Minnebar 17 Session Schedule

If you have never been to Minnebar before, one of the things we do to kick off our day is called Sesssion 0. All other sessions throughout the day are a break-out or ‘choose your own adventure’ style. Session 0 is a little different. We start our day together with a dynamic technology community leader, and this year we are honored to be joined by Deepinder Singh. Deepinder is an expert in climate tech, IoT, and co-founder of 75F. We are excited to have him with us to kick off a very special Earth Day Minnebar!

About the Session

Get ready to dive into a groundbreaking keynote that will change the way you think about the most important element to life on earth: Carbon. In this first-of-its-kind presentation, we present research from dozens of sources illustrating the hidden carbon cost of everything from paper straws to shopping malls, and illuminate what these fascinating numbers say about climate change.

Presenter Deepinder Singh will ask the audience to consider what power the individual has in this narrative, and how readily available technology can change everything in one of the most important sectors of climate: Our buildings. Deepinder co-founded 75F after designing some of the world’s fastest core networks for Tier 1 service providers like AT&T, NTT, and Verizon. With 25 years of experience in electronics and computing, he’s brought a wealth of embedded products to the market.

Hello Computer Friends, what if I told you there was a vibrant community of independent game developers in your very own state of Minnesota (and surrounding principalities) making seriously excellent video games?

You would demand PROOF, as is your right.

Mega Minne Multi Indie Mini Arcade is here to provide you so much proof that you are like "Okay, okay, I get it. Enough already."

We got:

💪 2 big screen TVs running a selection of locally made games and immersive tech fun

💪 This thing's going all day long

💪 In the main hallway area of Minnebar

See you at the arcade!

How do you know when it's time for a big transition in your business or career (or life in general)?

This session will be geared towards working/thinking through big changes. It will be very informal. Come expecting to participate, think through, and/or answer some questions like:

• Do you need a change?
• What are the signs that you need a change?
• How do you feel about change – love it or hate it?
• Have you dealt with big changes in your journey?
• Might you need a change and not even know it?

User research is essential for creating products that consumers truly love, but let's face it, it can be daunting to manage, prioritize and plan for. When should you talk to users? How do you gather feedback? And is one-on-one communication always necessary?

In this talk, we'll share our experiences scaling research and discuss the right and wrong times to lean into unmoderated testing.

Join in to learn valuable lessons for running successful user research, identifying when and where to focus your efforts, and why you shouldn't get too comfortable with just one research method.

How much JavaScript is on your website? Do you know what it does? No really, have you looked at the code and seen what it does? Probably not.

JavaScript controls the client side environment, and we can use it to compromise users, consume resources, and steal data. Yet many websites continue to add scripts without review, audit, or thought.

Let’s explore what JavaScript can do to a browser, the vectors that JavaScript can get added to websites, and how we can defend against JavaScript attacks.

Join us for a group discussion about quantum technologies! The Minnesota Quantum Computing community is starting regular meetups again - now's a great time to get involved.

Know something, or want to know something, about quantum computing, quantum networking and sensing, quantum information science, different types of qubit hardware, weird effects of superposition and entanglement, software APIs for simulating devices? Let's talk about it!

There are hundreds of quantum startups around the world. What kinds of projects are happening in quantum around the Upper Midwest?

Could the Twin Cities become a regional hub for this area of tech? Or is quantum still mostly theoretical?

Exact topics TBD until you come open the box.

Whether they know it or not, businesses have data. They use data to operate. They generate data on a daily basis. For some, this provides simple metrics to take a temperature check of the business - such as average cart value or total cost of sales. But from these basic data sets a deep story can usually be told. Through descriptive analysis or predictive modeling, this data can be leveraged to tell a story and pin point greater opportunity. Through causal analysis ideas can be tested and client journeys optimized.

At GED Test Service we are taking steps to unlock this additional value. We started with a relatively dormant database of information reporting total counts and averages, to exploratory analysis and visualizations. Recently we partnered with the U of M grad program to launch projects that cluster our learners into segments and create a model to predict their likelihood to earn their GED. Next, we are planning to use this prediction model to help us optimize our marketing resources to support the largest number of learners.

I’d love to share our journey on how we are unlocking this additional value for the business.

Collecting complex legislative data from hundreds of government websites isn't all sunshine & rainbows. We'll cover some of the strangest things we've encountered with scraping these sites: from awful APIs to entire government offices disappearing. Most official sources have been easy enough to find, while others have been more tricky, with at least one coming from an address scribbled on a napkin. Since we're also an open source project, we have some struggles with things like getting helpful issue submissions and ensuring clarity around the project ecosystem.

Open States strives to improve civic engagement at the state and federal level by providing data and tools regarding state legislatures by aggregating legislative information from all 50 states, Congress, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. This information is then standardized, cleaned, and published to the public for free. At the cost of our sanity.

This talk is recommended for folks interested in the process of scraping government data, contributing to open source civic tech projects, or for those that enjoy hearing about other people’s misery.

How old do you need to be to be an entrepreneur? 20? 30? 40? Or 60? 70? 75? When you think about entrepreneurs, you might think about those who forgo the college experience to chase their dreams. However, the idea that all successful entrepreneurs are vivacious, twenty-somethings is a myth. In fact, a recent study showed that the average age of startup founders in three separate divisions was 45. Entrepreneurs have to be creative and passionate. These qualities do not have an age limit.

I started one of my current businesses, a restaurant in the middle of covid (what was I thinking) at 72, three years ago. It has never been easier to be an entrepreneur as it is today. Today in a few clicks you have a website in the cloud. You used to have to fly around to meetings, today, everyone is just a web conference away. There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur than today, and you can start at any age.

Come learn and be part of the conversation on todays entrepreneurism.

Have you ever found yourself frustrated by the inefficiencies and annoyances of manual software deployment methods? Do deployments take forever, and do you find yourself constantly putting out fires caused by bugs or inconsistent environments? If so, it's time to consider DevOps, a set of practices that can help you work more efficiently, save time, and deploy with confidence.

Have you ever wasted countless hours setting up your development environment(s) or dealt with manual deployments gone wrong? It's all too common to spend time on tasks that are annoying or frustrating, but not really necessary. This kind of typical development is a major time sink and can lead to burnout and frustration. By automating processes like testing, deployment, and infrastructure management, you can free up more time for actual development work.

In addition to saving time, DevOps can also help you deploy with more confidence. By using continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, you can ensure that your code is always tested and ready for deployment. This means fewer bugs and less downtime.

By using annoyance-driven development, you can save time and be able to trust your deployments. Come join us and learn how DevOps can help you work more efficiently and effectively.

Come Out and Play! As children we use play to learn, grow, and connect.
As adults, we refine our play tendencies, but they are still there!

In this session we'll explore play, what it means, why it matters, and how to get more.
What is play? What are play archetypes? What is LEGO Serious Play? And more!

Warning! There may be actual play involved in this session !!!

There are many developer workflows: Git Flow, GitHub Flow, and GitLab Flow. Ultimately they are all alternative Git branching models that involve feature branches and multiple primary branches. It was first published and made famous by Vincent Driessen at Nvie. (https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/) Compared to trunk-based development, Gitflow has numerous, longer-lived branches and larger commits.

Long-lived feature and development branches are dead.

Tagging commits is the future.

This 25 min talk will explain what GitLab Flow is and why it's the most extraordinary way to develop open-source software. We'll mention GitOps workflow for the infrastructure people. But this is a beginner talk and demo that shows how to do basic 'hello world' style code commits using this excellent workflow.

Plenty of time will be given for interactive questions and answers.

ChatGPT recently attended this presentation at a virtual event and had this to say "as a sentient AI being, I left feeling inferior to human creativity and ingenuity - but also hopeful for our collaborative future!"

Hear about the most bizarre Facebook experiment ever conducted, and how it spawned multiple businesses built on the most valuable foundation: a community created by YOU (aka owned media).

I'll share experiences managing 1000+ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, & Reddit profiles and discover real tactics that you can implement before you even leave the room.

No platitudes about hustle and no false promises -- just practical advice for setting realistic expectations about what social media marketing can do for your business or brand. Get ready to learn how to add 1 million followers to your Facebook page, attract your first 1000 followers on TikTok, and/or usher in the most sought after objective of any audience: monetization.

And yes, I'll even show you how ChatGPT can teach you to speak dolphin. Okay, not true. But we'll walk through how it helps with everything in the session.

Join us on a conversational quest and roundtable discussions addressing how Enterprise Architecture as a Practice can move an organization out of the Digital Dark Ages and into the Enlightenment of Digital Innovation. Regardless of where you are along the path from traditional business to modern digital innovation powerhouse, we want to share with you where we have found success in a dynamic and constantly changing market. We will discuss how Enterprise Architecture when implemented as a community of practice, turns the governance and enablement structures necessary for Digital Innovation into muscle memory across the organization. In this session, we will collectively address legacy tech debt, mapping the journey, and integrating perspectives across the complex enterprise business and technology domains as you seek to move to an enlightened age of digital ascendancy.

Fractional consulting - contracting part-time for multiple clients concurrently - has virtually exploded since the pandemic. With remote work becoming the norm and traditional “secure” jobs no longer being especially so, more and more people are flocking to the fractional path, for a combination of reasons.

✅ Flexibility - setting your own schedule and number of work hours ✅ Variety - being able to work with multiple interesting companies ✅ Specialty - doing what you love; the kinds of work you’re best at and enjoy the most ✅ Independence - being able to say no (i.e. being boss!!) ✅ Earning potential - ideally more “feast” than “famine” times

This session will be an informal meetup with light facilitation by Victoria Schanen. Reasons you might wanna join, though all are welcome. 1) You’re currently a fractional consultant and looking to meet other fractionals, share ideas across the board, find out what’s working, unpack challenges, and give and receive support. 2) You’re considering becoming a fractional consultant and want to meet people who’ve chosen this path to learn a bit about it. 3) You are a recently funded company founder who isn’t ready to hire expensive directors and vp’s but you need specialty expertise (HR, Finance, Marketing, etc.).

One caveat: this is not a teaching session or training program on how to be a fractional consultant, though the facilitator will share ideas, resources (including bootcamps), and help with “connecting dots” a bit.

Lots of people want to do something about climate change, over 70% now. But what to do? Mobile apps can help!

By recommending different green actions, from better ways to get around, food to eat, sustainable product alternatives, alternatives to buying new products at all, ways to recycle, compost and reuse. And do it in a way that's fun and social. The individual is more important than ever - what each of us does will make the biggest difference in what the future of Minnesota and the planet looks like.

Come learn about GetGreen Duluth, a program started at the end of 2022 to help the city of Duluth meet their emissions reductions goals. And hopefully get inspired by ways each of us can help make our community, our school, our company or organization more sustainable.

The standard role-playing game has Rangers, Fighters, Clerics, and many other types of characters that can be played. We write a game, or a series of games, that follow a plot. We follow and play as characters, who develop and progress. We throw unknowns at our characters, often randomly generated. The modern trope really only includes a few kinds of these adventures that have evolved slightly - but still resembles the original work done to define the game mechanics from the 1970s. This is true with startups as well. There are missions, visions, and values. Maybe we're building software, but we need the same types of characters, responsible for many of the same things. And just like in a long campaign of any game, sometimes we have to throw out the rule books and just ad lib it. In this session, we're going to look at how our early days in a startup map to character classes, the types of campaigns we may choose to run, and unpack what the difference really is between chaotic and lawful good.

Have you burned out? Do you think you might be burning out?

In this panel, we'll have a conversation with a few people who have experienced burnout, and talk about what happened, how they recovered, and any other questions from the audience.

Our panelists will discuss (among other topics)

• How did they experience burnout?
• Did they have any warning signs?
• What happened when they burned out?
• What did they do to recover?
• How are they doing now?

Panelists

• Tony Collen
• Cortney Rasmussen
• Tammy Livingston

Moderator: Lizzie Breyer Bowman

As AI advances, groundbreaking technologies like generative AI, deep learning, and word embeddings have captured the imagination of developers, sparking surges in prototypes and startups. However, many of these systems fail to make a lasting impact and fade away within a year.

In this session, I will share insights on how to build AI systems that matter. Although cutting-edge technologies like GPT-4 can be a catalyst for impactful AI, they can also lead to the creation of systems that fail to address user needs. I will discuss the essential questions I consider when tackling new AI problems and emphasize the importance of integrating qualitative methods, such as interviews, with algorithmic studies and interactive prototypes.

I'll ground this discussion in my experiences building and deploying AI systems, which range from building movie recommender systems for Blockbuster in the late 90s to creating large-scale AI systems for Target, and more recently for Microsoft, where I provide both hands-on and strategic scientific AI support for several major software products.

I'll dedicate the closing 20 minutes of the session for questions and for participants to share their experiences in building AI systems that have made a significant impact— or those that haven't! Join us as we explore the key strategies for creating meaningful AI solutions that stand the test of time.

Are you a software engineer looking to improve your Computer Science fundamentals or an experienced engineer wanting to refresh your knowledge? Look no further!

Join our talk on algorithm complexity analysis where we will cover all the most common patterns with real-world examples. We'll discuss the importance of understanding different algorithm complexities and the formal measurement of program or algorithm speed.

Don't just jump straight into writing code without considering the best way to do things. Let's explore how the big O (pronounced "big oh") notation can help you avoid accidentally writing code that takes 10 times longer than necessary.

So whether you're new to algorithm complexity analysis or looking to brush up on old knowledge, this talk is for you! Join us and unleash the power of algorithm complexity analysis in your code today!

You may have seen Instagram influencers posting pictures of business class flights or overwater villas in the Maldives. But how do they do it?

In Travel Hacking 101, I’ll teach you how you can use credit card welcome bonuses, spending offers and perks to put more cash in your wallet or enable the aspirational travel of your dreams. In 40 minutes, you’ll learn:

How to leverage credit card welcome bonuses to get miles and points How to use miles and points for travel How perks like airline lounge access can elevate your travel experience What is airline and hotel elite status, how you should pursue it, and how you can get it easily.

Taking a look at the sick and twisted world of onboarding a new developer, the often painful and convoluted process of setting up new projects, and how Docker Compose can help save the day.

What is more important? Getting the answer right? Or, asking the right question? This session explores why innovation remains elusive despite companies investing millions in “innovation centers” or hoping that making innovation a company value will somehow inspire employees to be innovative. We will concentrate on the first barrier to innovation: your brain. Once we learn how our brain tries to limit our innovative thinking, we will teach our mind to counteract it. You will learn techniques to decipher what really is the problem, what actually needs to be solved, and ways to creatively solve it.

Learn how to create a low-cost, low-power computer lab that runs on ARM-based Raspberry Pi clients, a simple server computer, and runs a Debian Linux-based operating system. This lab is easy to maintain and environmentally friendly, making it a great option for those on a budget. Future directions involve customizing OS images that are delivered to lab workstations to fit specific requirements. We are looking for volunteers to help with that. WIth a finished prototype of a working lab, we would like to present it to organizations with budget constraints that have a need for technology centers, for example schools, libraries, community centers, shelters, etc.

So you know HTML, CSS, and some Javascript? Great! Let's take your CSS one step further with CSS transpilers (like Sass and {less}), frameworks (like Material Design, Bootstrap, and Bulma), and more! You won't know everything about CSS by the end of this session but you should feel more confident in telling terms apart and choosing the right tools for styling your next web project.

It feels as if everyone has a newsletter in 2023 and there is nothing wrong with doing it just for fun.

But if you are interested in turning your newsletter into one that has a substantial audience and perhaps makes a bit of money, it can be a daunting challenge.

My TooMuchTV newsletter began as a bit of an afterthought. Just a place to highlight pieces I had posted on my AllYourScreens.com site. But after some false starts and a lot of learning experiences, I've built a daily Monday-Friday newsletter with more than 50,000 free subscribers and several thousand paid subscribers.

I can't guarantee that you'll be successful with your newsletter. Much less make money. But I'll walk through some of the lessons I've learned and hopefully point you in the right direction towards success.

My kids and I enjoy 90s hip hop music but some lyrics from that era have not aged well. What if there was an easy way to create reasonably good instrumental versions of these songs?

Polymath is a suite of tools that uses machine learning to convert any music library into a music production sample-library. Polymath uses Demucs behind the scenes to separates tracks into stems for various instruments (drum, bass, guitar, piano, other, and vocals).

Polymath

https://github.com/samim23/polymath

Demucs Music Source Separation

https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs

Demo gods willing I will run through a few examples. I would also be interested to learn from attendees about other tools & methods for accomplishing this and other music production sample processing tasks!

Join us as we take you through our start-up journey of taking the idea of an eye-tracking-cannabis-detection-machine from concept, to clinical studies, to data analysis, industrial design, and more.

While cannabis may change how a person perceives the colorful painting on the wall, it also has a big affect on the nervous system including heart rate, blood pressure, and the eyes. However, when it comes to assessing how high someone is, these signs are hard to reliably measure with the naked eye and take highly specialized training.

HealthVisit is a health-tech startup that has developed an innovative platform to improve the way people access medical care. The platform simplifies the medical visit process by enabling users to search for their condition, select their symptoms, and choose a provider. The platform's AI-generated pre-visit, during visit, and post-visit notes provide patients with detailed information on how to prepare for their appointment, what to expect during the visit, and how to follow up with their healthcare provider.

The platform also allows users to select their age, sex, and one symptom they are experiencing, and the AI-generated notes will provide a list of 5 possible conditions associated with the symptom, along with pre-visit, during visit, and post-visit notes. HealthVisit aims to empower patients to take control of their health by removing barriers to accessing quality care and helping them stay consistent with their health recommendations.

Overall, HealthVisit's platform makes it easier for patients to find the right provider, receive detailed visit notes, and access the care they need. The startup's mission is to revolutionize the way people access medical care and help patients become more engaged and informed about their health.

What makes a manager terrible? Effective? Motivating? Deflating?

Everyone has Opinions about management, whether you are currently a people leader, individual contributor (IC), or student.

Let's talk.

• What makes an effective people leader?
• How do you exert informal influence and drive a team (or organization, or company!) forward?
• What's happening behind the curtain -- what are managers even doing outside the view of ICs?
• If you're an IC: how can you prepare for a transition into management?
• If you're a line manager: how do you prepare for more senior leadership roles, and what shift in mindset is required?
• If you're in upper management: what advice would you give to those earlier in their careers?
• What challenges manifest regardless of your level, and what unique challenges present themselves at the top?
• What skill sets are shared between upper-level ICs and managers? Are the two career tracks parallel, or do they curve toward each other as you move up?

We'll set the stage with a 5-10 minute presentation on themes from "Becoming a Manager" by Linda Hill of Harvard Business School, and then open the floor up for moderated discussion.

This session will have been a success if we gain:

1. a broader perspective on management
2. small lessons to apply to our own careers
3. and a sense of community

Lawyer (20-year litigator) and coder (building AI tools atop 750M legal documents) Damien Riehl will lead a discussion about Generative AI — practical and legal implications:

• How large language models (LLMs) are radically transforming knowledge work:
  • Coding
  • Lawyering
  • Every job whose primary tool is symbolic representation (e.g., words, code).
  • That's you. And me. 🤓
• Legal battles currently being fought in court
  • "Can OpenAI and GitHub train Codex on MIT-licensed code stored on GitHub?"
  • "How about Stable Diffusion, which is being sued by Getty Images, for copyright infringement?"
  • "Is GenerativeAI's output copyrightable?"
  • "Is any of the above fair use?"
• Practical consequences
  • Coders can 10x or 100x their output
  • Does that mean:
    • Work only 10% of the time?
    • Work 100% of the time — but your employer will require 10x or 100x output?
    • ...and that employer will fire 90% of your colleagues who don't do 10x or 100x?

Knowledge work is a massive part of the U.S. economy. Coders and lawyers are in the same boat. Join this discussion, where we'll talk about the implementations. Our jobs depend upon it!

From the first HTML webpage in 1991 to the development of CSS in 1994 and JavaScript in 1995, these three technologies have undergone numerous iterations and are at the very core of all web development.

Today, web developers are more likely to use a framework such as Angular, Next, Solid, Svelte, React, or Vue. With so many options to choose from, deciding which framework to use can be daunting and confusing. Why are there so many options? What are the benefits?

In this talk we'll learn why frameworks exist, look under the hood at what differentiates them, and get to the bottom of what in the world is happening on the web!

Join us!

A session about technological evolution leading to Generative AI models, how Generative AI models are built, ethical considerations for Generative AI such as Bias, Privacy, Copyright, Intellectual Property Rights, Misinformation, Environmental Impact and how we can play our part to ensure that these models are developed and used responsibly.

No matter what your role is, no matter where you are in your career, storytelling has the power to transform your trajectory for better or worse.

We often hear about this topic in sales but in reality, this plays a key role in how we build our career, pitch our startup and explain ideas, to how we communicate with those closest to us.

If you want to learn 5 things that will instantly make you a better storyteller and give you a foundation to continue to grow as one, join this session.

What are the basic building blocks of Modern System Design? These building blocks are the foundation for designing scalable applications. Each block serves a unique purpose and has it's own importance in scalable applications.

These are the building blocks of modern scalable applications.

DNS, Load Balancers, Databases. Key-Value store, CDN, Sequencer, Distributed Monitoring, Distributed Cache, Distributed Messaging Queue, Pub Sub, Rate Limiter, Blob Store, Distributed Search

Idea is to cover the breadth of these components instead of going deep on any one component. Covering depth on each of these components will be a lot and can be taken care of in future presentation.

After COVID scuppered my plans for a European research sabbatical, I opted to use the 2022-2023 school year to learn some new technologies. It's easy to say "I'm going to use this time to learn X", but it's not easy to actually make that happen in practice. I was in the position so many of us have been in: "How do I stay focused and keep myself accountable?".

As an experiment last May, I scheduled two 2-hour live streaming sessions a week on Twitch, where I programmed live on the Internet, teaching myself the Rust programming language with the assistance of complete strangers from (literally) around the world. At the beginning I had no idea if anyone would show up or what the experience would be like, but found that there were people out there who were happy to not only watch me program but also to patiently answer questions, make suggestions, and generally support my learning. By August I decided to double the number of sessions per week, and to date I've generated several hundred hours of live programming on Twitch, going through tutorials, rewriting past programs, and building new applications.

In this talk I'll focus on the live programming and social support side of the process, how helpful this has been, and how important my little streaming community has been in my learning. I'll also share a few things I've learned along the way. I was using this to learn a new programming language, but I think a similar process could be used to help learn almost any tool or process that you can share live online. I won't get too deep into the weeds of Rust in the talk, but I'd be more than happy to answer questions about my experience with Rust if folks are interested.

I'm hoping to actually live stream the talk on Twitch, so the folks that have been so helpful and supportive can join us.

Gathering for all those working in (and curious about) Fintech. From traditional banks to cryptocurrency startups.

Banking, Neo-banking, Embedded Finance, Banking as a Service, Buy now pay later...

Do you work with any of the above?

Love acronyms?

Fintech curious?

Want to hear people gripe about InfoSec?

Let's talk about the good, bad and ugly of working in Financial Services

Do you cringe at the sound of someone chewing gum, slurping soup, or clicking their pen? Do certain sounds make you feel angry or anxious, even when others seem unaffected? If so, you might have misophonia.

Misophonia, or selective sound sensitivity syndrome, is a neurological condition that affects millions of people worldwide. It can cause extreme emotional and physiological reactions to specific sounds, leading to significant distress and impairment in daily life.

We're often ridiculed, dismissed, or shamed because, well, it's a condition that sounds like no big deal. But research and therapies are showing that there is more behind it than an annoyance of sounds. There are neurological and epigenetic components, and clinicians are looking at therapies influenced by ones used for PTSD and complex trauma.

In this talk, I'll explore the science behind misophonia, from its causes and symptoms to the latest research on treatment options. But I want to spend most of the time sharing stories of our experiences. It's kind of surreal how many of our past experiences are similar. And yes, that includes frayed and damaged relationships with family and friends.

I host The Misophonia Podcast from here in Saint Paul, a top 2% podcast with over 150,000 downloads in 3 years.

I am also co-author on an upcoming book published by Bloomsbury, along with a clinician and researcher at Oxford University. This is the first book about misophonia by a major publisher.

Join us to learn more about this often-misunderstood condition and feel free to email me at hello@misophoniapodcast.com

LATE ADDITION TO THE SESSION LIST

"Hey Paul, why are you not doing a recruiting session this year at Minnebar?"

I've received a few messages like this the past days.

OK, let's do it.

Know this... I have many strong opinions around a theme that most companies are not ready for what is coming after this current economic period. Think "Great Resignation the Sequel". A lighter version than the last but one most are not ready for.

Whether you are recruiting now, this summer, later this year or... you need some general advice on how to navigate the current economic times, I'll be ready for Saturday.

OAuth 2.0 is the de facto industry standard for authentication and authorization on the web. Patterns are well understood for traditional, server-side rendered applications (e.g., Spring Boot/Spring MVC based apps) but what about a modern Single Page Applications?

This talk will focus on patterns for delivering a modern user experience via browser browser based applications while also maintaining security in an OAuth 2.0 model.

Everyone knows that system. It predates your oldest colleague, it doesn't integrate with anything, it has no API. It's been out of vendor support for half a decade, it was custom-written by someone who retired eight years ago, it runs all your critical infrastructure.

In a perfect world, no one would have to deal with these systems... and yet.

In this talk, we will share reasons why companies find themselves stuck in technological cul-de-sacs, and by understanding the reasons why it makes sense for them to remain there, we can also uncover how to change the underlying conditions so that progress and growth may become possible once again.

Decentralization has begun to affect all industries/aspects of our lives without most even understanding it.

There have been 4 major technological (original definition - beyond hardware/software/screens) forces in our generation: 1/Earth - internet or Web 1.0 / all humanity finally interconnected in a worldwide web

2/Fire - the untethering of desktop through a mobile wave in mid 2000s that sparked virality & revolutions galore

3/Water - the cloud envelops earth & fire and exponentiates both to infinite scale

4/Air - DeAll, the de-centralization of finance (defi) & art/music/content/journalism/academia is erupting = everywhere & nowhere, unconstrained by power, time, or structures

**This last revolution is ALL-to-ALL centric, with endless push to have Each of Us: own - access - build our own full stacks:

Stacks of thoughts, expression, critiques, poems, fashion, challenge, economics, identity, comics, games, training, UI/UX, monetization, with increasing level of independence & interoperability independent of centralized forces.

Will have 4 DeAll panelists + a few free T-shirt’s never to be replicated again

Questions to submit ahead of time? twtr = hectorguatemala

Preview of what is DeAll? YouTube with one of most famous Apple/Tesla/big tech equity research analysts after we came back from Bitcoin 2021 =

https://youtu.be/RyCMsr5LPnI

Technology has a profound impact on many industries, including the sports. Artificial Intelligence in particular has completely disrupted the sports industry, enabling the precise analysis of the performances of players. SportsVision is an advanced sports analytics platform powered by Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and Computer Vision for both off and on the field analytics that caters to the needs of everyone involved in sports management. It enables coaches and managers to analyze and enhance the performances of players with vision-centric insights like never before. Once the videos are uploaded onto the SportsVision platform, the deep learning algorithms provide multiple insights such as automated actions, event tagging, pose analysis, player tracker, and rating application as needed.

Detailed Outline of Presentation: Introducing SportsVision: • Problem Statement • Our Solution • Our Evolution Artificial Intelligence for the Win: • Assessments and Training Evaluation • Performance Analysis • Tactical Analysis The SportsVision Paradigm: • Anthropometric Analysis • Computer Vision based Bio-Mechanical Analysis • AI based Individual player performance statistics • Individual Strategic Analysis • Computer Vision driven SWOT Analysis for both home and opponent team tactics Key Challenges of AI usage in Elite Sports: • Data Collection • Connecting AI and Sports Communities • Keeping control on decision making • Interpretability of AI results • Robust Modelling Platform Illustration of AI based Stats in: • Diving • Boxing • Taekwondo Summary and Conclusions of AI Usage in Elite Sports: • Risk • Potential • Future and Ease of use in sports

The Social Security Administration(SSA), Medicare, Medicaid, and the Rail Road Retirement Board use EnduraData EDpCloud real-time file replication to synchronize data between web server farm nodes to ensure the same data is available to millions of US citizens and businesses who log in to any node of the web farm. The nodes run the RedHat Linux distro.

SSA signed a five-year contract with EnduraData to provide the software and annual support in 2022, and SSA renewed the support and subscription contract for the second year in February 2023.

EnduraData EDpCloud file replication and synchronization is a cross-platform and cross-operating system file replication software that runs on physical or virtual machines. It is also available as a container.

EDpCloud is all written in C except for the browser-based GUI.

If we have more time, we will also show how EnduraData's software works.

Visit link for more information.

In 1968, the infamously grumpy computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra published a polemic called “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” in which he made a striking argument: GOTO, a programming language feature widely considered essential at the time, was such a bad idea that not only should programmers stop using it, but it should be removed from high-level languages altogether. A decades-long fight ensued, but Dijkstra essentially won the day: new languages now rarely support GOTO, and even when they do, programmers largely pretend they don’t.

The idea that removing features can make programming languages better is both surprising and exciting. What programming language features that we consider essential today might be the next GOTO, withering and vanishing from high-level languages of the future?

In this talk, we’ll look at several candidates: raw memory access, inheritance, reference types, and null. Drawing on examples from several programming languages, we’ll look at some of the problems with these features, the alternatives, and the tradeoffs.

This talk will be accessible to anyone with beginning programming experience. It will have some tasty tidbits for hard-core programming language nerds, but if you have some idea what variables, loops, and objects are, then you’ll be fine!

Are you interested in learning about the latest AI tools that can revolutionize the way we work and increase our productivity? Join us for this exciting conference session where we'll explore cutting-edge technologies designed to enhance human performance and streamline complex tasks. This session is not just about ChatGPT but 50 other tools that you will find useful.

From intelligent automation to natural language processing, these innovative tools are transforming the workplace, freeing up valuable time and resources for more strategic activities. Discover how AI can help you and your team work smarter, faster, and more efficiently than ever before.

Whether you're a business leader, entrepreneur, or technology enthusiast, this session is a must-attend for anyone interested in the future of work and the role that AI will play in driving productivity and innovation. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to learn from leading experts and explore the latest tools and trends in AI technology.

Let us share some AI tools that we all know about or use and make this an interesting discussion

Collaboration between developers and designers is crucial for creating successful and effective digital products. In this talk, we will explore how Figma can help bridge the gap between these two roles, allowing for smoother and more efficient collaboration. We will discuss various ways designers and developers can keep design files and code bases in sync. We’ll also discuss strategies for overcoming some common challenges that can arise while designing and building an ever changing product. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or both, you’ll come away from this talk with a deeper understanding of how to work collaboratively with your colleagues and create awesome stuff. See you there!

Learn about Fyra's core design principle of treating our customers as humans instead of just users or generic personas. In this talk, we'll discuss how we've built a design system that incorporates real-world considerations to meets the needs of actual people, even at scale. Discover how we prioritize empathy and a people-centered approach in our work, and gain valuable insights into how to do the same for your own design projects.

Organization Website

I've been a software developer and data scientist since 1994. I've worked at Google, Amazon, Pinterest, and a host of startups. I would be happy to answer questions, either one-on-one (bring some code to run and debug, or a particular problem) or to the whole group (bring questions), during this session. We'll write down questions for 5 minutes, then start going.

I'll favor questions that more people are interested in. So, this is likely a group discussion, heavily moderated by me. If that happens, then I can answer one-on-one questions outside the session.

NEW ADDITION: Link to submit questions: https://dory.app/events/s0ThwSO90oMfPdQfuNWQ/71fde18f_minnebar17-data-science-q-a/. Go ahead and submit and vote whenever you like. This is an experiment.

NEW ADDITION #2: minnestar slack URL for "data-science-qa": https://app.slack.com/client/T02RC2T5P/C053D3LSNB1

Some possible topics I could help with:

• Code: R and tidyverse (e.g., dplyr), python (but not pandas in-depth), Hive (i.e. SQL for Hadoop clusters), SQL
• How to become a data scientist (I wrote parts 0-3 on medium, start at https://medium.com/@dfrankow/how-to-become-a-data-scientist-part-0-introduction-3fc18c2073ee)
• A/B experiments (design, analysis, process)
• Deep learning for image recognition (gave a talk about a Kaggle contest last Minnebar)
• How data scientists work in groups or companies
• Software development for data scientists
• Statistics at an intermediate level (e.g., basic binomial frequentist confidence intervals)
• Basic cloud concepts (I have worked on cloud platforms like AWS, Heroku, Aptible, but I wouldn't speak in-depth about cloud migration strategies)
• High-level technical understanding of GPT, based on my notes from https://www.atmosera.com/ai/understanding-chatgpt/

Or maybe I'll crash and burn. Or maybe the room will be empty for 50 minutes. Who knows!

What is Kubernetes, why do people keep talking about it, and do I need Kubernetes? What are all these words your coworkers are using? Docker? Containers? Orchestration? YAML? Let’s put an end to that FOMO. This talk will get you all caught up on why that DevOps friend of yours is so excited about Kubernetes.

An approachable talk about Docker, Containers, and Kubernetes that will give you just enough information to feel confident talking about them at dinner parties. (What? I don't know what your dinner parties are like!)

This will be an approachable talk for newer developers, but some coding experience will be helpful to understanding the more advanced concepts covered in the talk. It's a plus if you have ever failed to deploy something or yelled the words "But it worked on my machine!!"

If we're feeling it, we might even go ahead and deploy something live, because what could go wrong with a live demo?

How will artificial intelligence affect the future of the internet, website design, search, and SEO? AI is poised to revolutionize how we search for information and interact with the internet. This talk will provide valuable insights and practical tips for navigating the ever-evolving landscape of AI and its impact on the internet, search, and SEO.

The discussion will explore how AI impacts search, content creation, and online advertising. I will discuss the latest trends and advancements in AI and how I believe they are shaping this future.

I will also discuss some of the tools I am using to in my marketing work to help increase my productivity as a freelance growth marketing professional.

Whether you are a marketing practitioner, content writer, sales professional, business owner, or just looking to stay ahead of the curve, this talk is not to be missed.

Join us and discover how AI is shaping the future of the online world and what you can do to stay ahead of the curve.

Important work should be done in person in an office with colleagues. Remote work saved my [life/marriage/dog's well being]. Two days a week in office is the best solution for hybrid. Early career people need in-person mentoring. It's not the same on Zoom. It's not the same in person. We want you to come in, we require you to come in, we could care less if you come in. I feel anxious about getting sick or just being around people!

If one of these statements (or similar ones) makes your blood boil then this session may be for you. We're going to respectfully argue it out in an audience-participation session where you can share your personal experiences and strongly held positions about where we work and the myriad of related issues that surround that issue.

But this argument won't just be about winning (because who would you beat?) but rather about listening and learning. This session is really for you if you want to think through this complicated issue with smart people and find examples, experiences and beliefs that may be different than your own. Come with a strong opinion but also an open ear for understanding why this issue animates our contemporary work culture.

The concept of serverless development causes no end of heartburn. Many of those are pedantic: yes, there are actually servers. Yes, there are containerized solutions that likely qualify as serverless.

However, one of the biggest heartburns we've faced, though, is more practical: how do you make local development feel...local? While still inheriting all the service-full benefits of engaging in a cloud provider's ecosystem?

In this session, we'll bring real, practical experience in using AWS Lambda, SNS/SQS, API Gateway, and more-- all spun up and managed in the same language as our application-- in a way that allows rapid iteration locally while leveraging a production-like set of services. Most importantly, we do this without needing to set up extensive mocking solutions, and without requiring individual developers to know more than they want about the infrastructure behind their services.

While our use-case made a serverless architecture extremely cost effective for all stages from local development up through production, even just implementing a serverless solution for your lower environments -- avoiding tons of unused cycles or the need to spin environments up and down based on time-of-day-- could save you and your company hundreds or thousands of dollars a month.

Most observability efforts focus on distributed services and cloud architectures, end-users only care that the client-side works for them. In this talk, we’ll explore how to make client-side web applications more observable by monitoring session analytics, user experience, errors, APIs, and data integrity directly from real users. We’ll cover how web developers, SREs, and DevOps engineers can collect data from the browser, handle noise, and interpret data to make better decisions for users, enabling them to prioritize fixes that have the most impact.

Free pizza used to be a thrill and now it’s...well, it’s starting to get a bit like the crust from last night: STALE! Unless you enjoy heartburn. It's time to break free from the greasy cycle and join me for a talk that will change the way you think about workplace wellness. Yes, pizza is delicious (buffalo chicken is my weakness and I refuse to apologize), but let's face it, it's not exactly the key to employee happiness and productivity. That's where Nutrition For All comes in. Get ready to laugh, learn, and leave with a new perspective on how to treat your staff and yourself like the true VIPs you are. Plus, I promise not to judge if you sneak a slice during the Q&A. See you there!

Fractional work has become a new career option for professionals who have reached the wall of progress within the corporate structure. Seasoned executives and managers have volumes of value left to offer, more than ever before in fact, but due to corporate structure status quo it has no place to land. Those corporate ladders are extremely thin and shaky. Enter fractional, a career model where professionals can indeed deliver their entire repository of wisdom, guidance, clear decision marking and rock solid direction. But rather than offer it up to a single corporate entity, they deliver it to the next market down to three or four smaller businesses in fractions. The under 200m in revenue market. That’s 99% of our businesses so plenty of TAM floating around to serve. This is a much hungrier market for wisdom and direction, and a far more willing participant to utilize such a resource. Everyone has a story about how brilliant ideas die a long slow death in corporate America. Not because the ideas aren’t valuable, more so because larger Fortune 500 types simply don’t know how to handle them.

This discussion will open the aperture on the supply side and demand side of the Fractional talent economy. Led by John Arms, author and instructor of the Voyageur U Fractional Training Progam and founder of the Voyageur U fractional community.

Let's start with some universal workforce challenges:

• Attracting top talent
• Retaining top talent
• Productivity
• Equitable employee experience

Now let's add some status quo solutions:

• Offer the most flexibility (like the 4 day work week or days you get to work from home)
• Offer the best perks
• Offer ice cream Fridays, no meeting Wednesdays, and a day off on your birthday (no - we're serious - we just saw all of these recently)
• More days off
• Benchmark with the competition
• One and done trainings

And now let's scratch our heads wondering why we're not seeing improvements in our data... "But we offered them ice cream."..

Join us as we explore the social science of:

• Engagement (hint - it's not ice cream - unless you're 7)
• Stress (hint - flexibility won't help)
• The myth of the average (it's why your car seat is adjustable)
• A six year NIH + University of Minnesota longitudinal study on a revolutionary approach to work

This social science leads us to a contemporary solution to the challenges above.

Come learn about the difference between a Policy Based Hybrid Environment (something 99% of hybrid organizations are adopting) and a Performance Based Hybrid Environment (backed by social science).

Once you know you know - you'll be able to see which path your employer is currently on.

And maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to alter course.

Almost all of what you see ChatGPT do is also available with the GPT API. But with the API you can give GPT the context and the commands you want, blended it with user input, and reimagining the output.

Here's some other things you could make using GPT:

1. Write stories
2. ... critique those stories
3. Generate diagrams
4. Write prompts for AI image generators
5. Fix code
6. Explain data
7. Construct SQL queries
8. ... interpret the results using natural language
9. Play games
10. Create games
11. Reformat text
12. Explain differences in text
13. Apply natural language edits

... and more things that only you are going to think of.

This talk will feature examples from my own experiments and lots of small examples that show the diversity of ways GPT can be used. If it's successful it will get your imagination working.

Product development teams at all levels are commonly vexed by the question "which new features should we prioritize?" In the absence of an empirically sound prioritization method, product teams are often prone to internal forces carrying an outsized influence over their product roadmaps - including the infamous HiPPO effect.

The Kano survey method offers a novel approach to product feature prioritization by considering not only the functional requirements of a product feature, but also the emotional needs and expectations of users. While a Kano survey doesn't make the prioritization decisions for you, it provides a user-centric, quantitative way of revealing the features that really matter to people.

In this session...

• We'll get grounded in the theory behind the Kano model

• We'll share practical tips for how your team can run its own Kano study

• We'll acknowledge some of the practical limitations of the Kano model, and how you can overcome them

Join us!

It probably sounds like hyperbole, but ChatGPT really holds the power for you to do the absolutely unthinkable.

I'm going to briefly show you through how I rebuilt my fantasy sports platform using ChatGPT using a programming language I didn't know how to use on a hosting platform I'm not familiar with.

Then we'll take a journey together to have it show us how ChatGPT will brainstorm the idea, create the plan to build it, troubleshoot the creation of it, then market and sell it.

ChatGPT isn't just some fun toy to goof around with. It's a powerful and tireless engine to help you brainstorm and be incredibly efficient. I liken it to having a room filled with a ton of incredibly creative people who know everything you don't and can either teach you or just walk you through tasks if you have no idea what you're doing.

This will be a casual, interactive session to put ChatGPT to the test. So bring some creativity. Or don't. You'll be shocked to see how ChatGPT will bring it for us.

Many will remember when Google first announced that it would phase out and remove all use of 3rd party cookie-tracking. While it was a paradigm shift for digital analytics, a field that was pretty much the wild west prior to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was not out of left field.

Fast forward 2 years and this deadline has now been pushed to 2024. This deadline extension provides marketers and analytics implementers more time to create a new user tracking solution that fits into the legal confines of CCPA & GDPR. The days of collecting any kind of data and asking about ethics later are pretty much over. What has emerged from the ashes is a strict and definitive framework that not only safeguards user data, it encourages new innovation among digital marketers. It encompasses the following tenets of data stewardship

We Look forward to showing you how to toe the line

This session will be fairly evenly divided between ideas for employers to successfully onboard and retain emerging talent, and ideas on habits and practices for emerging engineers to develop to help them... emerge?

• Act one draws on my experiences as an engineering leader who has built teams that include engineers from across the experience and educational spectrum.

• Act two is born out of my experience as an "emerging engineer" (long before anyone put buzz in that phrase) where I'll make some practical suggestions as to how you can shape your career.

Who knows? Maybe by bringing potential employers and potential employees together in one room, we can enable some serendipitous connections in the end.

The Open States project has done the grunt work of collecting and publishing free, open data on legislation across the US for 13 years. But, if anything, dynamics of transparency and trust in democracy seem to have gotten worse. Mundane assertions about vote tabulation or ballot practices are partisan again. Disagreements about basic facts, about data, seem to have plied the wheel of democracy free from its axis.

What can a tech startup do about this? Can we imagine a society in which data brings truth and clarity to collective decision making and public policy? Or has that ship sailed?

Jesse Mortenson and Obinna Osisiogu, respectively, are the CTO and VP of Africa for Plural. Join us for a lively discussion of democracy through both a data/tech lens, and also a multinational lens as we draw connections between threats to US and Nigerian democracy. The conversation will proceed from data access and literacy, through narratives about policing and elections, to visions from science fiction (and beyond) that draw us to still believe in the promise of technology in politics both in the United States and Nigeria.

Plural is a Minnesota-founded and VC-backed startup that builds collaboration and data tools for public policy research and advocacy. We adopted the Open States project in 2021, and we are expanding that open data project to countries in Africa. Our founders started the company in 2015 with the belief that technology can help narrow the transparency and participation gaps in democracy. Our vision is a future where people and data drive public policy. We started with, and continue by, asking hard questions about how to achieve this.

https://www.pluralpolicy.com/ https://openstates.org/

Biggest problem in this fast-moving technology world is how to survive in your job!

There are various factors its dependent on:

Think Smart, Technology, Experience, Patience, Never give up, Involve your soul, Power of Acceptance, Willingness to learn, Say No, Keep it Clear. Its you at end!!

This applies for any age group/any role who want to be happy at work place too!

I will be talking about how to acquire all above and stand out!

Let's meet soon!

Shireesha S

Have you ever been on a project where it feels like nobody knows what to build? The client is expecting the impossible, the manager is stressed because they're over budget, and the developers have pressure to stay busy; and nothing productive gets done.

Let's talk about how to manage expectations between clients and developers so we can get on the same page and stay there. Starting with requirements gathering and moving through the software development lifecycle, we'll explore ways developers and clients know good progress is being made.

30 minute presentation, then you share your best practices.

As Evan Armstrong articulated so compellingly last fall in his article "Venture Capital is Ripe for Disruption," the current models of startup funding leave too many founders, too much talent, and too many potential investors on the sidelines.

In this session, we'll explore the larger trends in the startup and funding landscape and take a deeper dive into the Shared Success Agreement. The agreement was created by me, has been used successfully by my company Cloudburst, SBC, and is open-sourced at sharedsuccessagreement.org.

Shared Success is a new founder-friendly funding alternative to equity, debt, or a SAFE. It enables people to invest time and/or money in companies for a share of future revenue.

For Founders, Talent, and Funders

• Founders share upside but preserve optionality and equity
• Talent invests time to win new business and create cash flows
• Funders create cash flows and don’t need to be accredited

Our Vision Democratize entrepreneurship and investing globally, empowering the masses to launch new ventures and create wealth together.

There will be time for Q&A and discussion. I'd love to hear about what you're working on!

You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect yourself as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk. - Kevin Mitnick

While I have become a father relatively recently, it has vastly changed how I view certain things in the world. One of those things is risk and danger and what it means to mitigate that risk.

I will talk about how I think we should be looking at risk, what it means to plan for risk, and what it means to ignore risk at times. I will also be talking on why we should look at security and risk during the whole process and not as an afterthought to a new project/program/system.

A fun, competitive, and friendly coding tournament for new and experienced coders of all ages! Build a computer bot to play head-to-head against other coders! No previous coding experience necessary.

If you plan to participate (which I highly recommend) bring a laptop. If you have a modern browser like Chrome or Firefox, no additional download is required. Please come knowing how to navigate the internet (basic typing and mouse control).

Want to get a sense of what this will be like? Check out our website or Minnedemo presentation from 2019!

The Internet is now a user-hostile place. Advertising plasters every surface. Interfaces are designed to trick. Third-party scripts hoover personal data. We surf a web largely composed of content written by bots for other bots, and with the advent of AI-like language generation, we're about to go even harder into swamping our collective knowledge store with dreck.

All of these anti-human unpleasantries have been implemented by humans. Yes, humans with jobs, bosses, deliverables, and the need to earn money to live... but also sometimes humans who didn't think carefully about the consequences, who ignored their consciences, or who chose to optimize for moneymaking or popularity instead of what would be better for the internet as a whole.

I'd like to anchor us instead on what we can do less of, what misuses of technology we can avoid, and what we can push back on. We're all shaping the internet's future, especially those of us who are designers and engineers. Though our individual spheres of influence may be small, we can still guide clients, companies, and ourselves away from both immediate and long-term harms. Let's discuss both pragmatic and radical ways to do that.

Gathering user feedback is crucial to the work of user experience designers, product professionals, engineers, and leaders, but it can earn a reputation for being expensive, time-consuming, and even trivial. A systematic approach to collecting and interpreting insights can mitigate budget creep and prevent essential data points from getting lost in unread reports. We’ll share our practical approaches and some of the highlights (and lowlights) we’ve experienced as we’ve operationalized our methods.

A lot has changed since we did this a year ago… and while these are usually fun, laid-back conversations, this one feels more serious.

I’ll start by talking about:

• The current state of MN, Midwest and remote jobs and trends
• What employers in town are saying, doing and planning for jobs this year
• How I am thinking about the economy the next 3, 6 and 9 months
• For those planning a job search later this year, I’ll have info to get you started
• We’ll talk about LinkedIn profile makeovers and content to post

That’s where we’ll start.

Please bring your questions, thoughts and opinions.

Send them ahead if you like to be sure we get to them => paul@mnheadhunter.com

MESA is a non-profit organization offering pro bono mentoring by C-level software executives to founders/CEOs of MN-based startup software companies. MESA’s sole mission is to grow the size and vibrancy of the Minnesota startup software community.

Founded in 2011, MESA has mentored 76 companies, including many Minnesota startup success stories, for over 6,000 total mentoring hours. These include When I Work, Dispatch, Players Health, Sezzle, Fulcrum, Omnia Fishing, Datica Health, and Vidgrid. With 6 mentors at our founding, we now currently utilize the proven knowledge and experience of 41 C-level, volunteer mentors.

Through our combined experience, we have identified a short list of critical and focused actions common to the successful growth of our startup mentees. With attention given to these building blocks, we speed founder/CEO learning and avoid potholes that slow growth.

This session will highlight the key points an entrepreneur needs to understand for each of these five critical startup building blocks:
* Selecting your first target market (what to look for)
* Founder as initial Chief Sales Officer (when you’ve never sold before)
* The path to predictable sales results (data matters)
* Being ready to raise money (if you want to)
* Minimizing chances of a cash crisis (when to raise the yellow and red flags)

The war for talent is on and it doesn't appear to be letting up anytime soon. Despite record layoffs in tech this last year, competition in the labor market is incredibly tight and understandably so. The person with the right set of skills in the right role can change the entire trajectory of an organization. At the end of the day, I would argue most issues that companies and organizations run into are people problems. If you can't attract, retain, evaluate, or even find the talent you need, it is likely your organization will face major issues moving forward. Additionally, even if you have a great team with poor leadership or organization your team can still fail. (looking at you Vikings Defense) That's why addressing skills gap and managing human capital is so important for companies and why I'll be covering it in this session. In this session, we will discuss the macro trends in the labor market, contributing factors, and forecast what these mean for the broader innovation ecosystem.

Things that we’ll cover: Hiring trends and forecast, Assessing current and future skill gaps, Dive into upskilling, Continuous professional development, Alternative credentials, Resiliency and adaptation to technology changes

Blockchain is no longer just a buzzword - it’s being used in everything from finance to healthcare, from startups to enterprise. And the best part? It’s all happening right here in Minnesota.

In this fun and interactive session 🤩, be prepared to be impressed by all the ways blockchain is being applied in our lives, how Minnesota is at the forefront of its integration, and how you can get involved yourself!

We are the MN Blockchain Initiative - a Twin Cities based 501(c)(3): Our mission is to build the Blockchain ecosystem in Minnesota and establish the Twin Cities as an international hub for Blockchain & Web3 innovation.

In our session we'll cover:

• Blockchain in the State
  • Utilization
  • Government
  • Education
  • Corporate
  • Startups
  • Research Report
• Who is MN Blockchain
  • Events
  • Opportunities for involvement
• Q&A and audience participation

We look forward to seeing you there!

This will be partly just a meetup to chat casually and discuss the things we love (or don't!) about Mastodon and "the fediverse" more generally. Martin will give a short talk about ActivityPub and the open source software that empowers Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and so many other social projects, more generally. He'll share a bunch of links and touch on how you can get involved the free and open source social universe.

Who this session is for: - Anyone already excited by the prospect of decentralized social media – created by the people, for the people. - Anyone who has heard of Mastodon and/or the fediverse, but doesn't understand what all the fuss is about and/or just wants to learn more. - Folks who just want to meet other fediverse users and grow their networks. - Developers looking to learn more about how they can get involved in making the internet a better and more connected experience.

What we'll talk about in this session: - What is "the fediverse", and why is it so much better than existing social media? - What is ActivityPub, and what does it mean for social networks?

What this session will not be about - Twitter and/or Elon - the capitalist dystopia

Hopefully there will be a whiteboard, and anyone who wants to can add their social media handles. Let's talk about the future of social networks!

It is oft-repeated that businesses need to be data driven. We collectively know that data is valuable to a business, but for all this shared understanding of value we still lack a shared understanding of what it means in practice. This talk aims to provide a framework for understanding the fundamental data needs for a SaaS business.

Serverless is a cloud buzzword, but at heart it's about something very valuable: assessing technology based on how well it lets you focus on solving your business problems. This approach leads to technologies like Functions as a Service and a reliance on fully-managed cloud services with certain properties (transparent scaling, scale-to-zero, fine-grained billing, etc.), but can be applied to evaluate the evolution of any application, no matter what technology it uses. In this session we'll discuss definitions of serverless, reasons to change technologies (like VMs to containers, or on-prem to the cloud), the threat of vendor lock-in, and adopting the serverless mindset.

Marketing is a black art for most founders, causing more damage than demand for their startups. With a clearer understanding of marketing, founders will be able to leverage it at the right time and place to grow their business.

This session will dig into the ins and outs of marketing for founders: what it is, what it does, what it doesn't do, how it works, when it's done, who gets it done, and how to know if it's working.

A founder-focused model for marketing will be shared, and we'll have an interactive conversation about how it works in the real world of startups.

Do your Android builds take forever to complete? Or even if they don't, do you wonder if you could speed them up just a little bit? This talk will go through my experiences attempting to improve the build times of some of our company's apps and saving everyone time. We'll discuss Gradle techniques that can hopefully cut those build times down by minutes.

This talk will focus on our efforts to ensure safe and efficient changes to our postgres database at GitLab. In 2018 we implemented a database review process after encountering production incidents caused by bad migrations and poorly performing queries. Over the past 4.5 years, we've have refined this process and developed various tools for automated testing. I'll cover the importance of database review in preventing incidents, as well as the development of the automated migration testing tool. I'll also discuss our plans for further automation in the future. This talk may be relevant to anyone interested in observability, automation, or database management.

Some Links - Our Database Review Process - Automated Migration Testing - Query Intercepter - Blueprint for Automated Query Analysis - Database Group

Now that Winter is Gone, this non-keynote talk, fully compliant in good humour, man, with the Code of Conduct, is for Midwesteros people with a hart who are naught littorally shtabby about the punishing of the Untouchables for technical infarctions wit here Lake Michigan or Bde Maka Ska beaches.

Recent local history reference: I have never smoked or edibles, but I have a great unpublished TikTok with a Capitol Police Officer about someone lighting up a skunky vape in the part of the Senate Gallery that is not closed due to construction errors when it became clear that the Great State of Minnesota was going to restore the right to vote to drug (and other) felons released from prison into the community on parole. SF26. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?f=SF26&y=2023&ssn=0&b=senate

Taylor Swift was 7 years old when the PGP 5 source code was exported, in printed book form, via Brussels to the friendly NATO country of the Netherlands. C2's Sameer Parekh and I had to figure out how to navigate timely trains amidst Teardrops and Pings of Death to Alex DJ's flat near Amsterdam's red light district in the absence of Dave Del Torto, who allegedly snow-jobbed the SFO passport office. A few grams of ||ugh Daniel were subsequently shot into outer space along with a few grams of James Doohan, Majel, and Gene Roddenberry.

Or were they?

There was a weather delay.

The history of the Sunjammer flight is somewhat unclear. No complete public archive of the original cypherpunks mailing list appears to exist.

Photographs from a meeting we hosted at Stanford University at which Ian Goldberg, Lucky Green, Black Unicorn, and Phil Zimmerman discussed future developments in digital cash, as well as the curious case of domestic terrorist Jim Bell, will be discussed. As far as we know, we never met the author of I Was Never Here: My True Canadian Spy Story of Coffees, Code Names, and Covert Operations in the Age of Terrorism but did train other friendly secret police agents in Toronto.

At this writing, George Takei and William Shatner remain boldly on this planet.

As far as we know.

The post-Millennial generation and their demanding moms are invited to keep it weird with k8s, which is best described as one silly gray ducking joke gone too far.

No versions of GPT or GPG were harmed in the making of this entirely true story.

Initially, almost all artificial intelligence models were created and used exclusively in large enterprise systems for a simple reason: the quality of the models was determined by the power of computing resources, the skill of mathematicians responsible for training, and a large amount of data. But gradually, with the development of instrumental systems capable of solving complex mathematical problems on personal equipment, it turned out that useful models can be trained and applied at home. Moreover, users can build models, train them, and use them for individual purposes without resorting to external services.

One of the main advantages of personal artificial intelligence models is that they can be adapted and subsequently modified in user applications, without the need to correct surrounding programs, which accordingly minimizes the number of expensive updates that must be made in case of a change in the hard-coded logic. By combining the methods of speech recognition, mathematical linguistics, text, and image classification, with models, based on virtual neurons and dynamic functionalities, we will get a technology for the production of “smart” assistants capable of solving a wide range of problems, including personal resource optimization.

I look forward to sharing some exciting new opportunities in business and R&D, which came from the continuous expansion of AI in personal health, on the one hand, production and delivery on demand, on the other. As an example, I will introduce myActor, a new application that preserves data privacy and at the same time uses various AI models which support personal AI and interactive Web. myActor based on Active Data. concept.

The theme of every talk I’ve ever given is “stuff I wish someone had told me earlier” and this talk is no different.

I’ve been working as a software developer for over 15 years, and I’m hoping to compile a useful list of general software development advice I wish someone had taught me from the start.

I’ll cover both coding and process-related topics, such as how to learn new frameworks and technologies, how to properly review code, and how to be a good teammate.

Hopefully you’ll learn a helpful tip or two, and if not, I’ll make sure to leave some time at the end for Q&A.

Harmless children's toy or serious pentesting tool? Let's dive into the Flipper Zero: a versatile hacking tool that has gained significant attention on social media platforms like TikTok.

The Flipper Zero boasts a CC1101 chip capable of reading, writing and emulating RFID and NFC cards and devices. It has a built in infrared transmitter and receiver, a Bluetooth radio, GPIO pins and MicroSD storage. This gives the Flipper Zero some serious wireless pentesting capabilities, all packaged in a sleek design featuring open-source firmware. Did I mention it has a Tamagotchi-esque Dolphin persona?

So, should you get one? Should you be concerned about J Random Hacker getting their hands on one? We will talk about what the Flipper Zero is actually capable of and assess its true risk to society. We will also cover legitimate uses for the Flipper Zero in cybersecurity and discuss how it can help expose vulnerabilities in existing systems. Finally, we will touch upon the vibrant community surrounding the Flipper Zero and its potential for innovation and growth.

What was the name of the Minnesota-invented protocol presented an alternative to the World Wide Web, but ultimately lost to HTTP? What wheel-shoe transportation technology was developed in Minnesota?

Come have some fun and test your Minnesota tech knowledge in an absurd session that primarily exists because the pun was too good to pass up.

Notifications drive product engagement, provide a secure sign up experience, and keep your customers informed about new developments within your application. Twilio and other providers make setting up basic email and SMS notifications look easy, but the initial ease of set up masks a wide array of deliverability challenges that may severely damage the user experience of your notification-based workflows. Husband and wife duo Carl and Abby Allen have lived through the trenches of notification delivery for over five years and will share their war stories of managing complex notification systems at international scale. Anyone interested in the customer-experience of SMS and email-based workflows should be able to walk away from this session with a better understanding of the legal landscape around SMS and email notifications in the United States and abroad, as well as technical challenges to consider that will enhance your customer's experience with your product.

If you've ever told a boss, family member, or friend "No," then you remember how difficult standing up for yourself can be, especially when it requires disappointing someone important to you.

The reason this act is so hard is that it challenges both you and others to abide by a new standard.

People can respond to that challenge by rejecting you and your proposed standard, which hurts.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that you can learn how to stand up for yourself in a way that makes others WANT TO change, which can enrich your relationships.

The best news is that you can access a sense of security that'll make it easier to both communicate your standards AND be OK with any reaction.

In the first half of this session, you'll learn the concepts that'll make it possible to set new standards in your work & personal relationships, including:

• How people naturally adhere to standards others set for them
• Why they secretly want to progress their relationship with you
• How to gracefully communicate your new standard
• How to inspire them to take action
• How to respond when they resist changing
• Why none of this works if you don't know how to take care of yourself

In the second half, we'll apply those concepts by role-playing a common challenge: standing up to your boss.

You'll partner up, with one of you playing an overly demanding boss and the other playing an employee who has to say 'no' to working overtime again.

I'll offer a rough script for each role to follow, which will make it easier to apply the new skills we learned in the first half.

Before the role-playing, I'll lead a brief self-compassion exercise, which will help us access the security needed to stand up for ourselves gracefully.

After each has had the chance to play both roles at least once, we'll come back together to debrief.

Many years ago. I started working at a new company. The first thing my hiring manager told me was. "I want you to make waves here. That's why I hired you. I need you to make waves big as you can ride them, but if you wipe out, you are on your own."

This was undoubtedly some interesting advice. It gave me confidence, and I suddenly knew I would face some opposition here. It also gave me a sense of freedom and a crap ton of other emotions.

This advice impacted my career and future decisions in my life. It also caused me to reflect on how decisions I made in the past were sound waves to ride and ones I should have passed on. These examples will help you make waves of your own. When to go for it, pass or carve your way through work and life issues. Like all my presentations, this is not a lecture but an interactive experience. Please asks questions and share your own stories of riding the storm out.

Climate change is one of the greatest problems facing the world today. How can the innovation of the tech community help solve it? What are the barriers to applying software solutions to the transition to renewable energy, and what are areas where software is primed to make a big impact?

Session content being refined. More detailed desription to come.

Now that you’ve claimed your Minnebar 17 POAPs, let’s talk about how you can use POAP to build digital community for on your own!

On June 7, 2021 I claimed my very first POAP and was intrigued. I quickly developed a love of these digital tokens that allow me to collect and remember fun events. I’ve created over 40 different POAP events for hobbies, personal use, family events, and professional.

We will cover:

• What is a POAP?
• Examples of POAPs and how they can be used.
• Review the Minnebar 17 POAP distribution.
• Discuss additional capabilities and applications built around POAP.
• We will even create a POAP in the event so you see how it is done.

POAPs are an incredible asset to create digital communities, and there is a vibrant ecosystem built around them to enhance and add utility.

SwiftUI has revolutionized the way developers create user interfaces for Apple’s platforms. Its declarative API makes it fast and simple to build most common UI designs. However, as applications become more complex, developers may find themselves fighting the system to create truly unique and dynamic interfaces.

In this talk, we’ll cover some of the techniques we’ve used in our projects to achieve custom UI designs. We’ll use animation to add whimsy, implement custom view alignment, create a new layout container, respond dynamically to user interaction, and improve navigation with custom transitions. With these tools you’ll be able to confidently tackle many types of custom interfaces in your SwiftUI apps.

While all experience levels are welcome, this talk covers advanced topics, so some familiarity with SwiftUI is recommended.

How IntelligentRx created, secured and audited HIPAA compliant services like our public website https://intelligentrx.com and our more security-minded B2B service https://intelligentrx.com/for-employers

You work on a web app that's grown and evolved over a few years. The backend stack you started with is familiar, and it's mostly accommodated your app's growing complexity. But you've started to hear a persistent voice calling to you: "We've outgrown our monolithic app! A service-oriented architecture will solve all our problems!"

If you've heard this voice and are intrigued by its promise, or have worked in a codebase navigating the tension between a central monolith and service-oriented model, this session is for you! I'll share what I've learned in the 5+ years since Reverb decided to introduce services around our Rails monolith, and there will be space for others to share their own experiences and ask questions.

Some topics we'll cover:
* Clarifying why you're re-architecting your application: Scaling an organization vs. scaling technology
* How do you actually split up an existing application?
* Tying it all together: Inter-service communication, API gateways, and frontend/client considerations
* Anticipating the operational overhead that comes with multiple services

Wireless connectivity is a critical component of our everyday lives. We can’t see it, touch it or hear it. How do we know it will work for our devices and systems? Wireless propagation simulations map the unseen and unknown of the wireless world and enable us to visualize what wireless looks like. Maps help guide our understanding of where wireless will and won’t work for us. Learn how wireless propagation predictions and maps help people make critical decisions when building wireless networks that affect our wireless connectivity experience.

Developing a compelling value proposition for customer engagement and competitive advantage

Your value proposition is the beating heart of your business opportunity -- it connects your unique capabilities with the unique needs of your customers.

Identifying and resolving opposing forces is a uniquely powerful method for developing a compelling value proposition that engages your customers and defeats your competitors. Opposing forces act as a "crucible" to deliver previously un-seen value and solve previously un-met needs. The most elusive aspect of solving the creative tension between a set of opposing forces isn't actually solving the contradiction -- it is identifying and defining the opposing forces. Many contradictions are "hidden in plain sight" -- because they are too subtle to be seen or, more frequently, because we have become conditioned to accepting the creative tension.

We will explore some contradictions that have been solved for significant business advantage; we will also explore some contradictions that remain un-solved. We will briefly consider practical methods for identifying opposing forces.