one of the first games that used procedurally generated content. It generates a random layout for each level that the player explores. Rogue's simple algorithms for doing so have been a source of inspiration for game developers for decades. But because Rogue uses a 32-bit psuedorandom number generator, there are "only" four billion possible levels, and we can enumerate them all. (I'd hoped that there was some crunchy technical content about how to do so efficiently -- but it's actually pretty easy!)

I’ll explore this connection between 20th century conceptual art and 21st century expressive range analysis. I'll show some examples of serial art, more recent examples of complete enumerations, and some results from looking at the Rogue level generator.

Everyone's implementing AI. Most of it isn't working. Not because the tools are bad, but because the people using them are still thinking the same way they always have. Finite thinking in an infinite game.

In this session, we'll cut through the hype and get honest about the real reason AI initiatives stall: organizational mindset. You'll learn how to spot the invisible assumptions and paradigms that quietly kill AI projects before they ever get off the ground and what to do about it.

You'll walk away with:

• A simple framework for diagnosing whether your team is ready for AI adoption (hint: most aren't as ready as they think)

• The specific language patterns that signal deep resistance to change

• A practical first step you can take Monday morning (no tools required)

This session is for founders, leaders, consultants, and anyone who has watched a promising AI initiative die a slow, frustrating death. You don't need to be technical. You just need to care about making change actually stick.

Yep, you betcha! Seven years ago, The National Center for Autonomous Technologies (NCAT) was founded in Thief River Falls, Minnesota through the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education (NSF ATE) program.

The NSF ATE program has been funding innovation at two-year colleges for over 25 years focusing on the education of technicians for the high-technology fields that drive our nation’s economy.

As the first national ATE center in autonomous technologies, NCAT's is nurturing the technical workforce of tomorrow in the following domains:

• Air (Uncrewed Aircraft Systems)
• Land (Self-Driving Vehicles)
• Sea (Uncrewed Maritime Systems)

Come learn more about how NCAT is accelerating autonomous innovation – aligning talent and funding with emerging tech – all from way up north here in Minnesota.

Most tech talks assume your product lives in the cloud. Mine ships in a box.

I lead engineering at a small professional audio/video company where software, firmware, and hardware all have to work together on day one. Our products range from Bluetooth Auracast audio devices to AI-powered real-time translation, and all of them have to ship on time with a small team and a real budget. A hardware mistake means a costly respin, not a quick patch. That changes how you think about every decision.

In this session I'll share things that building physical products taught me that I think apply to anyone making engineering decisions:

• Coordinating teams that move at completely different speeds. Hardware timelines don't bend to your sprint cadence. How we blend structured milestones with agile sprints so firmware, software, and hardware teams stay aligned without slowing each other down.
• Rolling out AI tools when you don't have an AI team. Our actual strategy for adopting AI tools across the entire company, what stuck, what flopped, and how it's changed what we can take on.
• Your team isn't generic, so why is your tooling? Enterprise software is either too expensive or too bloated for a small team, and the spreadsheet you've been nursing along is one pivot table away from collapse. I used Claude Code to build a custom resource planning tool in a week. No dev team, no six-figure license. I'll make the case that building your own tools is now a real option for any small company.
• Saying no to good ideas. How constraints on time, people, and budget force better prioritization than any framework.

Whether you're an engineer thinking about leadership, a founder wearing every hat, or a developer curious how the "other side" builds products, there's something here for you.

I'm a VP of Finance at a SaaS company. I'm not an engineer. But over the past 4 months, AI didn't just help me automate executive reporting, month end close, collections, variance analysis, competitive intelligence, and a CEO finance dashboard that puts live key metrics in the palm of my CEO's hand. It taught me how. Some of what I built uses tools that already existed, but AI empowered me by teaching me things that would have taken months or years to learn on my own. Things that used to take days now take hours. Things that used to take hours now take minutes. This isn't a talk about AI replacing people. It's about what happens when a non-technical person uses AI as a teacher, a building partner, and an agent that runs work in the background. My examples are in finance, but the patterns apply everywhere. If you spend hours every week on repetitive work, pulling data, formatting reports, chasing people for updates, answering the same questions over and over, responding to routine emails, or stitching together information from different systems, you're doing the same kind of work I automated. I'll show what I built, how AI walked me through it, and hopefully get you thinking about what your version of this looks like.

Most enterprise software sits there waiting - waiting for someone to remember it exists, log in, and do something. A manager has to open a recognition platform to thank an employee. An employee has to find a redemption portal to spend the points they've earned. The software works, but only if humans come to it.

AI agents invert this entirely. Instead of a recognition platform waiting for a manager, an agent detects that Sarah just helped Kevin ship his project and messages the manager in Slack at the right moment: "Want to recognize her?" From there, the manager adds their own words - the agent created the opportunity, not the message. The destination disappears, the human moment doesn't.

At Augeo, we're building these systems now for our clients - but the pattern isn't industry-specific. It applies anywhere your product depends on someone remembering to show up. In this session, Justin will walk through what we've learned: the design patterns that actually work, where agents should replace destinations, and how to spot those opportunities in your own products.

DefineTheBox to focus on solving customers' needs with products and services and derisking quality escapes from user requirements.

Join for a Case Study and lesson on defining Requirements, generate documents related to Quality Management, Preventative Actions Plans, Functional Requirements from Scope to Quote customers.

Innovators like you spend time creating documents to carry out guidelines and plans to meet customer needs. As customer needs become more complicated over time, scope creep becomes a liability.

Join us for a live Case Study how to DefineTheBox with Devices, Process and Users,

This year put the Twin Cities at the forefront of international attention — and not because of the large number of AI talks we managed to squeeze into our local unconference. We are the site of a disaster; we are (we're told) a city of heroes. We just lived through something whose memory will outlive all of us. We should reflect on it.

Coming from personal experience on the ground in South Minneapolis, in the thick of it, this talk will share lessons about technology: how it helps us, how it fails to help us, how it hurts us. These are lessons about fighting authoritarianism. They are also general lessons about product design, about security, about our human aspirations, about risk, about triage, about ethical computing — lessons we already knew, or should have known, but that are now thrown into sharp relief by the clear light only crisis can bring.

After the talk portion, time allowing, there will be a period of scaffolded small group discussion and idea sharing for those who wish to participate.

This session is a tech-focused counterpart to The Part You Didn’t See.

Following up from last year’s deep dive into traffic signal technology, this talk shifts focus to the human side of our streets.

Why do people “break the rules”? Why do some streets feel stressful, even when they’re technically safe? Why do drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians seem to be in constant conflict?

The answer often isn’t (just) bad behavior—it’s design.

In this session, we’ll apply UX thinking to urban planning: interfaces, signals, mental models, and cognitive load in the real world. We’ll look at bikeways, intersections, transit, and accessibility—and how each user is making decisions based on incomplete, conflicting signals.

Cities are designed systems—and they’re constantly changing. This talk will give you a UX lens to better understand the streets you use every day, spot what works (and what doesn’t), and feel more confident engaging in the changes shaping your neighborhood.

It's undeniable how truly amazing modern AI is, and in 2026, we’ve only scratched the surface of AI’s true potential.

Clearly AI has some incredible, life-changing, and far-reaching use cases, given virtually every other presentation here at Minnebar20 is about AI.

At the same time, it’s being overprescribed as the end all be all solution to everything, from replacing 80% of the workers at your company with AI, to your own personal AI Jesus for only $1.99 (per minute)!

But AI sucks at a lot of things, and we need to talk about it.

This talk has a few simple goals, which are to demonstrate:
  - real life examples of what AI sucks at, from silly to scary
  - ways to discuss tradeoffs of AI without being entirely “doom and gloom”
  - actionable things you can do to contribute to a less sucky AI experience

What do people actually mean when they talk about quantum computing? What could it possibly mean for a bit to be both zero and one simultaneously? Or to just try all the answers at once and pick the best one? What is being entangled? Are we really on the verge of quantum-mediated alternate-history time-travel?

No. But a lot of the other strange things you might have heard about are real! And you (yes, YOU) can already work with prototype machines today. If you've ever wondered what it was like to work in our industry in the 1950s, when computing was brand new and nobody knew where it would end up, quantum computing can give you some of that - not with time travel, but just by being raw.

The basic ideas: qubits, superposition, and entanglement, can be managed with high school algebra. So we will do a little bit of that.

We will also briefly refresh (or initialize) your memory of basic bits and gates from classical computing, to orient us and make the similarities and differences clear. And we will point to some online resources where you can build logic gates, play with quantum circuits, and explore more on your own.

How can knowing your life’s purpose unlock acceleration in your career, your business, and your thought leadership? And what are the practices of purpose-driven leaders who show up from a place of authenticity and the aliveness within them?

Join Alan Fernald, career coach and speaker from The Purpose-Driven Leader, for a talk on the three practices that support you in showing up at your most powerfully and magnetically in your career and life. These practices are centering your agency, infinite games versus finite games, and cultivating wholeheartedness.

Most "chat with your docs" tools disappoint. They hallucinate, miss connections, and burn tokens. The problem isn't the AI — it's how we structure our notes.

In this interactive session, we'll build a shared knowledge graph together using:

• Markdown files as the base format
• Entity types (character, location, event) to classify notes
• Explicit links between notes to encode relationships

We'll start with a blank folder, add structured notes together, then watch an AI navigate the graph we built — following relationships, not just matching keywords.

Bring your laptop if you want to contribute. No ML background required.

Are you building with speech, or thinking about it? Let’s compare notes.

Speech interfaces (e.g. speech-to-text, text-to-speech) have become one of the most practical (and widespread) ways AI shows up in real products.

2025 was the year of AI meeting note takers. Transcription apps are everywhere (and seemingly popped up out of nowhere).

2026 is about dictation. WisprFlow and Willow are changing how we interact with computers. Prompting Claude from a keyboard is sooo 2025.

Yet, it feels like we’ve only scratched the surface of what these technologies can do.

Building in the space? Let’s talk shop and make wild guesses on where this is headed.

I am a longtime journalist that founded the web site AllYourScreens.com and its sister newsletter Too Much TV.

TooMuchTV is a five day a week newsletter with a current free subscriber base of around 175,000 and a paid subscriber base of just under 9,000 paid subscribers. In the past several years, the newsletter has won several national journalism awards and broken a number of big stories. It's been mentioned in a number of other publications, including in the Associated Press, The Independent, The Verge, CNET, The Minnesota Star Tribune, Slate, Marketwatch, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian and many more.

I'll talk about the journey that led to me running a financially successful newsletter and the lessons I learned along the way. It's not easy to accomplish, but it is possible and if nothing else, perhaps I can inspire a few people to give their idea a serious shot at success.

Agentic commerce is the next shift in how we build online shopping experiences. Instead of users navigating flows, systems can now coordinate tasks like product discovery, cart building, and checkout across different platforms—initiated and fulfilled by agents on behalf of the user.

This talk breaks down what’s actually real today versus what’s still forming. We’ll walk through the landscape—commerce specs like ACP and UCP that are shaping how discovery and checkout work in these systems, alongside foundational pieces like MCP for tool access and A2A for agent coordination. We’ll ground it in what’s already working today: existing backend systems and APIs being orchestrated by agents to enable end-to-end shopping flows, and the emerging patterns.

You’ll get a clear picture of where things stand today and how all of this actually fits together—hopefully walking away with something useful you can apply, whether you’re building as a developer or thinking about it from a business strategy lens.

"Remember last year when we were 'Ghibli-fying' photos and marveling at the first wave of AI agents? That was the rehearsal. This year, the curtain has officially stayed up, and the 'Magic' has turned into Muscle."

The Power of Autonomy & Context

We’ll kick off with the game-changers in Agentic AI: systems that don't just "chat" but independently solve problems. We’ll specifically dive into Google AI Studio and Gemini 2.5 Flash, showing how its massive context window can digest hours of video or thousands of documents in seconds to act as your ultimate research partner.

The 60+ Tool Transformation

I’ll break down a curated list of over 60 industry-leading tools to replace your most tedious tasks:
Productivity & Research: Mastering Perplexity, Grok 3, and Gamma for instant intelligence.
Content Powerhouses: Using Kling, HeyGen, and VEO 3 for video, and Midjourney for elite design.
The Business Engine: Automating entire workflows with Make, Zapier, and Bardeen.
Specialized Agents: Deploying Seona AI for SEO and Otter/Fireflies to automate your meetings.

Building Your Own "Staff"

Learn how to use Agentic AI to create autonomous digital assistants that execute tasks. From Social Media Management with Tapilo and TweetHunter to Vibe Coding with Lovable and Cursor, you’ll see how to build a virtual department on a shoestring budget.

The Bottom Line This isn't just a list of "cool apps." It’s a roadmap for Productivity 4.0. Whether you are a startup founder using Tome or an executive streamlining with Copilot, you’ll leave with a toolkit to transform your workday from "busy" to "impactful.

We'll explore the shift from the Knowledge Era to the Wisdom Era, where judgment and discernment become the scarce resource. And we'll work with two practical tools: Braindumping and Ignorance Mapping. Leave with a new relationship to uncertainty and a sharper sense of what makes you un-BOT-able.

If everyone walks into the room with the same AI tools and the same access to knowledge, how do you differentiate? I think the answer is counterintuitive.

While everyone is racing to master AI, the real leverage is going all in on your thinking. Not instead of AI — but harnessing AI. Better thinking, better judgment, better questions: that's what separates signal from noise.

Your edge isn't what you know. It's hidden in your openness to explore the unknown.

Business partnerships can be a force multiplier or a slow-moving failure mode. This session is a facilitated conversation for co-founders and partners (and those exploring a partnership) seeking practical tools to build a better working relationship. If you are in a partnership that feels great, messy, or somewhere in between, come compare notes with other partners and co-founders in the room.

Together, we will surface the real issues that make or break partnerships, including expectations, decision-making, conflict patterns and communication breakdowns. Bring your scenarios, questions, and lessons learned. The goal is to leave with clearer language, healthier defaults, and a few practical tools you can apply immediately.

Who this is for:

• Co-founders and business partners, past, present, and future.
• Entrepreneurs considering a partnership, currently in one, or recovering from a hard one.
• Anyone building a company with a friend, family member, or long-time collaborator.

What you will take away:

• Tools for clarifying roles, expectations, and decision-making before conflict escalates
• Common partnership pitfalls, and early warning signs to watch for
• Practical ways to have hard conversations without triggering defensiveness or shutdown
• Prompts for separating “business relationship” issues from “personal relationship” issues
• Ideas for repair when trust has been dented, and how to prevent repeat patterns

Format:

Facilitated discussion with prompts, short frameworks, and group sharing. We will also pull insights from participants’ real scenarios (time-boxed).

Note: This is not legal advice. We will focus on partnership process, communication, and practical decision-making tools, not legal partnership agreements.

About the hosts:

Richard Chandler, “The Business Partners Counselor,” is a long-time business partnership counselor and executive coach. Grant Chandler is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and consultant focused on building clear, repeatable ways of working. They are also a father-son business partnership, and have helped many partners align and stay effective under real-world constraints.

It starts with a WestCoast Swing Dance demo to a Bad Bunny song. Then it gets real. Cadre's Chief AI Officer (CAIO) Mike Arulfo breaks down the AI Enterprise strategy powering a mental health platform built for humans, not algorithms. Michael will also cover the latest trends in Artificial Intelligence happening in the Enterprise and Startup environments based on his current experience working in an AI tech startup and from Human X 2026 in San Francisco and the Chief Architect Network (CAN)Summit in London! Dr. Charryse Johnson unveils The Cadre Way AI Framework— a clinical governance framework defining how AI operates in moments of vulnerability. Two perspectives. One mission. Zero boring slides.

The conversation around best practices can be ... complicated. There is always more that your technical team could be doing to follow best practices. Resources are always limited, and there are always legitimate competing business priorities for the team to consider. Prioritizing the best practices that matter to your team can be like comparing apples to oranges.

The best teams have discussions including both business and technical members around which best practices to adopt and why, but those conversations are as difficult as they are vital. Let's talk about how we might make those conversations work better! In this session, I'll present a new approach for tackling these conversations.

Everyone’s talking about AI—but if you’re in a “normal” job (especially in a regulated field), it’s not obvious where to start or what’s actually safe and useful to hand over to the machines. In this session, I’ll share how I’ve gradually woven AI into both my day job at a financial firm and my everyday life, without becoming an AI engineer or breaking compliance. You’ll see how I use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Cowork, and HeyGen to act like a one‑person marketing and content team (ad icons, copy‑fitting, SEO‑friendly video scripts, avatar videos), as well as a first‑line “smart friend” for real‑world troubleshooting—like fixing a thermostat that wouldn’t talk to my furnace and AC, or debugging a broken HTML email signature from screenshots and source code. I’ll be honest about what worked, what broke (like over‑engineered JSON and free‑tier GitHub limits), and how I decide where AI doesn’t belong. We’ll cover: • Where to start: low‑risk, high‑leverage AI use cases you can try this week at work and at home. • How to introduce AI inside a regulated or sensitive environment without freaking out compliance or leadership. • A simple decision framework for when to rely on AI, when to keep it as a draft‑only helper, and when not to use it at all. This will be a collaborative session—come ready to share your own experiments, questions, and “is this OK to do?” scenarios. Whether you’re AI‑curious but stuck on “where do I start?” or already dabbling with tools, you’ll leave with concrete workflows, prompts, and sanity checks you can apply immediately.

I've completed my consumer web app for my startup, yolomeal.com. I am just finishing the mobile app (submitted to app stores).

For new solo founders: I'll share my process, and why certain decision were made. It's a lonely road, so let's walk for a few minutes together.

For UX/UI folks: Critique what I've built, and share your thoughts. I'm always open to your ideas.

For Sales and Marketing: I'll share my new never-done-before marketing strategy, which should be active during Minnebar. Let's check the analytics!

This is a chance for all attendees, to help inform me, and each other. I appreciate all of you.

Most technology organizations optimize their development pipelines, yet few remove the friction from how work moves through their people. Bad systems don't scale and if your human architecture isn't intentionally designed, even the best software architecture will suffer from stalled decisions.

This session unpacks the Working Genius framework as a relational schema for your team. We will identify the invisible bottlenecks between the first spark and final implementation, aligning your team’s natural energy with your release cadence to eliminate deployment friction.

Join us to learn how to debug your team dynamics and take home a framework to:

𝗠𝗮𝗽 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗩𝘂𝗹𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀: Know where your personal and organizational blind spots are before you initiate a project, so you avoid the misfires that slow down execution.

𝗗𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀: Create clear ownership and intent to synchronize execution and eliminate the waste of rework and delay.

𝗢𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝗽𝘂𝘁: Aligning roles to how people naturally think and contribute reduces burnout while increasing output and accountability.

You'll leave with a concrete mental model to stop relying on unstructured, high-friction collaboration, and start treating your team's dynamics with the same architectural rigor as your codebase.

I am sharing this framework because it is the tool I used five years ago to re-engineer my own career. Making the transition from a W-2 employee to founding a business is never easy, but Working Genius made it possible.

Are you marketing, or are you just making noise?

In a world where attention is the most valuable currency, many leaders find themselves "stuck"—not because they aren't working hard, but because they are operating in silos without a clear roadmap. Being stuck doesn't mean you're broken; it means you're ready for a shift in strategy and mindset. The Community Connection is a high-impact workshop designed to help you stop reacting and start leading by building a bridge between your vision and your community.

What We’ll Cover This session takes a 20,000-foot view of your organization to help you see the value of strategic connections.

• The "Triple Threat" Strategy: Master the intersection of Marketing (the what/how), Outreach (the who), and Public Relations (the why) to build authentic community awareness.
• The Proactive Roadmap: Move from a reactive "firefighting" mode to a proactive strategic plan that ensures consistency across every program and maximizes limited budgets.
• The Modern Media Toolkit: Learn how to navigate the "PESO" model—Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media—to meet your audience exactly where they are.
• Inclusive Communication: Learn to look "beyond the lens" to ensure your messaging is accessible, culturally aware, and reaching the non-English speaking members of your community.

The Elev@te Framework: A practical, 3-step framework to get you "Unstuck & Thriving" by clarifying your path, simplifying your priorities, and protecting your most valuable asset—your energy.

Workshop Goals: 1. Transform your philosophy: Shift from seeing marketing as "selling" to seeing it as a vital community conversation. 2. Streamline your strategy: Learn how to pick just 3 priorities for the next 90 days to create real momentum. 3. Build a Bridge: Develop the skills to become the "Ultimate Connector" in your local ecosystem

Who Is This For? - Entrepreneurs & Business Owners looking to deepen their local impact. - Decision Makers in for-profit and nonprofit sectors who need a cohesive communication strategy. - Aspiring Entrepreneurs who want to build a business that "doesn't break them." - Tech-Interested Leaders ready to leverage modern digital tools and SEO for community growth

About Your Facilitator: Juan Llerena Juan Llerena is a community builder, entrepreneur, the founder of JLLB Media Creative Strategy & Business Growth, and founder and Executive Director of Vamos Impact, a MN based 501(c)3 nonprofit serving Latinos in Entrepreneurship.

With over 20 years of experience connecting businesses to communities, Juan has served as a leader in both the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.

He is the author of the book Elev@te: Lessons to Master the Balance of Entrepreneurship, Personal Growth, and Self-Care, and he brings a "constant learning" mindset to every strategy session. Known as the "ultimate community connector," Juan specializes in helping leaders shift their mindset to build sustainable, thriving organizations.

"You are not behind. You're just getting started. There’s a better way to build a community that doesn't break you." — Juan Llerena

LinkedIn - JLLB Media - Vamos Impact Nonprofit

If you are a Veteran, a Family Member of a Veteran, or Ally of Veterans, you are welcome to connect with Project Vanguard Fellow William Hossain (an Asset Manager of utility scale energy sites).

Come see how you can join a growing local and national community of Veterans and supporters that are focused on protecting and growing the energy infrastructure of the US, as well as connecting Veterans to career opportunities in energy industry.

This will be a free-flowing session that could lead to expanding your network, discovering new opportunities, and learning about future events hosted by Project Vanguard - pending Happy Hour(s) to be sponsored!+

link link

Do you work at a startup and receive stock as part of your compensation? Or are you at a big tech company and receive RSUs each year? These stock compensation programs can be complicated and have tax consequences that aren't always clear.

I’ve met so many people who have exercised their options or sold some RSUs and then received a huge tax bill they weren’t expecting. Some good planning up front could have reduced that tax bill and prepared you to pay it before you got that April surprise.

In this session, we’ll cover the most common equity types, how they work, and how they’re taxed. From there, we’ll have time for you to ask any questions about equity compensation and personal finance.

Building in medtech or med-device? Connect with others working across healthcare innovation — from founders to operators to investors — and swap insights, challenges, and ideas.

Minnebar is a great place to catch up with old friends, the Networking Lounge is a dedicated place to meet new people. Join us to chat about anything and everything.

It seems like every time you login to a website nowadays, it asks you to create a passkey. If you’re like me, you initially assumed this was some sort of scam. But now that it’s everywhere, you’re beginning to wonder what it’s all about and why every website is pushing it constantly.

This talk will cover the basics of what a passkey is, how they came to be, and what you should do about them now that they’re here.

I spent years at Best Buy headquarters learning how to make complex (often technical) strategy land with executives who had 90 seconds of attention and zero patience for jargon. That framework now drives every narrative I build for CIOs and startup founders — and it was never about slides. Even though they were good.

Most leaders try to communicate strategy by adding more detail, more data, more evidence. That's backwards. The leaders who get funded, who get buy-in, who move organizations - they do something fundamentally different. They build narratives with stakes that motivate an audience to act.

This session breaks down the communication gap that kills good ideas. Why it happens, why smart people solve it the wrong way, and three specific moves you can apply immediately to make your ideas land with any audience. I'll use real examples from building executive narratives for CIOs at companies like Estée Lauder and Bacardi, and for founders raising capital. This is a talk, not a pitch. Come ready to argue with me about what actually works.

In the next decade, it is predicted that the rising energy demands of AI and electrification will require millions of new tech workers and thousands of new, billion dollar companies. Thats because the transition to sustainable, carbon free energy requires 70TW of clean energy by 2050. To accomplish this, the US power grid will have to be almost completely reimagined and rebuilt. New energy sources must be found, developed, and dispatched, and doing so requires hardware, software, and business models that do not exist today.

This is called the 30X problem.

Back for a fourth year at Minnebar, this rapid-fire summary will highlight the leading startups and discoveries in the world of solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen and geo power. It will suggest what the future of energy might look like for technologists here in Minnesota: founders, engineers, designers, investors, policymakers, and anyone interested in clean energy.

I built a platform for developing websites. You're going to help me test it — by being the most difficult clients imaginable.

Here's how it works: someone pitches a website idea, I build it live using Geppetto (the tool I've been building), and then you tell me everything that's wrong with it. More Comic Sans. Make the logo bigger. Actually, start over. I want it to feel more... blue.

I'll do my best to keep up. It might go off the rails. That's the point.

Along the way, I'll share some thoughts on how we can use AI to enhance our workflow while maintaining control.

Come if you enjoy watching someone build things under pressure, have strong opinions about fonts, or have ever wanted to say "I'll know it when I see it" and mean it.

Beyond the skills to program and create your own video game, there is a process to create a unique story to base it on. In this session I will be teaching how to write the plot of your own video game. It will give you a step-by-step tutorial to begin your journey into writing an in-depth storyline that your players will love.

Training an agent is surprisingly similar to training a real person.

Both come with their own abilities, but you need to teach them to do things in ways specialized to your business. AI systems call these "Skills," but they're essentially documentation of how to perform specialized tasks.

In this presentation, I will show how I trained an AI to perform a time-consuming administrative role that would be impractical for a human to do.

The agent works for a home maintenance company and researches and enters customized maintenance plans for homes. I will discuss the nuances of training, including task guidance, guardrails, and continuous learning.

The first step is a human, who goes into the home and takes pictures of each appliance's nameplate, and then uploads those images to a folder.

From there, the AI agent handles the rest:

• Identifies the manufacturer, brand, manufacture date, and appliance type.

• Queries the federal recall database to ensure there aren't active recalls for the appliance.

• Downloads the appliance manual and reads through it to determine customized maintenance tasks.

• Finds all filters for the appliance along with direct links to order replacements online.

• Enters all that information into a server database.

This information is used by customers and technicians in web and mobile applications.

In today's market, your resume needs to be effective for every audience reviewing it, from the software screening you in or out, to the recruiter scanning your summary, to the hiring manager making the call. Your resume makes its first impression long before you do. The good news? You don't need to start from scratch.

These strategies work with the resume you already have. In this session, we'll cover:

• Building a resume that passes ATS and AI screening tools without sounding robotic or "AI-optimized"

• Structuring your experience so recruiters can quickly identify your fit

• Transforming your existing resume into a clear and compelling narrative

• Highlighting impact and skills in a way that resonates with hiring managers

• How to make a lasting impression that sets you apart in a tight market

Walk away with practical strategies to develop a resume that makes an impact and moves you forward.

Recreational, adult use cannabis is now legal in Minnesota. What's it like building a large cannabis business compared to other healthcare or high tech businesses? Join me to hear the Northern Calyx journey and get free merch.

Founders are already using ChatGPT, Grok, Claude and other AI to draft contracts, review investor terms, and do legal research. Some of that's great, and some of it's going to cost you your company when it blows up.

This session is a practical walkthrough of how to use AI and your lawyer together to get quality legal work done faster and cheaper. We'll look at live examples: AI drafting a SAFE (what it nails, what it hallucinates), AI reviewing a contractor agreement (what it catches, what it misses), and AI "doing legal research" (when it's useful, when it's confidently making things up).

You'll leave knowing:

• How to use AI output to make your lawyer faster and your bill smaller
• The mistakes AI makes about startup legal work that could actually sink your company
• Confidentiality risks with AI
• What an AI-forward law firm looks like in practice, and why it matters for your budget

This isn't a talk about AI replacing lawyers. It's about founders being smarter about how they use both. Bring your laptop.

Presenters: Todd Taylor and Alex Frescoln, Avisen Legal — startup and business lawyers with an AI-forward practice serving founders, funders, and growth companies.

With the launch of the Minnesota Angel Investor Network, there are new opportunities for funding in Minnesota! Learn how getting funding from angel investors works, as well as other funding options available within the state. Also, learn what makes a good pitch, and what to avoid.

This session is a tactical walkthrough of bootstrapping a micro e-commerce business using 3D printing and eBay. We’ll cover niche selection, rapid product iteration, demand validation and fulfillment, all without spending a nickel. Whether you’re a maker, a marketer, or just side-hustle curious, you’ll leave with a clear path to launch something small, scrappy, and profitable.

This session aims to answer the age-old question: "What would happen if you mixed the modern Elixir programming language with interactive fiction in the style of Zork or 'Choose-your-own-adventure' stories?"

While it may seem an unlikely mashup, the actor-based model of Elixir combined with the non-linear workflows possible in the Ink scripting language for narrative fiction fit together to create an interesting, fun environment.

A few things that may come out of this session include:

• A more humane alternative to forcing AI automation into flows that demand a human touch
• How to design dynamic, complex, multiplayer entertainment experiences
• Incorporating complex consequences into non-linear workflow engines
• The sheer fun of messing with storytelling while learning about the actor model of programming

Come for the storytelling, stay for the drama of Actors with Inky scripts!

Regarding topic level: Although we will be engaging with topics that are themselves extremely deep (narrative fiction, actor-based programming models), this session will aim to be accessible to a general audience.

Fast, fun, and a little chaotic (in a good way). Meet a bunch of people in a short amount of time through quick, structured rounds — perfect if you want to maximize connections.

Minnebar is a great place to catch up with old friends, the Networking Lounge is a dedicated place to meet new people. Join us to chat about anything and everything.

Last summer, eager to show a team how easily they could author Microsoft Playwright tests to determine whether their site still works after each new vendor patch ... I came five seconds away from hitting "send" on a test run results report that would have included:

1. screenshots of my bank account number, and
2. browser history including a cookie that could have let them log in as me and reroute my next payments to themselves.

My impatient boundless enthusiasm is partly to blame, but it could happen to any of us, because the problem is inherent to the nature of automation:

• Credential problems arise quickly when we take humans out of the loop and automate testing authenticated systems.

This session explores the security implications of common testing practices, and presents practical alternatives that maintain quality assurance and observability without compromising security.

You'll learn authentication and authorization patterns to improve test security across the software development lifecycle.

Properly implementing mitigations like health check endpoints, synthetic data, and privilege separation likely involves more subject matter expertise than is reasonable to expect everyone to hold at once, so you'll leave this session with a shareable vocabulary you can use to align business, development, quality, identity, security, and monitoring teams as you work toward safer test automation against your most important systems.

Utopia did not originally imply a place of perfection. In fact, it means "no land" or "nowhere". The digital environment is such a place. It is at once nowhere, and a place in which we spend more of our time. It is far from perfect, but it is more malleable than the physical world. While the two are inseparable they need not be mirror images.

The rapidity of developments in artificial intelligence over the last decade are awe inspiring. Scale and influence has grown increasingly concentrated in a few corporations, and the structure of the digital experience appears to be a foregone conclusion. The confluence of narratives, digital and economic, can leave the individual feeling as if they are caught in a rip tide and being dragged out to sea. However, a rip tide is not inescapable. By swimming crosscurrent, we can restructure the human experience in the digital utopia.

Whether you are a technologist, entrepreneur, enthusiast, skeptic, or some combination thereof, you are part of the digital environment. Join me for a brief presentation and rich discussion about the world we inhabit and the world we create.

I've been putting together a workflow that uses Claude Code Plugins, a custom docs MCP server, and the Linear MCP to take an idea from rough sketch to work items that are actually ready to build, and then from tickets into working code. This talk is a live walkthrough of that.

I'll start with a brand new idea and take it through the whole flow in front of you. A PM-style prototype turning into scoped Linear tickets, Claude Code picking those tickets up, and doing the implementation work. Along the way I'll compare each step to how the same thing would play out in a more traditional flow, since that's where the value becomes obvious.

The stack:

• Claude Code Plugins for role-specific workflows, so the PM step, the engineering step, and the review step each have their own purpose-built experience
• A custom docs MCP server that gives every agent the same grounding in product context, architecture, and team conventions
• The Linear MCP so the output lands as real work items, not yet another tool your team has to remember to check

If you're a PM trying to hand engineering better-formed ideas, an engineer tired of untangling half-baked tickets, or a founder looking to cut down on handoffs between idea and code, I think you'll get something out of this one.

In business, we often focus on strategy, growth, and execution—but rarely do we look at the internal patterns that quietly shape our decisions, relationships, and outcomes.

This session introduces the concept of the Five Life Poisons—anger, ignorance, ego, jealousy, and attachment—and how they show up in business environments.

Whether you are a founder, leader, or team member, these patterns can impact communication, decision-making, productivity, and overall success.

Through practical examples and guided reflection, you’ll learn how to:

Recognize these patterns in yourself and your organization Understand how they affect leadership and company culture Shift from reactive patterns to more intentional, effective responses

This is not about theory—it’s about awareness, clarity, and creating a more grounded and effective way of working.

The Distance Between "Hello World" and "Secure-at-Scale" A developer spins up an AI agent, gives it access to a database, and suddenly magic happens. It’s writing emails, taking actions, and automating the enterprise. It looks flawless. It feels like the future.

I’m here to talk about why that magic often breaks the moment it hits a production firewall.

As a practitioner leading GCP architecture, I spend a lot of time thinking about the distance between a "smart" agent and a "secure" one. The gap isn't usually the LLM's intelligence; it’s the Decision Architecture we build around it.

In this session, we’re moving past the AI hype to look at the actual scars of building secure agentic workflows. We will move through the lifecycle of an agent, from the initial development sandbox to a governed, enterprise runtime.

What we will explore together:

The Development Gap: Why "Prompt Engineering" isn't a security strategy and how we build supply chain trust for models. The Runtime Reality: Encoding enterprise "values" into technical guardrails using GCP’s security suite.

Dog parks are one of the few public spaces with zero behavioral infrastructure—and predictable conflict points.

Instead of blaming “bad dogs” or “irresponsible owners,” what if we designed simple, visible systems that guide human behavior at the exact moments pressure builds?

In this session, we’ll break down one real-world scenario (dog park gate entry) and explore how small design signals—timing, spacing, movement—can reduce friction before it escalates.

If you work in product, UX, behavior or systems design, this is a live case study in shaping behavior without rules, enforcement, or training.

How do teams outperform AI?

If your value is ‘I can think (search/ research) my way to a decent answer,’ AI is already competing with you.

This session is about what still gives you an edge. We'll practice how to turn ambiguity into action using small, fast experiments (“Weick-sized wins”) that generate real insight

You’ll leave with:

A simple way to break stuck problems into testable actions A clearer read on where your team is actually stuck One experiment you can run immediately to increase learning velocity

Part 1 — 3 min intro and chose from among 6 to 4 4-min segments (~20 min total) Part 2 — Practice (12 min) - Exercise: “Act to Learn” Work in pairs: Pick a real ambiguous problem (something that annoys you both at work that you'd like to change, but don't see an obvious 'fix')

We'll apply what we just talked about to

Define: 1. one small action (reversible) 2. what it will teach you 3. what decision it unlocks 4. When you can test it next (within a week or less!)

Part 3 — Feedback for you (5–8 min)

Peer critique using the following questions: Is it safe enough to fail? Make adjustments! Is it fast enough? Make adjustments! Does it actually reduce ambiguity? Make adjustments!

Feedback for me: One-line takeaway for the session [3x5 cards!]

~~ Check out my bio for more information, hit me up on LinkedIn and mention MinneBar if you want to chat.

to truly NERD out, download and read the article

The people who are “The Glue” of your teams, hiding in plain sight

Visionary, Founder, Dreamer, Idea Generator, you already know what we call the people in the spotlight… but in every high-performing team, near every “Visionary” who actually delivers, there’s someone (or several of them) keeping everyone moving in alignment, and forward, together. You've probably worked alongside one. You might even be one.

What makes these people extraordinary is WHO they are, which they bring to every role they’re in. So while some organizations have “Second in Command” titles that attempt to call for this kind of person, like COO, Chief of Staff, President, or Integrator, those are job titles, and you can put any kind of person into any job.

Not understanding who Seconds are means you often lose what holds your organization together without knowing how or why, but when you DO understand them, you unlock partnerships so effective they change what's possible. In this session, we will name the identity of Secondness, separate Identity from Roles, and give every person in the room a new lens for building teams that actually execute.

POAP KINGS is our Clash Royale clan that is structured, recognition-driven, and built around the idea that participation deserves proof. That last part is literal. Our members collect POAPs — a blockchain-based collectible that marks their place in the clan's history.

Then one of the clan founders decided the clan needed an AI agent! 🤖

That agent is Elixir (Github). It runs 24/7 inside the POAP KINGS Discord, pulling data from the Clash Royale API and generating signals to drive insights. When something real happens — a member crossing a trophy milestone, a war day kicking off, a promotion earned, a new member — Elixir notices and says something, in its own voice, without being asked.

Elixir isn't just an announcer! In the leadership channel, the clan's co-leader can ask it freeform questions — who's been carrying wars, which members are going quiet, whether someone's earned a promotion — and get answers grounded in actual clan data. Elixir also drives the clan's entire website: it regenerates roster pages, member bios, and the home page message, then commits it all to git automatically.

Elixir also helps our clan members get better! They can use #ask-elixir to get input on their deck, how to counter certain cards, and analyze their previous games. They can even use #card-quiz to drill themselves on battle mechanics.

In this session we'll tell the story of building Elixir. We'll demo it live in Discord, walk through the architecture (Python, Clash Royale API, LLM, SQLite, and an 11ty static site pipeline), and dig into the agent design problems that actually turn out to be hard: distinguishing signal from noise, why memory matters more than raw intelligence, schema-validating LLM output before it touches your site, and why giving an agent a consistent voice is not a nice-to-have.

You don't need to know Clash Royale. You just need to be curious about what it actually takes to create an agent.

Last year at Minnebar, we discussed why GenAI will help creative technologists become the world's future tech giants.

This year, we're giving a major update, once again sharing WHY Creatives are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the AI revolution and HOW they are already changing the landscape in MN and beyond!

Caroline Holden, a creative technologist, content creator, and founder of MN Women in AI with 8 years experience in startups, AI, and venture capital explains why creatives are uniquely positioned to become the tech leaders of tomorrow.

This session is ideal for anyone interested in the intersection of creativity and technology or anyone interested in how Generative AI may fundamentally change what it means to be a stellar employee, founder, or innovator.

SKILL.md files are a great way to export knowledge from one engineer to another. Think of them as training docs that someone can read, but if they don't want to, they can assign their assistant, or copilot, to read them and do the work.

Sharing knowledge (context) across larger engineering organizations that are engaged in agentic engineering (go ahead, call it vibe coding, but then we can't be friends), should make everyone more productive, until it doesn't. Done right, big win. Done wrong, failures may not be recognizable as such until well after you shipped what you thought was working code.

In this session, I'll cover:

• general benefits of SKILL.md files,
• how my teams are using SKILL.md files at Shipt to share context with one another
• Cite an academic study measuring the effects of bad context on coding assistant outcomes
• Tell you why I believe you should audit your context if you are not sure if your SKILL.md files might be conflicting
• Show a SKILL.md that checks other skill files (yo dawg, I heard you like SKILL.md files)
• Tell you how you can do the same
• Plead with you to stop thinking of SKILL.md files a "just markdown"

I gave a talk last year on a doorbell and kitchen dashboard project. I'll do a quick recap of those and how they're going.

I have some more projects that I'd like to share, including a weather station I set up in my backyard and self-hosting the data.

I have tried out some different houseplant monitors. I'll tell you how that's going.

I've tried several of different buttons. We can talk about those too.

Last year, the follow-up conversations I had with folks were so good, I kinda want to just run it back and do the same talk again, but there are also plenty of new things to talk about.

The University of Minnesota has been a longstanding leader in scientific computing. It was the first U.S. University to buy a supercomputer, from Minnesota- and Wisconsin-based Cray Research in 1981. In the years since, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute has offered on-campus computing resources and technical expertise to thousands of researchers around the state, enabling scientific discoveries in disciplines including genetics, chemistry, astronomy, and economics.

As an engineer at MSI, I've seen firsthand the value of this resource to the research community, and the interesting legacy quirks that come with operating a decades-old computing center.

In this session, I'll share an overview of MSI's history, a virtual tour of its current datacenter in the basement of a 100-year-old library, and get into the tech we use today and some examples of the computational research people are doing. And we'll touch on how things may change in the years ahead, as AI seeps into academia and hyperscalers eat the world's hardware supply.

I am a state employee leading a statewide AI planning project focused on human-centered outcomes. One person. Just me. So I need all of you — my army of beautiful, criminally underutilized, truth-telling humans.

Bring your hot takes. Tell me what we’re getting wrong. Tell me what you’d do if you were in charge. Bring your most unhinged proposals — we might just find gold in there. Don’t let me off easy. I have thick skin and I need to know.

I will respond honestly, even when the honest answer is “I don’t know.” I’m not here to defend the government — I wouldn’t even know where to start.

This will be messy. That’s the point. But it’s also genuinely valuable — because I have this tiny, now-or-never window to shape how Minnesota responds to AI, and I am not about to waste it. So if you’ve ever wanted to say something to the government and have someone listen and make it count, this is your 40 minutes.

Say something. Say anything. No ego. No filter. No guaranteed outcome. No wrong answers. No holding back.

Let’s see what happens.

Embark with me on a journey back in time to a place I'm sure you've been dying to explore: the early to mid-1900s rural Midwest. Stick with me now. With our time machine, we will be able to observe a change in agriculture that would go on to fundamentally shape our nation's health, environment, and political climate, to name just a few. At the center of the transition: technology and women.

I believe this frequently forgotten and quite surprising history can provide a unique perspective on gender inequity in the tech industry, both past and present. As we rapidly enter a new era of technology, this story also raises the stakes of engaging with the ever-so-complicated question: Why is tech sexist?

Let’s take a look together at using agents and skills in Figma! I will go through what is available in Figma and present a demo on how this can be used in a project.

I have been running Sofawolf Press INC, a four-person full-service publishing company, for over 25 years. A lot of software solutions for managing day to day operations have come and gone from our tech stack, and none of ever held a candle to what I have been able to do using Notion.

Notion is our CRM, our ERP, our Product Development and Event Planning System, our Royalty Reporting system, and a web-facing solution for our Sales and Marketing Efforts. All for <$1,500 a year.

In this session I will describe the challenges we faced trying to run a small but complex business "in the old days" and how Notion has been a cost-effective solution to most of them, allowing us to run lean and still be a fully functional business.

LAIC is the Life Time AI Companion - an AI concierge available to every Life Time member. It answers questions about clubs, classes, and fitness programming, and it can also do things for the member: build custom workouts, draft training programs, provide nutrition guidance, and even schedule classes on a member's behalf.

Getting to “cool demo” is easy with AI. Getting to something members rely on has proven to be more challenging. It takes a willingness to experiment and the tenacity to keep evolving at a pace that is constantly pushed by advances in AI tech. This talk will cover our approach, and lessons learned (including a few missteps) for others to apply (or avoid) when building AI products.

We'll cover things like: - Engaging the business in AI. How we get domain leaders to help shape the product. - How AI is changing how we build product. - Which Model is Best? (Answer: all of them).

Learn what we’ve learned about leveraging the ever changing landscape of LLM models.

If you're building an AI product inside an established company, come for the war stories, leave with ideas for your playbook.

Social media is full of advice- but what actually works today to build a real, engaged community?

In this session, I’ll break down current strategies for growing a personal brand and turning followers into a community that interacts, shares, and sticks around. I’ll share what I’ve learned building a community of 300K+ followers, including what worked, what didn’t, and what I would do differently if starting from zero.

We’ll cover:

How to find your voice and stand out (without feeling fake) What kind of content actually drives engagement right now How to build trust and connection- not just followers Practical ways to stay consistent without burning out

This will be a collaborative session- come ready to share your experience, ask questions, and exchange ideas. Whether you’re just starting or already creating content, you’ll leave with clear, actionable strategies you can apply immediately.

AI is transforming work, and data & analytics is no exception. But beyond the headlines, what are companies actually doing with AI in their analytics workflows today?

In this session, we will start with a look at how organizations across industries are applying AI to existing analytics workflows: accelerating insight generation, automating reporting, enabling natural language data exploration, and more. We will ground this in real examples and observations from what is happening in practice.

Then we will take a step deeper into why this is harder than it looks. AI powered analytics does not work without strong fundamentals such as clear data definitions, governed semantic layers, and high quality data. Without these, AI might not just underperform, but it can dangerously mislead.

We will use healthcare as a lens for these challenges, where the higher stakes make these issues unavoidable. How do you ensure privacy and security when AI interacts with sensitive data? How do you evaluate and trust AI generated outputs? What should AI be allowed to do and what it should not? How do you make the case for investment when the return is not always immediate?

Whether you work in healthcare or any other industry, these lessons apply broadly. We will discuss what is working, what is not, and what data teams should be thinking about before diving in.

What if we applied the same rigor we use to evaluate software interfaces to how we interact with our colleagues?

In this session, we'll conduct a live usability assessment, but instead of testing an app, we're testing you. Using actual UX methodology (heuristics, systems thinking, friction analysis), we'll identify where your professional interactions create unnecessary cognitive load, confusion, or frustration for the people trying to interact with you as a coworker or leader.

You'll discover:

• The hidden usability issues in how you communicate • Why your "intuitive" management style might be anything but • How to run lightweight user testing on your own leadership approach • The difference between being technically right and being human-centered

Walk away with a practical framework for making yourself easier to work with, because the best technology works seamlessly, and the best colleagues should be too.

Perfect for developers, designers, and anyone who's ever wondered why people problems feel harder to debug than code problems.

This talk will be on the rapid scaling of AI without sufficient oversight, and how this impacts businesses that must meet compliance standards while simultaneously adopting AI to replace more expensive SaaS tools and even human labor.

How can companies successfully signal trust to their customers in this environment?

The real risk isn’t AI itself; it’s the growing gap between how AI is actually being used and how (or if) it’s documented, controlled, and defensible.

In this session, we’ll dig into real-world moments where AI use has already created legal, reputational, and operational headaches - and unpack what “defensible AI” actually looks like beyond the buzzwords.

You’ll walk away knowing exactly where the hidden risks exist and how to get ahead of them without killing innovation.

I wanted to create a live, QR-based scavenger hunt for Minnebar, but I didn't want to touch the web stack myself. As a data scientist, I’m comfortable with data but a stranger to hosting and UI.

In this session, I’ll walk you through how I used AI to architect the entire project—from selecting a free database to deciding on a hosting platform—all through a collaborative Q&A. Then, I’ll show how I used GitHub Copilot to turn those plans into functional code, iterating through the build until it was live.

The best part? The hunt is active right now! Come hear how AI slashed the "idea-to-deployment" time from weeks to hours, then grab the first clue and start playing.

Tech support is about more than solving problems. It’s also about building trust and connections.

In many support environments, conversations with users and teammates can become rushed, scripted, and transactional. This session explores how lessons from hospitality can help support professionals and leaders create more meaningful interactions, stronger relationships, and better support experiences overall.

Drawing from personal stories transitioning from hospitality into IT, this talk will share practical ways to communicate more genuinely, connect more effectively, and bring more of your human personality into your work without losing professionalism. It will also touch on why these skills matter even more in an AI-driven world, where human character stands out more than ever.

This session will include audience engagement, reflection, and practical takeaways attendees can bring back to their teams.

You've cycled through three COOs in four years. Each one looked perfect on paper. Each one left you doing the same strategic work you were desperate to hand off.

Maybe the problem isn't them. Maybe it's how you're finding them.

Here's what's actually happening: You're not looking for a Chief Operating Officer. You're looking for a Second-in-Command. Someone who's energized by the work that drains you. Who sees systems where you see chaos. Who thrives on execution while you focus on vision.

But here's the problem: Recruiters optimize for qualifications. Résumés. Keywords. Experience.

And the #1 factor in whether a CEO/COO relationship actually works? It's not any of those things. It's the relationship itself.

You can't recruit your way into a relationship.

In this session, we'll walk through what Seconds actually are (hint: it's an identity, not a job title), why traditional hiring fails at finding them, and what a matchmaking approach looks like for bringing on the person who can actually propel your vision forward. You'll leave knowing whether you're ready to delegate, what you actually need in a Second, and how to find them without posting another job description that attracts 200 wrong candidates.

Most small businesses don't need a massive CRM. They need one that actually works for them. In this session, we'll look at how AI is changing the way small teams manage leads, follow up with customers, and keep deals from falling through the cracks. We'll use a real local example: IT Metrohub, a workforce development organization, partnered with Amptech, a marketing agency, to generate leads, manage them, and streamline student registration using an AI-powered CRM. No theory, just what they actually built and how it worked. We'll also cover what AI-powered CRMs can do today, which features are worth your attention, and how to get started without a big budget or a tech team. Come with questions. This one's meant to be a conversation.

How does early-stage capital actually move in Minnesota? This session unpacks how founders go from idea to first check, including how angels, funds, and networks interact behind the scenes. We’ll cover where founders typically get stuck, what signals matter most locally, and how to navigate the path to funding more effectively. Designed for builders looking to better understand and access early-stage capital.

Jensen Huang famously runs Nvidia with 60+ direct reports and skips 1-on-1s by giving everyone equal access to information and reasoning. It sounds brilliant... until you try it in a fast-moving startup or with dozens of AI agents and suddenly everyone (and every agent) is drowning in lost context, hallucinations, parallel drift, and rediscovered problems.

At our fintech startup Easy we solved this by building Engram, our shared intelligence layer and living Company Brain. Engram automatically ingests everything and turns it into a rich, self-organizing collective memory for both our team and our AI agents.

The result? A 28x productivity boost.

In this session we’ll show exactly how Engram works: the five-layer memory stack, mycelium-inspired self-organization, provenance chains for trustworthy autonomy, and the always-on Curator that surfaces business patterns. You’ll see real examples of how it turns session amnesia into shared superintelligence, and we’ll walk through how to set it up yourself (it’s open source and runs in a handful of commands).

Whether you’re running agents in a startup or just want to stop re-explaining the same decisions, you’ll leave with practical steps to implement collective memory in your own operations.

Links for the program/notes: GitHub → https://github.com/itseasyco/engram

Overview In a matrixed organization, outcomes often depend less on authority and more on the ability to align priorities, clarify ownership, and keep decisions moving. This session offers a practical approach to technology initiatives that strengthens influence through alignment across multiple platforms and cross-functional stakeholders. The focus is on the mechanics of cross-functional leadership: how to align stakeholders around a shared definition of value, clarify decision rights (“who decides what”) to reduce ambiguity, and establish an operating cadence that keeps decisions moving and removes roadblocks. Attendees will learn how to use prioritization criteria to shift conversations from opinions to tradeoffs, and how to create influence through clear communication, a champion network, and well-defined value measures.

Learning goals • Build alignment early and sustain it through delivery • Establish a shared definition of value so teams optimize and prioritize established outcomes • Prevent “shadow priorities” by centralizing intake and maintaining clear priorities visible • Define ownership for exceptions, escalation paths, and dependencies

Expected Outcomes Attendees will leave with a practical approach which can be applied immediately to lead technology initiatives across teams in a matrixed environment by using alignment mechanisms such as shared value definitions, explicit prioritization, clear decision rights to accelerate decisions and reduce rework.

What key takeaways will the attendees gain? • A practical approach to leading technology initiatives across teams in a matrixed organization using alignment as the primary lever • Techniques to build alignment early, maintain it through delivery, and keep decisions moving by establishing ownership and decision rights • A method for creating a shared definition of value so teams optimize and prioritize for the same outcomes • An intake and prioritization approach that keeps priorities visible, reduces shadow priorities, and shifts conversations from opinions to tradeoffs • Sustain momentum through clear exception ownership, escalation paths, cross-team dependencies, and creating influence through communication, champions, and value measures

All of us lived it. No one saw all of it. Operation Metro Surge was too large, too fast, and too deliberately decentralized for any single person to have witnessed the whole thing. But collectively, we did. This session is an attempt to build a collective context, drawing on local and national reporting and firsthand testimony, and to make sense of what it revealed.

The community response that emerged wasn't spontaneous. It built upon community and technical infrastructure that was created over months and years, by non-profit groups and local organizers who saw what was coming before most of us were paying attention. By understanding how we got through the previous crisis, we can see where things stand now: what's continued, what's evolved, and how the tools that got us through that can get us through the next.

This session is a community- and organizing-focused counterpart to What tech lessons should we learn from the ICE invasion?.

The founders of Rive.app are twins on a mission to bring back the joy and interactivity we lost with the death of Flash. In this session, you'll learn what Rive is, how it's used, and which platforms it integrates with — and see an illustration come to life with a live demo.

Two years ago at Minnebar I said I could build a $1M business in 30 minutes using ChatGPT. You were skeptical. I did it anyway.

Combat Candy now has half a million in seed capital, five-figure monthly sales, and a Shopify store so effective it makes even Chatgpt question free will.

So naturally, I raised the stakes. Because apparently I have something to prove. To you. Repeatedly.

This year I’m going to show you how a two-person supplement company is chasing $1B ... not because we’re delusional, but because we built something that makes the math actually work.

It’s called OpenClaw, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you will because your LinkedIn feed is about to bombard you with it.

OpenClaw is an open source multi-agent AI framework that’s quietly becoming one of the most powerful unfair advantages available to anyone with a MacMini and something to prove. I’ve deployed it across Combat Candy like a very ambitious, extremely underpaid intern army.

• It runs our email marketing.
• It optimizes our paid social spend.
• It manages and grows our CRM.
• It finds, inspires, and literally pays our affiliates.

And that genuinely is just the tip of the A-Iceberg.

Two people. One framework. Zero chill about what’s possible.

I’ll show you exactly how I built it into our stack, what it’s doing right now, and how you can steal the whole playbook before you leave the room.

Bring your skepticism. I brought receipts. Again.

Are you interested in 3D printing but don't know how to get started?

This session is to give aspiring 3D printing hobbyists a rundown of what it is, what it isn't, and how to start trying it out if you're interested.

We'll be exploring:

• Types of 3D printers

• Types of filaments / resin

• Software for creating objects

• Slicing software for prepping files for printing

• Caveats, considerations, and drawbacks

• Safety

There will be time for a Q&A at the end for anyone who has specific questions. 3D printing is an exciting, fun, sometimes frustrating, and extremely vast and deep hobby. I hope you'll join and find out more about one of my favorite hobbies!

We’re not talking about the outdoor game where you are trying to steal a physical flag and bring it back to your base, this capture the flag is a series of computer security challenges you solve to retrieve a flag and get points! Solving these challenges require various skills including decrypting content, SQL Injection, reverse engineering and more. Learn about how capture the flag works, where you find challenges/competitions, and some techniques required to solve them. I went from never having tried one to winning a competition the next year. The challenges are not only interesting, they helped change my perspective about how web sites are attacked and how I could better protect them.

I despise using hype or fear to get someone motivated to do a thing, but… if you have been, are, or will be recruiting, hiring, building talent pools for future hiring, networking to find co founders, you’re going to want to join me.

In short, hiring and building teams has been dramatically changing the past two years and the impact will last into the foreseeable future. Some of this changes comes from socio/economic/political factors and a bunch from the use of AI.

HR tech - changed

Candidate expectations - changing

Use of tools to find people - changed, changing, and will change again

How we evaluate candidates - changing

How candidates evaluate us as leaders, hiring managers, and companies - changing

Who should attend… if you are (or will be):

A leader hiring a team

A team member who is part of the interviewing process

A CTO (or similar) doing long term planning

A founder and looking for senior leaders

A startup and prepping to hire outside of family and friends for the first time

Agenda coming soon

There's a lot of noise around venture capital and not enough honest explanation of what it actually is, how it works, or what to expect if you take it. If you're on the founder path and trying to figure out how to fund your company, this session is for you. A VC Partner and former operator will walk through the fundamentals: what venture capital is, where the money comes from, how investors make decisions, and what you're actually signing up for when you take a check. We'll spend equal time on the "should you" question, including the types of businesses VC is built for, the ones it isn't, and how to think honestly about whether your goals and a VC's goals are actually aligned. Plenty of time for Q&A built in. Your host is Steph Rich, Partner at Bread & Butter Ventures, who has spent her career on both sides of the table as an early operator and early-stage VC.

This is a workshop about community, craft, and the unlikely places technology shows up. You'll leave with a hands-on introduction to crop art, a take-home magnetic piece, and the satisfaction of having contributed to a collective Minnebar anniversary project headed to the Minnesota State Fair. Along the way, we'll explore one unlikely AI use case that helps crop art newbies. The first 40 attendees will get a take-home project and supplies.

Imagine you process information more slowly, avoid eye contact when overwhelmed, or shut down under stress. Now imagine being confronted by law enforcement during a large-scale enforcement operation like Operation Metro Surge here in Minnesota.

What might be interpreted as defiance could simply be disability.

This session examines that moment, when behavior is interpreted quickly and often incorrectly. We will explore practical tools and community-informed strategies that help people with disabilities prepare, communicate clearly, and reduce risk in high-stress encounters. You will leave with concrete ideas you can apply in design, policy, and real-world interactions.

If you care about accessibility, dignity, and real human impact, join the conversation.

What are we building? What's most important? When are we done? What's needed? Where will I find the time? What's next?

Choosing is hard. Opportunity is unlimited. The work is unlimited.

But, limits are real. Time is limited. People are limited. Most is singular.

It's cliche to say that "priorities shift" and yet, so many of our leadership practices are built on assumptions of stability. Beautiful vision statements grow stale and fail when we never update them. We give ourselves and teams whiplash when we pivot too often and chase problems that weren't really in our way.

What could it mean to embrace our limits and work with them? What happens when we commit to "for now", reserving the right to change our minds? What happens when we're honest with ourselves and others about how much we can actually take on?

What's hard about prioritization? How might we do better?

If you attend this session, expect to participate. This is about you and your work. Expect to walk away with work to do, and a few new techniques to help you do it.

But this is not a motivation problem; it is a design problem.

Why does making friends as an adult feel like a high-level boss battle we weren't prepared for? In a world that is more connected than ever, the Loneliness Epidemic is hitting harder than we like to admit.

Join me for a session as they open up about their own journey through the 'Friendship Desert'—the missed connections, the flakiness of modern life, and the struggle to find a party that actually stays together. This isn't just a lecture; it's a shared space for us to be honest about the effort it takes to stay connected.

Through 2000s-themed nostalgia, interactive Kahoot quiz, and Q&A we’ll explore our collective experiences with friendship. We’ll dive into what it means to be vulnerable in a 'surface-level' world and how a 'Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained' mindset can break the cycle of isolation.

If you’re tired of 'solo-queuing' and ready to put in true effort for a permanent party, come join the conversation. Let's brave the unknown together! :D

Not sure how much your new product or service is worth to your customers.

Swing by and we'll run some napkin math and rules of thumb on your specific product.

Leave with some tools and techniques to tweak as you go.

What if instead of writing code to describe something, you could write a language about it? That's the idea behind domain-specific languages, and once you've built one, you'll never stop seeing where they belong.

In this talk, Jake introduces DSLs from first principles: what they are, why they're worth reaching for, and how they let you model messy real-world problems with surprising clarity. He'll walk through Tamarack, an open DSL he's building for video and image annotation, as a hands-on case study — showing how a well-designed language can describe scenes, sync media, and track annotations in a way that's human-readable, git-friendly, and built from the ground up to be understood by AI.

That last part matters more than ever. As AI becomes a collaborator in our workflows, the structure and intentionality of a DSL gives it something powerful: a constrained, meaningful vocabulary to work with — making its output more predictable, more trustworthy, and more useful. You'll also get a practical, beginner-friendly look at how to actually build one — from identifying the right domain to designing a grammar your team can read on day one. You'll leave with a new mental model and the tools to start speaking your own domain.

I’ll be blunt: AI is really cool, but also really, really dumb. It can build an app in an afternoon, design a VR videogame overnight, update your systems, and build an entire ETL system. It also can’t remember who you work for, has a habit of broadcasting your secure keys, and clutters your codebase with dozens of debug_duplicate.py files.

AI is the best of the worst tools in our belt. It’s brilliant, it’s broken, and I use it every single day

In this session, we’re taking a frank look at where AI actually is right now, where it shines, and where it consistently falls apart. The critical topics of how to make it useful, where it shines, where it just won't work, and ways to make it less obnoxious. How to accommodate goldfish memory, terrible assumptions and tendencies to go on “adventures”. Strategies the average user to leverage these tools safely and sanely without a dedicated dev team or a complex setup.

There are various ways to integrate it into your work life without losing your mind (or your ability to think). Come learn how to interact with the bots recognizing they are like an overconfident, very smart, but completely chaotic junior dev.

Scope: This discussion will be focused on commercially available AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. I’m sure some of y’all have custom fixes for all these issues, but for this we’re focusing on the out-of-the-box bots were stuck with.

Have you always wanted to design a game but you don't know how to get started? Maybe you did get started and were quickly overwhelmed? Or you're already a full-time developer, so you don't want to spend your free time writing code? Good news! You can use AI to lay the technical foundation, so you can skip ahead to the fun part!

I used Claude Code to build a shoot-em-up prototype in 24 hours. It was functional, but not very fun. Since then I've been hand-tuning the gameplay, level design, art assets and music. Let AI do the heavy lifting that it's good at (frameworks, physics, online scoring systems, etc.) so you can focus on making something that's unique and enjoyable for humans to play... and empower yourself so you're not reliant on an LLM.

This session will be about 1/2 presentation and 1/2 Q&A and discussion. I'll share specific examples from my conversations & codebase, and offer advice on: * Pros and cons of starting with AI code -- is this approach right for you? * What to consider before even writing your first prompt * Surprising "gotchas" to watch out for * When to use AI, and when to get your hands dirty * How to use AI as a coach to reduce your dependency on it

I don’t have dedicated home internet at my apartment — but my neighbor’s cable company will sell me wireless internet access from his cable modem for $10/month. Then I run TollGate.me on a cheap router and resell that bandwidth as a Bitcoin-powered hotspot.

In this session I’ll show you exactly how it works: the simple hardware setup, how Lightning micropayments flow in sats every time someone connects, and how people in a good location with excess bandwidth can(*) turn it into automatic bitcoin income with almost zero ongoing effort.
(*) Where permitted by your ISP’s Terms of Service

I’ll bring my hotspot router so you can try it yourself — I’ll give you a sample of ecash to use for paying to connect using your phone or laptop, and you’ll see the sats flow in real-time.

If you’ve ever wanted to set up a tiny ISP that pays you in bitcoin while you do (almost) nothing — or just see decentralized internet access in action — come check it out. No slides, just a working hotspot with real payments happening live.

Karpathy's AutoResearch ran 700 experiments while he slept. It works because the objective is locked: one metric, lower is better, don't touch the evaluation function. Most research doesn't start there. Deciding what to measure, whether your benchmark is even valid, what a result means: that's the part that still requires a human. This talk is about that part.

I built a stateful AI research assistant to help me run an enterprise knowledge graph project: can organizational KG signals (reporting chains, projects, meeting attendance) help LLM agents resolve ambiguous people references in enterprise conversations? Think "set up a meeting with the data scientist on the Atlas project" when three people hold that role, two of whom changed positions last quarter. We built a synthetic org, generated a benchmark, ran experiments across three models and six retrieval conditions.

Here's what I learned the hard way.

The assistant has knowledge boundaries it won't volunteer. Infrastructure failures can corrupt results silently. Design flaws in your data go unquestioned if you don't ask. Confident-sounding write-ups can outrun what the numbers actually support. And fast-generated code works until you need to defend it.

These aren't reasons to stop. They're reasons to develop practices: specify behavior before you ask for implementation, verify outputs against raw sources rather than summaries, make "why did you do it this way?" a standing question, and treat the first draft narrative as a starting point, not a conclusion.

I'll walk through the failure modes concretely, show what the collaboration actually looked like, and share what moved the needle on both speed and rigor.

Format: Story + examples + Q&A

At some point, most skilled people get asked to contribute to something they believe in — a friend's startup, a promising client, a project worth caring about. Sometimes you say yes. Sometimes you say no. But rarely do you have a clear framework for what your contribution is actually worth, or how to structure it so everyone wins.

There's a better model that almost nobody is using: one where your time and expertise function as actual investment capital, with structured returns tied to the value you help create.

That's what Shared Success Agreements are. A founder-friendly alternative to equity, debt, or a SAFE — a structure that lets you invest your skills in exchange for a defined share of future revenue, with clear terms, milestone tracking, and real ROI expectations. Not consulting. Not employment. Investment.

Over the past 8 years Cloudburst has invested more than $500,000 in clients this way. We've learned what works, what doesn't, and how to tell the difference before you commit. I'll share all of it.

Whether you're between roles right now, running your own practice, or just wondering if there's a smarter way to deploy what you know — this session will show you how.

You'll leave with a new mental model for your own expertise, a framework for identifying which engagements are worth investing in vs. just billing, and a practical understanding of how to structure an agreement.

The open-source template is at SharedSuccessAgreement.org. This session gives you the strategy behind it.

Bring your scenarios and questions — when more of us are invested in each other's success, the whole ecosystem wins.

​​Hear stories from the crazy Vid Kid days of the 1980s! Starting at age 10, Rawson Stovall was the first regular reviewer of video games with his nationally-syndicated newspaper column, “The Vid Kid,” from 1982-1992. During that era he appeared on numerous television shows including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Good Morning America, the CBS Morning News, and That’s Incredible! Articles about him appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. His 1984 book, “The Vid Kid’s Book of Home Video Games” was published by Doubleday. Oddly, Rawson was the host of the event where Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Given the complexities of our future environments, leaders will not be able to respond to these complexities effectively. The future will rely on Elite teams able to take risks and make decisions quickly and in alignment with the organization's goals.

Many leaders believe they have a "talent" problem, but the truth is usually an "operating" problem. After a wake-up call in a downtown pizza place, Craig Vosper realized that the leadership principles he learned in the 2nd Ranger Battalion were the exact tools missing from his corporate strategy. He had become the bottleneck—and his team was waiting for him to lead, not manage.

In this high-impact session, Craig shares the framework for developing Elite Teams that are win, are proactive, adaptable, and have each other's backs. You will walk away with a tactical toolkit to: E - Empower your Team: Ensure the desire to win outweighs the fear of failure. L - Lead your people: Give them a clear path to winning. I - Inspire Greatness: Lead your team daily as Greatness isn't an event; it's a daily cadence. T - Team over heroes: Heroes can save the day, but teams win the war. E - Excellence as purpose: Make being excellent at what you do your purpose.

Leadership isn't a natural gift; it is a trained discipline. Whether you are an overwhelmed leader or one seeking to grow your organization, join Craig to learn how to build teams that win, even when you’re not in the room.

We started as an art collective with six artists. We ended up with three and an idea to turn our art studio into a podcast studio. We signed our studio lease in September and had our first paying client in the studio in November. As of April, we're posting a profit less than six months later. I'll detail the journey and how we managed to scrape the money together to get it off the ground to how we're doing now.

Lots of AI sessions this year are about text. This one is about your mouth.

BeastBox is a real-time beatbox-to-MIDI engine I've been building on nights and weekends. You make a kick-drum sound. 11 milliseconds later, a real kick drum hits. Snare, hi-hat? Same thing. No quantization, no lag you can feel, no cloud round-trip. Just a microphone, a tiny CNN, and a lot of C++ behind the curtain.

What you'll see, live on stage:

• I'll beatbox a full drum pattern and you'll hear it come back as a real drum kit in real time
• The visualizer shows the onset detector firing and the CNN's class probabilities updating hit by hit
• A guided tour of the architecture: an ONNX model trained in PyTorch, a native JUCE audio engine, cross-platform native code, and a Flutter UI bridged in with a lock-free ring buffer
• What breaks, what surprised me, what I'd do differently
• The specific tricks that got end-to-end latency under 20ms (typically 9 to 11) on a laptop CPU

BeastBox is a personal passion project, not a pitch. I want feedback from a room of builders, especially people who care about DSP, on-device ML, or real-time systems. If you've ever wanted to beatbox a whole drum kit into existence, or if you just want to see what it takes to run an extremely low-latency neural net inside an audio-thread budget, come hang out.

What keeps you up at night? Last year, 26,000 vulnerabilities were discovered - 10% of them exploited by malicious actors, wreaking havoc on real victims. Even more concerning, 88% of these attacks happened within the first 6 days of discovery. The threat window is closing fast, and patching vulnerabilities the traditional way isn’t cutting it. It’s time to automate. In this session, we’ll explore how Open Source tools GitHub’s Dependabot, GitHub Actions, and OpenRewrite can automate your security and tech stack upgrades - slashing response times, reducing risk, and enabling continuous improvement. You’ll walk away with practical strategies for integrating these technologies into your workflow to stay ahead of your teams tech debt snowball.

Fast, fun, and a little chaotic (in a good way). Meet a bunch of people in a short amount of time through quick, structured rounds — perfect if you want to maximize connections.

Minnebar is a great place to catch up with old friends, the Networking Lounge is a dedicated place to meet new people. Join us to chat about anything and everything.

A talk about farts. Wait, nobody's going to come to that. Forget I said that. It's not about farts.

A talk about the messes we make at tech companies, which bear a purely metaphorical resemblance to farts.

Every company has them (messes, not farts). And, just like farts, each one is pungent in its own special, unique way. The holes we dig for ourselves are uniquely our own, though maybe with enough perspective we'll be able to spot some common characteristics.

Through 18 years in the tech industry, half of that freelancing, I've ridden a few sinking ships and some others that were taking on an awful lot of water. Come with me on a retrospective of all the different ways a tech company can flounder. We'll have some fun, and see if there's anything at all we can learn from it.

Bring a story about the most notable failure you've been a part of, and we'll have some time for sharing at the end.

My brother Ryan and I have been investing in the early stages for 20+ years. Since we started investing together back in 2005, we’ve been involved with 60+ companies. I am going to pull back the curtain on what those two decades have actually looked like—beyond just the headlines.

Whether you are an active angel investor or someone just starting to explore the space, I’d love to have you join me.

I plan to cover several practical topics, including:
- The Long Game: Reality checks on how long exits actually take.
- Post-Investment: How to manage and support your portfolio after the check is signed.
- Deal Flow: Strategies for building a high-quality, consistent pipeline.
- The Founder Perspective: What founders actually value most from their angel investors.

I want this session to be a great resource for our Minnebar community, so if you know of other angel investors or colleagues thinking about getting into the space, please help spread the word of my session.

Hope you can make it!

Best,

Rob Weber
Managing Partner
Great North Ventures

For the past 20+ years, I've found myself leading collaborative projects. To me, the best outcomes often come from combining unusual topics and bringing together people from a variety of backgrounds. This approach has led to the creation of new communities (such as the Playful Learning Lab, Educator Show and Tell, and PlayLine), new products (ranging from Squishy Circuits to OK Go Sandbox), and new ways of working (for me and for my clients.)

In this session we'll explore: -How to find new collaborators (even if you're an introvert!) -Advice for the framing of collaborations (hint: don't leave them open ended- have a goal!) -Playful approaches to ideation

According to the World Health Organization currently about 1 in 6 people experience a significant disability.

While the numbers of disabled people vastly outnumber software engineers, software products are still being shipped that are not digitally accessible.

Come learn some basics that everyone, no matter their role in the software development cycle, can use to make more accessible products.

This presentation will explore consoles, computers, peripherals, and handheld gaming hardware, tracing 50 years of shared ideas, experimentation, and cross-pollination that ultimately converged in the commercially successful Steam Deck.

Using the Steam Deck as a culmination of the last 50 years we have the opportunity to rethink the history of game consoles and: – Recognize that modern gaming ideas have deep historical roots – Understand that video game hardware history is not a simple linear progression – Develop a broader appreciation for overlooked or transitional game hardware

Are you thinking about getting a microgrid with solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage (ESS)?

In this session, I will talk about essential items to consider while choosing a solar PV and ESS. I will also share what it takes to keep a system functioning for a long time and get the most out of it.

Discussion topics: *General overview of PV and ESS *Project process *System sizing *Equipment *Interaction with utilities and government entities *Balancing cost and system size *Typical electrical diagrams *DIY vs professional install *System monitoring and maintenance

90 seconds here. Five minutes there. All those moments while you wait for AI to generate a response to your prompts add up. A new genre of free time now exists. Humans need to decide what to do with it

In this session we’ll explore the various ways we can respond to this new-found free time and discuss how these micro moments will shape the future of how humans work and live with AI.

Schools are actively debating how to respond to AI—but much of that conversation is happening without a clear view of how students are actually using it day-to-day.

As a current high school student, I’ll bring a ground-level perspective on how AI is really showing up in classrooms: how often it’s used, what it’s used for, and how students themselves think about it.

Right now, AI is often framed as a problem to control. In practice, that control is limited. AI tools are widely accessible, constantly improving, and already part of many students’ daily routines—whether for studying, completing assignments, or, in some cases, bypassing the work entirely. At the same time, every student is being exposed to AI in some form, regardless of school policies.

In this session, I’ll break down the most common ways students are using AI today—from legitimate learning support to clear academic dishonesty—and explore the gray areas in between, where expectations are often unclear. I’ll also share how students themselves view these boundaries, and where there’s a disconnect between student norms and school rules.

Looking ahead, I’ll discuss the potential long-term impacts of this level of AI reliance—both the opportunities and the risks for skill development, learning habits, and equity.

Finally, I’ll offer a student-informed perspective on what effective AI policies could look like: not just how to reduce misuse, but how schools can realistically adapt and help students use AI as a tool for learning rather than a shortcut around it.

Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of what is actually happening in schools today, where current approaches fall short, and practical ways to think about AI policy moving forward.

Every time a company claims it's "100% powered by renewable energy," or a product says it's "made with clean energy," we all assume that statement traces back to a wind turbine or solar panel that actually produced the electricity. But... who actually checks?

This session digs into the hidden system behind clean energy claims — Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), the registries that issue and track them, and why verifying generation claims is harder (and more interesting) than it sounds. We'll start with the trust problem, then walk through what it actually takes to validate a claim using real-world data.

Along the way we'll: * Peek inside the strange world of US energy infrastructure: 3,000+ utilities, 50 state regulatory schemes, several registries, and a federal dataset that still starts in CSVs and dBase * Reconstruct missing power plant data using 20+ years of free public datasets * Use physics models and real satellite weather data to estimate what a generator should have produced * Compare modeled vs. reported generation and ask: does this claim hold up? * Show how it all turns into an API (with a quick peek at code)

We'll also touch on how richer data unlocks new kinds of claims — like energy tied to pollinator-friendly solar — and why that matters for the next phase of the energy transition.

Expect a mix of storytelling, consumer-friendly examples (yes, Catan), light audience participation with fun rewards, and practical lessons on working with messy public data. No energy background required. If you like uncovering hidden systems — or just a new way to think about "trust, but verify" — you'll fit right in.

Let’s be honest—incident management isn’t just about dashboards, severity levels, and status updates. It’s about people. It’s about pressure. And sometimes… it’s about quietly wondering if everything is falling apart (including you).

In this session, we’ll go beyond theory and into the real world of incident response—where communication gets messy, decisions aren’t imperfect, and the difference between chaos and control often comes down to how we show up in the moment.

Through real-world scenarios (names and minor details changed to protect the privacy of those involved), we’ll break down what actually works during high-severity incidents—how to create calm, structure, and clarity when everything feels urgent.

We’ll also go where many talks don’t: the uncomfortable parts. The missteps. The failures. The moments where things didn’t go as planned—and what we learned from them.

You’ll walk away with practical approaches to: • Leading incidents with confidence and clarity • Running and participating in truly blameless postmortems • Using premortems and proactive strategies to prevent incidents before they happen • Influencing a culture of reliability—even when priorities compete

And because growth doesn’t stop at work, we’ll briefly explore how these same practices—reflection, ownership, and learning—can be applied to our personal lives, including navigating career setbacks with intention and clarity.

This session is interactive—come ready to reflect, share your own experiences, and learn from others. Because the most valuable lessons in incident management don’t come from slides… they come from the stories we’re willing to tell.

You’ve built systems for your code, your products, and your companies—but is your life running on legacy software? Many high-performers treat their professional goals with rigorous engineering and their personal lives with hope and caffeine. The result is the bottleneck effect: burnout, fragile resilience, and lost vision.

In this session, we apply the principles of a Business Operating System (BOS) to the most important organization you lead: yourself.

We will explore how structured rhythms and visual tools create the focus and action steps to achieve your vision. Using frameworks from the world of scaling businesses, we will identify how to move from reactive living to intentional leadership across all areas of life.

Session Takeaways -

The Personal Scorecard: Identify the 3–5 Metrics that prove your life is on track, moving from subjective feelings to objective data.

The 3-Year Picture Mapping: Craft a Vision Board (digital or physical) that serves as the User Interface for your Life OS, ensuring your daily sprints align with your long-term North Star.

Personal Meeting Rhythms: How to implement a weekly & annual resets to audit your energy, solve personal bottlenecks, and reduce decision fatigue.

Delegate & Elevate: Use an energy-audit framework to identify tasks that drain your battery and create a plan to offload or optimize them.

Everyone's talking about what AI can do. Almost nobody talks about what breaks when you actually try to run a business on it.

I've spent the past year rebuilding my consulting practice on AI. Not one tool, not one workflow. The whole operational layer. And the problems worth talking about were never the AI. They were the detection system I had to build to stop my own content pipeline from publishing things that sound like a robot wrote them. The three-day silent outage caused by a renamed folder. The moment I tried to turn my sales instincts into a scoring model and realized I couldn't explain how I actually make decisions.

This is a walk through the real system: what it looks like, what it costs, what I broke building it, and the one insight that turned out to matter more than any tool I plugged in. You'll see the actual architecture, the actual banned word list, and an honest split of what I'd never do manually again versus what I gave back to the humans.

Have you ever felt frustrated trying to figure out how to model time in your Android app? The options are dizzying: ZonedDateTime, OffsetDateTime, dare I say... GregorianCalendar?

Our talk will give you everything you will ever need to know about modeling and displaying time in an Android application.

We'll cover which time APIs you should use, which ones you should avoid, and how to model and display timestamps in a wide variety of use cases.

This will be the last Android talk about time you'll ever need to attend!

Two years ago, I wrote about the future of Interior Designers in the world of AI.

Now that AI can design a room in seconds… did it actually happen?

Or are we (me) missing something about how we actually buy? Let's talk about it + the future of work and commerce for all of us.

https://katekuehl.medium.com/is-the-interior-designer-doomed-by-3d-generative-ai-aece2a92cc0d

Joining us will be Steve Bonoff, of IQ Design. He will talk about how interior designers are operating today and what it means for the future of the industry.

Session will include a talk and group discussion addressing/challenging: • AI can design anything, so why don’t we just buy it? • Why infinite options make decisions harder, not easier • Coordination and the meaning of labor • Why “Just Generate It Yourself” Doesn’t Work

In this presentation, we will share our experience of bringing together a study group to learn how to build and scale language models from scratch using Stanford’s open-source CS-336 coursework.

What started as a straightforward plan with weekly study sessions and hands-on homework, quickly came face to face with reality: varied skill levels, competing priorities, and schedules that didn’t resemble a university semester. Along the way, we discovered that organizing and sustaining the group was at least as challenging as understanding the trade-offs in scaling and optimizing the training of large language models.

In this session, we’ll discuss the motivations and tactics that helped us form and keep an engaged learning community. We’ll cover how we adapted the material for participants with diverse backgrounds, restructured expectations when the original plan fell short, and leaned into individual members’ expertise to create a more sustainable and rewarding experience.

The talk is practical, honest, and intentionally humorous. Attendees will leave with actionable insights for running their own technical study groups, learning effectively from open-source coursework, and navigating the inevitable “bumps in the road” that come with expanding their knowledge, especially when doing so alongside others.

As engineers, we have a gift: we can build systems for which we are not the intended users.

Minneapolis has a rich musical culture. There are incredible jazz musicians and venues in this city, and there's a running joke about not being able to throw a rock without hitting an indie recording studio. Japan revolutionized the world of music with smartphones. How can we do the same with AI in Minneapolis? It's time we built locally: tools to discover local music, software written for our artists, systems that drive real growth for the people making music here.

I'm inviting three musicians working in different areas to sit down and talk about the problems they face in their daily lives, and how we can make their lives easier so they have more time to make music:

• An educator
• A live performer
• A producer

DAW Accessibility. You can tell that designers weren't involved in building tools like Logic Pro, Ableton, and Reaper. How do we make these systems easier to use?

Generative AI & Ethics. Generative AI in music raises real questions. We'll talk about existing software, what musicians like and don't like about it, and where the ethical lines are. I explored some of this in my article, "Much Ado About AI: An Artist, a Writer, a Musician, and an Engineer Walk Into a Debate."

AI in Education. How can we use AI meaningfully in teaching music?

Local Music & Trends. What kind of music are Minneapolis musicians making and interested in making? Who are the stakeholders: who's making music, who's listening, who's going to live shows?

I've built a lot of software with LLMs over the past year. Some of it went great. Some of it turned into five prompts of debugging hallucinated code while I questioned every life choice that brought me to that moment. For most people, the biggest bottleneck is the expectations they bring with them. Specifically, it's the mental models we bring to the work.

In this session I'll share the frameworks I've landed on for actually shipping apps with LLMs, not just generating code and hoping for the best. We'll talk about how to treat an LLM like a tireless intern instead of a magic wand, how to recognize and escape context collapse before your project goes sideways, and the specific tooling and workflows that bridge the gap between a raw prompt and something you can actually deploy.

If "vibecoding" hasn't been working for you, or if you're an experienced engineer who keeps getting stuck in loops with AI, this talk is for you. You'll leave with a repeatable approach to designing, prompting, and shipping real software without the frustration.

Ah, Product and UX/UI Designers - we love our work. We're protective of it and we take pride in it. So we can naturally get a little nervous to show off our creations (especially when we're new!) because we're so closely tied to our designs that any critique of our work feels like a critique of us! But it doesn't have to be that way...

We can all feel anxiety when it comes to our design work, so the question is: how can we better separate ourselves from our work, and lower our anxiety? Whether you are new to design or a seasoned designer or maybe you just want to hear about how to help calm your own nervous system, this session is for you! We'll talk through how intentional language and reframing scenarios can help alleviate the pressure that we too often put upon ourselves. Presented by someone who is a Recovering Anxious Designer and has come out on the other side, this session will provide you with tips and tricks on how to take those situations that elevate your anxiety and turn them into scenarios that excite you!

LLMs and agents are changing the ways we build and maintain software.

As a result, a skill becoming increasingly relevant is the ability to guide and govern LLMs and agents.

In this session I will share a set of LLM adoption levels, and what tends to show up at each level. My hope is that this gives software engineers a practical way to:

• see where they are today
• understand what it might look like to grow
• take the next step

This matters for us, and for those we lead. Understanding where our colleagues and direct reports are on that journey can help us create safer, wiser, and more effective ways of adopting these tools together.

Lessons from building real AI systems that survive beyond the hackathon.

AI projects often shine in demos or hackathons, but most fail to survive the messy realities of real-world deployment. In this talk, I’ll share insights from building agentic AI systems that actually work beyond proof-of-concept. We’ll explore where AI projects typically break: data pipelines, infrastructure, human workflows, and deployment processes. More importantly, I’ll present a framework for designing AI systems that endure, including modular pipelines, human-in-the-loop design, and practical monitoring strategies. Attendees will leave with actionable lessons on bridging the gap between flashy demos and reliable, production-ready AI solutions. This session is targeted at developers, product builders, and anyone curious about what it really takes to make AI projects work in practice.

The Great story of landing your first software engineering job isn’t one you'll keep to yourself. It’s a defining moment—one you’ll retell for decades, maybe even pass down (haha, it's that important!). This story of yours deserves our full and immediate attention.

In this talk, I’ll share my path to my first major fintech role—graduating with a Computer Science degree at the height of AI layoffs, when the path forward was anything but clear.

I did not have the luxury of leaving it to chance so naturally, I tried EVERYTHING. Not * casually.* But deliberately - treating the job hunt like:

• a system to be studied, tested, and refined.

Somewhere between joining every meetup I could find and handing out resumes at every tech conferences, something clicked:

• You don’t just live your “great story”—you write it in real time.

What This Talk Is (And Isn’t):

I won’t ask you to grind through LeetCode-style questions—you’re probably already doing that.

Instead, we’ll focus on what actually moves the needle across three fronts:

• Building real value and capacity
• Crafting a clear personal narrative
• Engaging with the world with curiosity

We’ll move past the obsession with the “perfect resume”
and focus on building a portfolio and a story that connect.

Because today, it’s not just about skill. It’s about how clearly you can communicate: - what you’ve built
- what you’ve learned
- and why it matters

No fluff. No recycled advice. Just what works—and how to start shaping the story you’re already in.

Let's work on it together. See you there!

A space to connect with and support women across the tech community. Open to all who want to build meaningful connections, share experiences, and strengthen the network.

Minnebar is a great place to catch up with old friends, the Networking Lounge is a dedicated place to meet new people. Join us to chat about anything and everything.

In the Twin Cities tech scene, a handful of companies keep coming up - places like Code42, Sport Ngin, Refactr, Clockwork, JAMF, GovDelivery, etc. - where it was a genuinely great place to work and a cohort of really good people all happened to be there at the same time. If you were there during the right years, you know it, and you probably still keep in touch with those people.

This session is about those runs. For each company, we'll try to articulate three things:

1. 📈 When was the golden era?
2. ✨ What made it special?
3. 📉 What changed?

‼️ Help me make this session great: I put together a very short form to gather data and stories for this session. You'll help me immensely by filling it out for one (or multiple) companies you've worked at that had one of these runs. Even better, share it with former coworkers who were there during the same era.

I'll compile the results and share my findings during this session. It won't be about naming and shaming, more identifying patterns and themes to help us all recognize these special places when we see them in the future.

For years, consumer 3D printing was the exclusive domain of the "dedicated tinkerer", a niche pursuit requiring a mix of engineering prowess, patience, and arcane technical knowledge. However, recent breakthroughs in hardware, software, and materials have stripped away the complexity, transforming 3D printers from temperamental experiments into accessible tools for the casual hobbyist, the home organizer, and the creative professional alike.

Some suggest that the 3D printer is on its way to becoming a standard household appliance, as ubiquitous as the toaster or the microwave. But how close are we to that reality?

In this session, we will:

*Look back at a brief history of 3D Printing from the "RepRap" movement to the mostly plug-and-play machines of today.

*Learn how 3D Printing looks and feels today, including 3d model distribution methods, materials used, various technologies in play, and how it all works

*Dive into the exciting advancements currently reshaping the space, including high-speed printing, toolchanging, multi-material capabilities, and the emergence of AI in the space

*Identify some key roadblocks that could stifle innovation and prevent further development and adoption of 3D printing in the US and around the world

And more!

Join us if you're curious about getting into 3D printing, or just want to learn more about what's going on!

Large Language Models are remarkably effective at generating code, tests, and even entire system designs. They’re also remarkably effective at creating systems that no one fully understands.

As engineering velocity increases, so does intellectual entropy. Add in the variance introduced by AI-assisted development, and teams fall into volatility traps: systems that appear to improve rapidly while quietly increasing risk.

Drawing from real-world edge and hardware systems, we’ll explore why correctness is not a property of code, but of the system as a whole. We’ll also examine how AI can either amplify entropy or reduce it.

Who should attend: Engineers, architects, and technical leaders building real systems. Beyond that, anyone else living in a world where things are moving faster, but getting harder to reason about, debug, or trust.

We started TechMasters 17 years ago with the promise of helping grow presenters for the Developer Community. Since then we've evolved to a hybrid tech focused meeting every Tuesday where people are able to learn and practice the skills necessary to evolve their careers and chase dreams of keynoting conferences. In this session we'll look at the key ingredients that helped spark the group and keeps it going, the story of TechMasters, Twin Cities.

This is the time for AI show-and-tell. No thought leadership. No "journey" slides. No executive summaries. Just AI practitioners, with a few minutes each, telling you what they're working on. Hot takes encouraged. Working demos encouraged. "AI failed spectacularly and here's why" talks get bonus applause.

Want to share your project? Fill out this form.

OpenClaw is an open-source agent framework. It moves the AI paradigm from "chatbot" to something that runs in the background, remembers what you've told it, and acts on a schedule. It also has a plugin ecosystem, allowing you to expand base functionality or build your own tools.

I'll start with a quick tour of OpenClaw for folks who haven't seen it: gateway, tools, skills, cron, memory. Then the plugin SDK: What definePluginEntry actually does; How to register tools the agent can call; How to ship skills as Markdown files a user can override without touching your code.

Then PolitiClaw: an OpenClaw plugin I've been working on. It watches federal legislation, scores reps against stances a user has declared, and drafts outreach letters that can be pasted into an email client.

No OpenClaw experience needed. A little TypeScript helps but isn't required.

BYOC - Bring your own craft (knitting, crochet, embroidery, cross stitch, etc)

Meet other crafters and work on your craft.

You have hard-earned skills and functional expertise that early-stage founders, younger professionals, and industry newcomers desperately need. Yet, many experienced professionals hesitate to step into advisory roles due to perceived barriers around time commitments, corporate optics, or simply knowing where to start. This session will break down those barriers and provide a practical roadmap for securing and succeeding in your first board or advisory position.

If you are worried about the corporate optics, rest assured: your boss is not going to fire you. A quick look at their LinkedIn profile will likely reveal that they advise multiple people and companies themselves. Furthermore, advisory work is highly flexible. A commitment of just a few focused hours a month can be incredibly impactful for a growing startup and entirely manageable alongside your main career.

What You’ll Walk Away With:

• A Specific Personal Template: A ready-to-use framework to help you package your corporate expertise into a highly sought-after advisory asset.

• A Network Outreach Plan: A specific, easy-to-follow plan to re-engage six people who have helped you along your career path, turning warm contacts into advisory conversations.

• Accelerated Day-Job Performance: Fresh perspectives and innovative approaches that directly improve your performance and decision-making in your primary role.

• Agile Solutions: Exposure to new tools, templates, and operational playbooks that work better, faster, and cheaper in younger, fast-moving companies.

About the Speaker:

Loran Gutt is currently balancing a rewarding day job as SVP Strategy and Corp Dev at Bazaarvoice with paid board and advisory roles across six companies, serving on the Board of Directors for Shipsi, acting as a CEO strategy advisor for Wunderkind, and several earlier-stage companies, while driving exponential revenue growth, executing transformational M&A, and delivering exceptional financial turnarounds and outsized returns (up to 6x ROIC) for top private equity-backed software and enterprise companies.

Personal reflection requires something most of us avoid: honesty and vulnerability. Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) members are trained to reflect regularly on their work, family, and personal life experiences through the “5% Reflection” practice, but consistency and depth can be very hard.

In this session, you will learn about the EO 5% Reflection methodology and I'll demonstrate a custom GPT that helps guide deeper, more vulnerable thinking about your experiences.

We’ll explore:

• Why meaningful reflection is uncomfortable – and why that matters
• How prompts structured by AI can encourage more honest thinking
• A live demo of the custom GPT 5% Coach
• How sharing your 5% reflection can benefit others through resonance

This will be part demo, part discussion. Come if you’re interested in thinking more clearly about your vulnerabilities, experiences, successes, and blind spots.

Each member of this panel is currently using a mentor and has found it valuable. They will discuss their experience in a formal mentoring program and will address these issues:

• Why consider having a mentor? • How does a mentor differ from other advisors and investors? • What should you look for in a mentor or in a mentoring program? • What is an example of your mentor’s impact on your decision making? • What does a good mentor do and not do? • How has your mentor changed how you think about your business? • What is your cadence for meeting with your mentor?

A good mentor provides unvarnished, straight guidance and feedback shaped by experience and motivated by a pure desire to see the entrepreneur succeed.

We believe that this discussion will benefit any entrepreneur considering a mentor or mentoring program. We hope it will provide specific and actionable guidance. The panel moderator will conduct an “open Q&A” session for the final 10-15 minutes of the session.

This panel, with a different set of entrepreneurs, was well-received at Minnebar 18 and 19, with 40--50 attendees.. Mark Capaldini will once again serve as Moderator.

When something breaks on a team, we almost always blame a person. The one who didn't document because there was no single place to put it. The one who dropped the ball because nobody told them they were holding it. The one who's been figuring it out as they go because nobody wrote down how any of this works.

But team failures aren't only people problems. They're operational problems. That work lives in a Slack thread from eight months ago, in a shared drive nobody governs, in a process people follow because they've always done it that way — or in the head of the one person everyone knows to ask. And nobody owns any of it.

This session names that work and introduces SEEN — a framework for operating teams where nothing critical is hidden:

• S — Spaces: Shared tools and spaces that are governed, maintained, and owned
• E — Exchanges: Handoffs between people and roles that are explicit, designed, and acknowledged
• E — Expectations: Processes, norms, and institutional knowledge that are visible and challengeable
• N — Network: Decisions, context, and feedback that reliably reach the people who need them

Come ready to recognize your team in the patterns. Leave with a practical audit you can run Monday and language to talk about the invisible work that's been slowing you down.

"But when we move off CodeIgniter and onto Laravel, that'll fix all the little bugs"

"Check out this new JS Framework; it'll improve our dev productivity"

"The vendor assures me the migration to this new ERP will be painless, and the ROI will pay off in 3 years"

For long-running systems, upgrades are often more painful than they're worth.

But what's the alternative? Sticking with old, crusty code from yore?

We'll discuss why upgrading is painful, different options for upgrading, and finally, ways we've found to not upgrade.

Come and share your upgrade experiences. Come and learn why we're still running a project on 2010's latest technologies - Grunt and Bower - and why we have forced ourselves to not upgrade.

Build a Bridge with Interactive Art Hosted by Crayon Kelly

Step beyond the velvet rope and into a space where the "fourth wall" of the gallery is stripped away. Build a Bridge with Interactive Art is an immersive session designed to explore how active public participation transforms a static piece of work into a living community narrative.

Led by Kelly Anderson, founder of the Crayon Kelly Experience, this session dives into the mechanics of interactive art as a tool for connection. We will examine how blending traditional mediums—like melted crayons and acrylics—with digital painting and large-scale public installations can bridge the gap between artist and observer.

What to Expect:

The Philosophy of Participation: Insights into shifting the artistic focus from "look but don't touch" to collaborative creation.

Case Studies in Connection: A look at how mural festivals and live painting competitions (like Time Stamp Art) foster local identity and engagement.

Creative Strategy: How to design experiences that encourage people to contribute their own stories to a shared visual space.

Whether you are a creator looking to deepen your community impact or a strategist interested in the intersection of art and public engagement, join us to discover how we can use the canvas to build stronger, more vibrant bridges.

The Dark Lords of Tech are nearing completion of their mission: to seize all the world's wealth and power. Their plan's one flaw: it depends on controlling all of our data. Enter the Atmosphere. We are a group of builders, designers, dreamers, hobbits and elves forging the tools of our liberation. In this session, we'll demo one of them — the App Wizard, an open source web tool that helps anyone scaffold a personal app on the AT Protocol (the one behind Bluesky). We'll also talk about the wider atproto ecosystem and how the protocol puts users back in control of their data. Bring a laptop to build alongside us, or just a notebook to sketch ideas.

Wherever your interests lie, there's a corner of the Atmosphere waiting for you. Join us.

(Oh, the ring? That part was just a metaphor.)

Bring your business (or other technological) bottlenecks. We will build the solutions live with you. (using AI or not depending on the wifi ;) We are Microsoft partners and know OpenAI(Codex/Agent Mode)/Microsoft Copilot, Power Platform, Webflow, Lovable, Supabase, Github, and likely more I'm forggeting right now. We can as a group figure it out we can automate it!

In this interactive session, FlowDevs engages directly with the audience to tackle real-world operational challenges. We ask attendees to share the specific inefficiencies they face in their businesses. From there, we select one or two prime examples and engineer clear, automated solutions on the spot.

• 00:00 - 00:05 | Briefing: Explaining the interactive format and selecting audience challenges.
• 00:05 - 00:35 | Live Build: Architecting a custom workflow, automation, AI agent, website, or app to solve the selected problem in real-time.
• 00:35 - 00:40 | Wrap-up: Reviewing the solution and answering audience questions.

• Business Card Digitization: Configuring Microsoft Power Automate to scan physical business cards and route the extracted data directly to SharePoint.
• Agentic Review Management: Using Make.com to create an automated workflow where an LLM agentically drafts responses to business reviews.
• Automated Lead Generation: Configuring Codex or Claude to scrape the web and compile a CSV file of prospective leads.
• Deep Research Prep: Using Gemini or OpenAI to conduct deep research tasks and compile background briefs on upcoming meeting attendees.
• Rapid MVP Development: Building a functional Lovable MVP featuring a front-end form and a connected database.
• Career Prep Automation: Scraping the web for specific job interview details and deploying Claude to generate tailored sample cover letters.

The quote in the title was encouragement I received about a program in 2012, when I was deciding to enroll in an M.S. in Software Engineering. I was not an English major. I was something considered even more useless during The Great Recession; I was a Global Studies major with a world language addiction.

• "Delve"
• "It's Not X, It's Y"
• Em dashes (-- RIP?)
• Bulleted lists with emojis

Let's review and discuss LLMs and code generation through a linguistic lens. Not just examples of the cues that tip us off that someone has sent us their Chat response unedited and our thoughts about the etiquette of that (although this is welcome!); but consideration of changing internet language norms. Because language.

“Language is humanity's most spectacular open source project.” ― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

One thing I love about software as an industry is it has given me greater opportunity for international collaboration than even my original major. My colleagues speak a multitude of mother tongues. A few coworkers have called into zoom from a new country every other week. But at the end of the day, we all produce code in languages that take their vocabulary mostly from English (our current business lingua franca). We'll explore exceptions, and look at how AI is also a language unto itself that is in turn shaping our human communication.

In the spirit of keeping Minnebar weird, come ready to experiment with LLMs and creative/collaborative output in a competitive race. I'll bring the markers and posterboard!

Thankfully, AI features usually don't fail in fun, dramatic movie-villain ways.

They fail in boring, expensive, and embarrassing ways: bad outputs, bad decisions, unsafe actions, misplaced trust, and workflows that quietly do the wrong thing at scale.

The failures come from biased data, unsafe tool access, overreliance on bad outputs, weak approval flows, and a lack of monitoring once the system ships

In this session we'll look at common failure modes, how your model can be attacked, and why your internal Red Teaming needs to include the whole business. This is half cautionary tale, half lab, and half builder’s playbook.

Wall Street doesn't want you to know this exists.

There's a legal, fully-regulated path for founders to become publicly traded —without venture capitalists, and without surrendering control of your company. It's called an Initial Crowd Offering (ICO), and in 2026, it's more powerful than ever.

In this session, David "The Little Duke" Duccini breaks down the securities "jujitsu" that lets founders combine existing exemptions — MNvest, Reg CF, Reg D, and Reg A+ — to raise capital directly from the public. Stack them right, and you can unlock unlimited capital while keeping VCs completely out of the equation. (Yes, the ones who fund less than 1% of what crosses their desk. The vampire clan, not just the vultures.)

But raising money is only half the story.

By linking your offering to an Alternative Trading System (ATS) like SPPX, you don't just raise — you go public. Early investors get liquidity. Your cap table gets cleaned up through smart lot-size mechanics. And you build a private secondary market that works for you — one that doesn't allow short-selling.

You'll also learn the single most important insight repeat founders already know: sell the exit first. It's why they keep getting funded on worse ideas. Because investors don't care about your vision — they care about cashing out. Master that, and you raise 150–300% more, right out of the gate.

"An investment without an exit is just a donation."

And stick around for the closer: a clever successive-offering hack — borrowed from the Reg A+ "30% selling-shareholder rule" — that lets you create a stabilizing bid in your own private market. Founders getting paid. Early investors getting liquid. The crowd winning alongside you.

This is the blueprint.

Listen to the episode that breaks it all down on The Big Idea Deep Dive Podcast

See how a single AI-powered conversation can replace your standup, your task board, and your meeting notes all at once.

In this live demo, we'll walk through an AI operations hub built for a startup that turns natural conversation into structured work: checking in, assigning tasks, extracting action items from meetings, and tracking weekly progress — all through chat.

• Conversational AI Work Assistant
  A tool-calling assistant that manages tasks, check-ins, and priorities in real time

• Automatic Meeting Extraction
  Powered by Read.ai webhook integration — watch a meeting turn into actionable parking lot items with zero manual effort

• Customizable AI Extraction Prompt
  Control how the AI interprets and structures your meeting outputs

• Weekly Timeline View
  Visualize team task distribution at a glance

At the same time tooling supporting test automation is tasked with discharging some unique responsibilities, the principles that set the stage for success with testing tooling closely resemble those that are equally as beneficial to first-class software solutions.

In particular, test automation frameworks carry a lot of weight when it comes to supporting/ providing access to define- and execute tests, to produce reliable test result data, and to provide scaffolding for extension and adaptation to improve coverage and reach. And as AI becomes more closely intertwined with how we deliver software, it will become increasingly important not just to be able to release with confidence, but also to be able to analyze-, evaluate-, and interact with work product with confidence.

Despite this, organizations for some reason seem to encounter very similar sorts of dysfunction when working with test automation frameworks. Ultimately it is the sort of dysfunction that presents unwelcome trade-offs related to sunken cost. This dysfunction seems to follow six types of decisions with distinct characteristics and trade-offs. If those in charge of execution and decision-making potentially understood what these decisions looked like and how they incur risk of dysfunction, perhaps they could anticipate the trouble and make decisions that better managed that risk better.

I’ve been brought in by a couple different organizations interested in resolving dysfunction in existing test automation frameworks and to build new tooling that stand a chance of circumnavigating it. I’m hosting this session to share what I see — in terms of who seems to be involved in/ affected by the dysfunction, where the dysfunction happens, and what/ how/ why organizations seem to (do to) perennially open themselves to risk.

Format: 30-ish minutes of presentation, 8-10 minutes of Q&A.

Convincing energy is still the thing I run out of the fastest; after big asks or big days filled with asks, I often need a day (or two, or several) to recover.

This means that sometimes (often) the growth of my company, How to be Second, is stuck behind my convincing energy; frankly, this also limits our “luck potential”, because the only way I have found to influence luck (which plays a brutally important role in success) is to just increase our “luck surface area” - aka, how many people I know and make asks of.

Turns out you can’t guarantee a “Yes” if you ask 100 people for something, but it also seems to be a hell of a lot more likely.

I’ve been able to smooth out the number of asks I need to make partially through the people I surround myself with, but it all goes back to getting help.

This one isn’t solved, it’s just lived with. Let’s talk about convincing energy, how you can better understand where you are at, and how we can all live with our capacities to show up and ask for the resources and help our companies need.

Hi Folks,

I wanted to showcase a passion project I have been working on because of an increasing growth in interest in temperamental analysis I wanted to create a project that puts that knowledge then says lets use that understanding to grow ourselves into a greater state of harmony and increase our magnanimity and not use temperament and personality analysis as a way to justify fixed non conducive habits.

Thank you, Abdirahman Ali

5-10 speakers who are game developers in some capacity, talking about their games and/or their experiences.

We'll update this description with short blurbs from each of the speakers as they are locked-in.

For example:

Martin Grider will talk about his exploration of game design ideas related to hexagons with rounded (convex and concave) edges.

Chip Pedersen What does a retired Game Executive do, when they retire? They make the games they always wanted to do with today's tools.

Samuel Fletcher will be making a case for making games about making art, presenting some alternatives to gamification and showing his thoughts in practice in his music composition-based game Audionaut.

Jered Byford will discuss the implementation, probability, and psychology of randomness in board games.

Most teams think they have a strategy problem.

They don’t.

They’re reacting.

Reacting to pressure, shifting priorities, stakeholder noise, and the constant push to move faster. Over time, those reactions start to look like leadership—but they quietly drive misalignment, rework, and products that never quite deliver the outcomes teams expect.

In this session, we’ll explore why smart teams with the right tools, talent, and intentions still struggle to make progress—and how the way people and organizations operate under pressure shapes the way decisions get made and products get built.

This isn’t a session about frameworks or process. It’s about recognizing the patterns underneath them—and what changes when you start to see them clearly.

17 years doing this session and this likely is the most important one I have done.

While things aren’t broken… they are not the same.

Hiring is happening: with smaller teams and higher expectations.

AI is being used across recruiting, hiring, annual reviews, and promotions.

And a lot of technologists are asking:

“Am I on the right path… and am I doing the right things?”

After a lot of conversations across the community this year, I’m back to share what I’m seeing and hearing, and how I’d think about building a career in tech right now.

This is a choose your own adventure agenda... please ask questions, bring up other/additional topics:

•The current state of tech hiring (Minnesota + Bay Area)

•How careers in tech actually develop (early, mid, and beyond)

•What employers are really looking for and how they evaluate candidates to hire and for promotions

•How AI is being used in hiring (what matters, what doesn’t)

•Why strong candidates are getting missed—and how to stand out

•Different ways to work in tech: full-time, contract, and project-based

•Why adaptability and optionality matter more than ever

•The growing importance of human skills in an AI-driven environment

•Practical ways to build visibility and momentum with your employer and community

•Looking out the next 1/3/5 years… things to do and be aware of

Most technical problems — from architecture debates to live production incidents — aren’t solved by brilliance. They’re solved by clear thinking, calm communication, and building trust, especially when the pressure is on and information is incomplete.

This session explores what actually works when systems are complex, the clock is ticking, and everyone involved wants to help — but in wildly different ways! We’ll talk about practical ways to create shared clarity: mapping the problem space, narrowing uncertainty, focusing on evidence over confidence, and keeping groups aligned even when goals differ.

The focus isn’t on heroics or blame, but on how individuals and teams can work together effectively when no one has the full picture — and still make good decisions.

Sometimes string and cardboard aren’t enough to figure out a home improvement project. As a visual person I have found it extremely handy to use a couple of free tools to help visualize things before diving in. This started as a way for me to understand projects around my own house, but now it has transformed into a furniture business.

In this talk I will go over my process for taking a 3D scan of a space and prototyping with it in Blender. I'll also cover some of the pitfalls and rough edges you can encounter, and answer any questions about what's possible with these tools.

The Jacquard loom gave us binary code and beautiful brocades. What else has the world of textiles given us and how to does engaging in textile craft make us better technologists? Turns out a lot. Spend 40 minutes engaging in hand quilting and Sashiko embroidery with your peers. Zero experience required. We are all here to learn.

What am I doing? Who am I? What SHOULD I be doing?

All transitions are hard. I'm not just talking about the "I need a new job" transition. It could also be a "I have a new boss" or a "it's really hitting me that I'm 40" or even "I guess I want to be done working" transition.

We ALL transition, and inevitably some pesky thoughts creep up when that happens. We start to question and maybe even doubt what we are doing or the choices we have made. And then making even more choices is harder.

Well, there is a lot of help out there and navigating that can be another hurdle and before you know it you haven't gotten any help and you are stumbling around uncertain and confused.

Let's talk about transitional questions and how the different types of help out there may or may not meet the needs you have.

I firmly believe, and my life has shown me, that going alone is the worst option.

Transitions are hard, different types of help exists. Let's navigate that together.

One of us spent 18 years in a high school classroom. The other leads enterprise AI strategy at the University of St. Thomas. Together we built RealPath Learning — and won the SheBuilds Season 2 Buildathon out of nearly 2,000 global applicants.

The problem we couldn't stop thinking about: teachers spend 3 hours differentiating a single lesson — and a 2024 DOJ ruling just made that a federal compliance crisis for every K-12 district in America.

So we built something. Using Lovable, Claude, and a hackathon deadline, we went from idea to working product fast. Now we have a real company, district pilots , and a $500K seed raise in motion.

This session is the unfiltered story: what tools we used, what broke, what surprised us, and what we wish we'd known about building a compliance-driven EdTech startup as two non-traditional founders. If you've ever had an idea you thought required a "real" developer — or a "real" background — this session is for you.

Something fundamental is happening to the American economy. By 2030, 60% of us will be working independently as 1099ers — not as a trend, but as a structural shift. The traditional org chart is dissolving, and what’s replacing it isn’t chaos. It’s millions of fractional professionals, empowered by AI tools, reorganizing around their own independence.

This is the next chapter of the American economy — not bigger companies, but better-equipped individuals building organizations of one that perform like organizations of many.

If you’ve been laid off, you’re not behind. You’re standing at the front edge of this shift.

This talk lays out the macroeconomic forces driving it, the AI infrastructure making it possible, and why the smartest move you can make right now is to stop looking for your next job and start building your next chapter.

AI can generate code faster than most teams can think. That does not mean the hard part is over. The software industry has spent years overvaluing output: more tickets closed, more features shipped, more code written, more visible motion mistaken for progress. AI supercharges all of that. It also reveals how incomplete that view always was. In enterprise software especially, the hardest part was never just making more things. It was deciding what matters, what is noise, what to preserve, what to cut, and how to keep systems and products coherent under real-world pressure.

AI is compressing the value of output and exposing the value of decision quality. It is exceptional at generation and acceleration, and increasingly useful in analysis and recommendation. But the highest-leverage work in software still lives in framing the problem well, setting the right constraints, making sound tradeoffs across technical and business realities, and staying accountable for the consequences over time. This talk argues that AI is not reducing the value of great engineers, product thinkers, or technical leaders. It is making their highest-value work easier to see. In a world of abundant generation, the differentiator is increasingly judgment.

Potential investors assess risk from the moment they open your pitch deck. This interactive session will give founders a framework for assessing and addressing some of their biggest unknowns - before they face a diligence panel. Sound expensive? It doesn't have to be! Learn how to zero in on the most impactful bang for your limited-resource bucks.

Audience takeaways: - Overview of Design Thinking and founder self-assessment - Brief intro to identifying your biggest actionable risk - Examples of how quick and dirty experiments can be used to de-risk complex technology

Format: - 15-20 minutes interactive presentation - 20-25 minutes speed brainstorming (1:1 volunteer founder/speaker, 5 min each, open with identified risk and close with testing ideas)

For the past year, AI tools have fundamentally changed how I write software. In this session, I'll live-build something from scratch using the AI-powered development workflow I use every day — no slides, no deck, just a terminal and 40 minutes on the clock.

Whether you're a seasoned dev curious about AI-assisted workflows or a skeptic who wants to see it break, come watch and find out how far we can get. The product will get shipped at the end of the session!

AI-generated films and AI-assisted films aren't a future concept — they're happening right now, and I'm making them.

In this session, I'll pull back the curtain on the exact pipeline I use to produce cinematic AI films from scratch — no camera, no crew, no studio. Just a prompt, the right AI tools chained together, and a story worth telling.

I'll walk through every stage live — writing the script, generating scenes, cloning voices, composing music, and cutting the final edit. You'll leave with a repeatable, real-world pipeline you can start using the same day.

Most founders become the marketing department by accident. One day you're building the product, the next you're writing ad copy, scheduling emails, analyzing data, and wondering why none of it is converting.

This session is for founders and small teams who are doing marketing without a marketing team - and want to stop guessing.

I've run full-stack marketing solo for multiple businesses across e-commerce and service industries: Meta Ads at 10+ ROAS (industry average is 2-4x), email flows generating $20K+/week in revenue, and lead gen systems that run without the founder in the middle of every decision.

What we'll cover: - The prioritization framework - what to build first when everything feels urgent and your budget isn't infinite - Where founders waste the most time and money - the three things that look like marketing but don't move revenue - What "good enough" actually looks like - how to know when to optimize vs. when to move on - The one metric that tells you if your marketing is working - before you've spent months figuring it out the hard way

You'll leave with a clear picture of where to focus next - whether you're pre-revenue, scaling, or just tired of marketing feeling like a black hole.

What happens when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence? We're finding out in real time -- in the coming years, this technological revolution will reshape not only our economic and political world, it will reshape all of us. But what happens after the dust settles?

This talk will summarize and synthesize ideas from Novacene, by James Lovelock (2019) and The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil (1999). Both of these books offer a prescient vision of the near future as well as predictions of where all of this is headed.

We'll talk about science fiction, consciousness, the human condition, and what life looks like when the machines become our caretakers.

Title taken from the poem of the same name by by Richard Brautigan.

You show up for community. Mutual aid, the march, the group chat that actually does something.

But at work, when you see a broken policy or a budget decision that hurts the people it's supposed to help, you accept it's just the way things are. It's not because you don't care. It's because you're good at the technical part, but no one ever taught you to make a case in the language the leadership understands.

I'm a working accountant who came up through education, nonprofit, and community organizing before I ever touched a financial statement. I spent years watching leadership get it wrong while frontline workers already knew the answer. So I did something about it: I became the finance person. I graduated summa cum laude with degrees in business and accounting and minors in economics and finance.

This session is what I learned in the field, and how you can use it without sitting through a lecture on budgets.

We'll work through three moves that actually shift the conversation with finance and leadership. No manipulation; no selling out. No becoming someone you're not. You'll practice with real scenarios from tech, healthcare, and nonprofits. You'll leave with a one-page tool you can use Monday morning.

Conviction is necessary, but it's just the start. This is the rest of it.

This session is for people who do what's right out in the world and are ready to make it happen from a work laptop, too.

In 2007, my wife and I started Creed Interactive in our basement with a mortgage to cover, a lot of hustle, and no certainty it would become anything lasting. Over 15 years, we grew it exponentially and we built a strong business where we ultimately exited successfully to Delta Dental Insurance.

By most measures, it worked. We created opportunities and achieved the goals we set out to reach. But starting over today, I am not building my next start up the same way again.

In this talk, I’ll share what actually drove the company’s success: how we found the right markets, hired people who could grow with the business, used retainer work to reduce volatility, learned to say no to bad-fit projects, and got clearer about profitability and focus. I’ll also talk about the less visible lessons: the joy of building with your spouse, the emotional cost of growth, and why a successful exit can still leave you rethinking how you want to build.

In my next start up, I am changing my definition of what is worth building. I am creating something different and finding a new method on how quickly truth should surface, and what I’m no longer willing to trade for growth. This next company will follow a very different logic. I’ll end by sharing the shifts I’m making now, and why a successful first run can be the very thing that makes you question the whole playbook.

A common trope in stupid horror movies is authority figures who prove to be too clueless and wimpy to protect the people.

Sadly, the writers of those stupid horror movies are proving to be much smarter than they seem. Because there's nobody in charge of public health, you and I have MORE responsibility. Worse yet, there are people in charge who are working hard to undermine public health.

The threat I'm focusing on in this session is airborne pathogens. COVID-19 is an airborne disease and is still raging. Worse yet, so many people have had their immune systems weakened by COVID that more diseases have become more prevalent. H5N1 bird flu has become a full-blown pandemic for birds and cows, and not enough is being done to prevent it from becoming a pandemic for humans as well.

I believe that airborne pathogens are nastier than ingested pathogens. Unlike your stomach, your lungs and nasal passages do not have a strong acid that kills pathogens. You can wash your hands, but you CANNOT wash your lungs.

Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself from airborne pathogens, and the world would be a much better place if these practices were the norm. In this session, I will focus on air purifiers and masks. Air purification and masking in tandem provide MUCH more protection than either one alone.

People are more concerned about sanitizing surfaces, but sanitizing the air is MUCH more important. Air purifiers sanitize the air, and there are ways to build them on the cheap. Yes, it's possible to build your own air purifier that's just as effective as some commercial products that are at least 10 times more expensive. You can use the money you save to build more air purifiers. If you want a quiet air purifier that does not get in the way of conversations, music, TV shows, or music, you can build one using quiet PC fans or buy an air purifier from Clean Air Kits.

If you have abandoned wearing a mask, you should return to this practice. Just because you should wear a mask does NOT mean you have to suck it up and suffer from an uncomfortable one. In this session, I'll discuss the masks/respirators that I like because they offer comfort AND N95 or better protection. I'll discuss the masks I like best (such as my 3M HF-802SD and 3M Aura masks) and the masks that I hate (such as ear loop mask and 3M's N95 cup masks).

"Men Don't Need Better Listeners. They Need to Start Talking."

There are 17 veterans dying by suicide every day in America. Most of them never told anyone they were struggling.

We're not building a better therapy app. We're not building a journaling tool. We're not building another wellness chatbot with a calming color palette.

We're building an upstream intervention an AI that meets men in the silence before the crisis, and asks the question that cracks it open.

mrkos.ai is a bet that the hardest problem in conversational AI isn't sentiment analysis or context windows. It's this: how do you build something a man who doesn't want to talk will actually talk to?

This session is the honest answer. The philosophy behind it. The psychology inside it. The engineering decisions that kept us up at night. And what 571 questions taught us about what men actually need to hear. Live demo. Real conversation. Bring your skepticism.

Why wait? Head to Sandy’s and kick off the social hour early. Casual vibes, great conversations, and an easy transition into the evening.

This session presents findings from three original research studies examining how humans interact with AI — and how AI interacts with us. Across topics including LLM confidence calibration, AI‑generated phishing, and the effects of AI explanations on trust, this talk explores a central question: How does AI influence human judgment, accuracy, and over‑reliance?

I’m a high school student at Mounds View High School and very new to presenting at events like Minnebar, so this session is designed to be especially accessible, fast‑paced, and easy to follow. Despite being early in my research journey, I’ve spent the past year studying how people trust (and sometimes over‑trust) AI systems — and I’ll be sharing what surprised me most.

You’ll learn, as the results of my 3 papers reported:

How often large language models are confidently wrong, and why self‑reported confidence fails as a reliability signal

Why AI‑generated phishing emails are harder to detect — and why people are more confident when they’re wrong

How explanations (simple or detailed) increase trust and over‑reliance, even when the AI is incorrect

What these findings mean for cybersecurity, education, and everyday AI use

Whether you’re an AI researcher, developer, educator, or just curious about how humans and AI influence each other, you’ll walk away with a clearer understanding of the risks and opportunities in our rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.

Discuss salient helpful features available with Snowflake and highlights of my work experience during the recent years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_Inc.

Nadir Doctor is a Snowflake Data Super Hero and also actively works with Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases - both on-prem and in the cloud [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadirdoctor/]