MinneBar 14 Session Schedule

Back for a fourth year!

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:

💪 3 big screen TVs running a selection of locally made games

💪 This thing's going all day long

💪 In the main hallway area of Minnebar

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FEATURED GAMES

Hey! Click a game's thumbnail image to see its trailer!

OR watch this mega-trailer to get a taste of all games in the arcade.

Atmocopter — Will Tice / unTied Games

Atmocopter is a retro sidescroller featuring a little helicopter robot who, upon waking up in a less-than-friendly factory, just wants to make it out alive! Navigate Atmocopter through hazardous electraps, bumpers, spider-bots, and more as you press switches, blast rogue robots, and solve puzzles!

http://untiedgames.com/atmocopter

HyperDot — Tribe Games | @TribeGames

Coming to Xbox One this year! HyperDot is an action arcade game rooted in minimalist design, maximum challenge, and infinite flexibility. Evade enemies and test your skills in over 100 trials in the campaign mode, outlast your friends in multiplayer battles, or build custom challenges with the level editor.

https://hyperdotgame.com

Joggernauts — Space Mace

Available now on Nintendo Switch! Coordinate the crazy conga line of alien athletes in this Minnesota-made cooperative puzzle platformer for 1 to 4 players.

https://spacemacegames.com

plylp — @devjana DorkChocl8

Digital catch! Two players hold the same controller and toss a "ball" to one another. It's kinda fun... give it a shot!

twitter: @devjana

Tactics V: "Obsidian Brigade" — From Nothing Game Studios LLC paul@fromnothinggamestudios.com [Paul Metcalf]

Tactics V: "Obsidian Brigade" is a tactical RPG in homage to the classic 90's games in the genre. It uses in-house lore, with magic, and multi-classing. Coming out in Q3 2019

http://fromnothinggamestudios.com

Volcano Valley — Volcano Valley Team (Alex Carlson)

Splatoon meets bumpercars. Have the most ground painted at the end of 90 seconds to win! Use fun items and watch out for volcanoes!

https://volcanovalley.itch.io/volcano-valley

West of Loathing — design by Asymmetric Publications (asymmetric.net), code by Victor Thompson (victor@caperacademy.com)

Available now on Nintendo Switch (and other platforms)! Say howdy to West of Loathing -- a single-player slapstick comedy adventure role-playing game set in the wild west of the Kingdom of Loathing universe. Traverse snake-infested gulches, punch skeletons wearing cowboy hats, grapple with demon cows, and investigate a wide variety of disgusting spittoons.

http://westofloathing.com

Widget Satchel — Noble Robot

In Widget Satchel, you are Sprocket, a pet ferret on a space station in the far future. Escape your playpen and make your way to the shuttlebay with the most stuff! Perfect for those who want a challenge, but also for those who just want to knock stuff over and get into trouble!

http://widgetsatchel.com

Wisper — Wisper

Take control of the wind and rise to the challenge of collecting and destroying the cursed fractions of a shattered storm to restore the tropical island of Sunshore. Your presence may be unseen, but your actions don’t go unnoticed.

Being a hero has never been more of a breeze!

https://www.facebook.com/sunshorestudios/

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Also, would you like to get plugged into the local game dev scene?

Ice Cold Games
website

A one stop shop for upcoming game dev related events, game creators, organizations, and more.

Glitch Con
website

Digital games festival run by Glitch.

IGDATC
website

The local chapter of the International Game Developers Association has monthly general meeting plus a VR meeting.

Nice Games Club Podcast
website

The podcast where nice gamedevs talk gaming. Nice! And, local!

Get feedback on your product/interface/idea from area designers and UX experts.

These are one-on-one review and coaching sessions so bring stuff to show and discuss. In the past, we've fielded questions from prototyping an idea to audience definition to building out a design team. We'll have an area staffed by reviewers all day with sign-ups for various slots as well as an ad-hock whoever's free line.

Whether you don't have a designer on staff or simply want another set of eyes, we'd love to see your stuff!

You Promise: To bring questions or topics to get us started. Here are a few tips for "winning a critique".

We Promise: Candid, unbiased and confidential feedback following the "rules of critique" to help you level up.

Rules of critique

1. Only the artifact is subject to critique, not the creator. Remember it's not personal.
2. Seek to first understand the problem before offering suggestions
3. Practice empathy - Think like the audience NOT like a maker.
4. Be objective and provide suggestions that may be tested. Avoid statements of personal "like" or "dislike"
5. Offer suggestions for improvement, don't dictate solutions.
6. Listen, recognize achievement, then offer critique (In that order)
7. Be Nice
8. Have fun

Sick of pitching? Let's turn the tables so you can stop sweating it out over your pitch deck. We'll tell you what we look for, so you can decide whether your startup should get our investment.

MinneDemo has been the first place where aspiring Minnesota tech entrepreneurs have publicly shared a demo of their project over the past 10+ years. Many of these projects have gone on to become the most successful growth companies in the state of Minnesota backed by millions of dollars in venture capital.

Through Rob Weber's 12+ years of experience investing as an angel investor in Minnesota startups, and now full-time role as managing partner of the new Great North Labs venture fund, he will share with you what he is looking for before making an investment. Mary Grove is Partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and previously spent 14 years at Google working with startups in over 100 countries. She’ll share with you what she looks for in making investments and supporting companies she invests in.

Topics will include-
* Total addressable market. What is it and how to estimate your startups TAM.
* Team. Early stage VC's care about your team. What should you share and why.
* Traction/Product-market fit. At what point have you demonstrated enough progress to be ready for venture capital.
* Defensibility. At scale, how will your startup create a moat around it and produce a lasting, valuable business.

About 1/3 of the session will be left open for Q/A.

No matter your role we're all feeling the pressure to incorporate machine learning into everything we build with the promise of enhancing our lives and increasing the bottom line. While we work to understand the impact of machine learning some are already fearing the consequences. Join us for a live recording of the WiT Twin Cities Podcast where we discuss machine learning's impact on the world in a fishbowl format where the audience is invited to join the podcast and be apart of the conversation. For more information about WiT Twin Cities check us out here: link

There are lots of questions about the role and how it differs between companies. Let's talk about what's the same and what's different in how we do Product Management where we work.

Adrienne Peirce
Product Manager
Leadpages
Company Size: 51-100 employees
Founded: 2012

Shawn Heller
Senior Product Manager
Sports Engine
Company Size: 501-1,000 employees
Founded: 2008

Jeremy Moede
Lead Agile Coach
Target
Company Size: 350,000+ employees
Founded: 1902

The gap between Minikube and Kubernetes in production is vast and full of pain. Want to know what it's like to implement Kubernetes in production for the first time before you collect the bumps and bruises yourself? Join me to learn about the ups and downs of one company's initial experience - including who was involved, the scope, and what was intentionally deferred.

We will cover:

• Why even consider Kubernetes (Hint: you might not benefit from it!)
• How a real company approached their first proof-of-concept
• How goals changed during implementation of k8s
• What we learned so far
• What we still need to learn

NOTE: before then I will be posting my Spring 2019 Minnesota Tech, Recruiting, IT Jobs, and Salary Report and will put a link here.

For this session a few slides and a lot of Q&A and discussion.

Frequent conversations, questions and topics I have had lately at Minnedemo, user groups/meetups and a CTO round table (I'll likely add a few):

• What the local job market is like right now
• Why there seems to be more hiring and layoff announcements
• Why salaries that had been stagnant the past 2 years may be increasing a bit
• I don't have the years of experience a company is looking for, what should I do
• How to network in the MN tech scene
• How does the Minneapolis tech scene rank with other cities

What is on your mind? Send me a note paul@mnheadhunter.com

I recently had the opportunity to speak at TEDxMinneapolis about virtual reality in a talk titled "Can Virtual Reality Change Your Mind".

The talk covers how beneath the immense amount of hype surrounding VR over the past few years, there is data is emerging on how it's impacting training and health care, with tangible use cases that go beyond gaming and entertainment. Since being published on YouTube, it’s now been viewed over 150,000 times by people in over 50 countries around the world.

In this session I'll share some stories and learnings from going through the process. If there's enough time, I'll demo some of the tech itself, including:

• developing avatar kinematics, and how this impacts user engagement
• simulating facial expressions / uncanny valley
• VR gloves & gestural interfaces
• and more!

Check out this session if you are interested in the future of robots and how they may become the next platform for most software development to move to. The first half is big picture, non-Misty Robotics-focused and then a live-coding session will ensue...using code (JavaScript or Python) for something other than a web browser or mobile phone—you guessed it—on a robot.

Like what you see? Interested? Want a challenge? Stay for the follow-up session where you can get some up close and personal time with a Misty robot and try your hand at creating your own robot skills.

Plan on spending 2 hours with us and these very cute robots!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvZwryzJuv4

Implementing change doesn’t happen with just one person. It takes a team. A change agent is a person who has the passion to make change work and to ensure that the change lasts. Being able to act as change agents is critical to successfully deliver today's complex technology and business products and to achieve their desired business value. Change happens because people recognize the value of making the change and then purposely decide to act. In order to convince people outside of your sphere of influence to change their behavior, you need to master the 7 change agent skills and to understand the pitfalls you will encounter if you or your team lacks those skills.

You’ve muscled through a dozen sprints, you’ve sharpened your app with round after round of user testing, you’ve got QA signoff - and now, finally, you have the green light to submit your app to the app store.

You. Are. Ready. To. Ship.

But are you ready… really?

When building a digital product, those last few steps before launch can seem like a formality. Compared to the complexity of your product itself, it is quite easy to overlook the process of releasing to the app store.

But, if you’ve ever received an obscurely-worded app rejection notice from an app reviewer at Apple, had a twinge of doubt over whether your Android app would run properly after code obfuscation, or even just scrambled to find decent-looking screenshots at the last minute on launch day – you know well that there are dragons lurking all over the app store submission process.

In this session, you’ll hear practical tips, hard-earned lessons, and maybe even a few horror stories from our experiences shipping hundreds of releases over the years.

You’ll leave the session with Livefront’s Preflight Checklist, which is the tool we use to slay those product launch dragons. The Preflight Checklist is a comprehensive list of checks, TODOs, and other things you just flat out don’t want to forget when shipping a new app to the store.

With this simple list; you can ship early, ship often, and most importantly - ship with confidence.

People bike, take transit, and walk to save money, reduce stress (on themselves and the planet), and make better use of their time. So much so that while over ten years Minneapolis increased in population by 30,000, total vehicle miles driven went down.

Un-conference, Un-session Features Participants here will be at anywhere on their journey to car-free-dom — from those setting out to reduce car trips to the all-in (anyone want to buy my two-car garage?). We will share gear, apps, and local knowledge that have helped us reduce car trips or even eliminate them altogether.

Topics may and should include:

• Bike commuting
• Bike-share
• Transit.app, the transit app
• eBikes
• Walking for health
• Walking to get somewhere
• Walkscore
• Scooters and other new mobility
• Bus Rapid Transit
• Resources and support

As a session jumping off point I'll spend a few minutes on what I've learned over thousands of city miles walked and bused. Like how to keep warm and dry(ish) walking through whatever Minnesota weather throws and how to use apps to speed travel and minimize waiting on Metro Transit.

Start with a contradiction. If you plan to invest several years of your precious time in a product / service opportunity that doesn't solve a contradiction, keep looking. If you are pursuing a product or service innovation and you aren't planning on a multi-year commitment, keep looking. Whether you're in a small enterprise or a large enterprise -- find an opportunity that is worth a multi-year commitment.

A contradiction is two opposing forces or dimensions that apparently can't be improved simultaneously. We usually optimize across contradictions instead of solving them -- by increasing one variable while decreasing the other variable. Optimization is not the same as resolution. Optimization produces incremental innovation; resolution produces radical / disruptive innovation. Optimization can be a distraction from discovering significant, long-term product / service value.

Many innovations improve one variable in isolation. Some innovations even improve two variables -- although the two variables are not inherently in conflict with each other, and they may even be un-related. Incremental innovation. Improve two variables that are inherently in conflict with each other. Radical / disruptive innovation.

Solving a contradiction addresses the two critical elements of a viable business model: Customer value (delivering two dimensions that previously required a compromise) and competitive advantage (delivering customer value that the competition has not discovered and / or is not equipped to deliver).

This approach is a variant of a broad domain that is known as systematic innovation. I will describe the basic model of systematic innovation. I will describe how the systematic approach is more effective than un-systematic approaches. I will describe how this particular systematic approach is more effective than other systematic approaches -- it solves a contradiction among systematic approaches!

I will describe how prominent innovators have used this approach to disrupt entire eco-systems in medical technology and information technology. I will describe how I used this approach to discover a Web middleware innovation that is currently generating a healthy royalty stream. We may even explore an application or two on the fly if you want to iterate some ideas.

Join me as we discover product / service value with systematic innovation. If you haven't discovered a contradiction that you can solve -- keep looking!

Only 1 in 3 Kickstarters are successful. How do you tip the odds in your favor?

Join us for a journey through the $30,000 funded Kickstarter for Magic Wizard Staff link. Magic Wizard Staff (www.magicwizardstaff.com) makes wizard staffs that actually do wizard things like shoot a 3 foot flame or billow a cloud of fog. We created Magic Wizard Staff specifically to learn how to run a Kickstarter and now we are sharing our lessons learned with you.

Come one, come all, and learn about:

• What products do well on Kickstarter
• When to launch your Kickstarter
• How to prepare for your Kickstarter
• How to deliver your Kickstarter
• How to keep your bakers happy in the face of everything going wrong

Come and learn from our mistakes in this brutally honest and conversation based session.

Magic Wizard Staff is just the beginning. In addition to hearing about our trials and tribulations, come and learn about our next project The Reactor. The Reactor is a group of engineers and marketers that meets regularly with the goal of building successful products for Kickstarter. Find out how we are implementing our lessons learned to meet our 2019 goal of receiving over $100,000 in funding on Kickstarter.

If you are a Coder, Owner, Startup investor, or just have an idea to improve this place, then this class is for you.

Lee is at it again. He will create an exciting learning opportunity about the 1981 law that takes your R&D costs and puts them in your pocket.

The R&D tax credit is for taxpayers of any size that design, develop or improve products, processes, techniques, formulas or software.

It is calculated based upon 4 steps that but the IRS muddled it up with ambiguity and conflict and think you can do it in 25 hours.

I guarantee you will have fun learning tax law, or will not fall asleep....

Every startup has those "gut check" and "oh no" moments. During this session, we are going to explore the fundamental steps that every founder and/or startup needs to determine in order to effectively build organizational structure. Additionally, we are going to discuss why and how startups and founders can win investments with a healthy organizational structure.

Thinking about leaving your posh corporate job to become a freelancer, consultant or owner of a (hopefully) growing small business?

Facing such a big decision you probably have lots of questions, like:

"Can I get rich?"

or

"Will I die poor and destitute?"

You might also have how-to questions about how to set up your business, how to do marketing and sales, billing, payroll, contracts , etc. You know, the fun stuff.

Bring your questions to this session. I and a few solopreneur friends will be on hand to field any questions, point you to resources and help you make a better decision.

Note: startup founders, you are certainly welcome, but just to be clear, we will not be discussing startup-specific topics like funding, scaling, recruiting, etc.

Whether you are applying for your first job or exploring new opportunities, writing an effective resume for a UX position is not an easy task. In this session, I will share some tips on how to design your resume so it persuades the hiring manager you qualify for the position in seconds. But this is not where your job adventure stops. Often, UX researchers and designers are asked to make a presentation. These presentations may vary in format, length, content, but play a significant role in the job process. In this session, I will share some tips and tricks on how you can prepare your resume and on-site presentation. Bring a printed copy of your resume for a group activity and walk away with ideas on how to improve it.

Does the sound of people eating chips, clearing their throat, chewing gum, coughing put you in a rage? You might have misophonia.

Misophonia may cause a reaction to sounds such as dripping water, chewing, snapping gum, or repetitive noises, such as pencil tapping. People with misophonia can become irritated, enraged, or even panicked when they hear their trigger sounds. Treatment might involve therapy or lifestyle recommendations, such as using sound protection or creating "noise-free" zones within living spaces.

NYT
NPR
Harvard
Psychology Today
Quartz
Misophonia Facebook group

A few months ago, the annual Misophonia Association conference took place in Bloomington and it was awesome. 200 people from all over the country gathered. I'll have updates from there.

This is relevant for the tech community because of the need for deep concentration, and the proliferation of "open workspaces".

If you think you have misophonia - this session may change your life.

Also check out my talk on Side Projects.

Technology is changing constantly, keeping us on our toes with new frameworks, features, tools, and hardware being released and improved. It gives us new choices and decisions to make that affect our product portfolio, our company’s success, our colleagues, our customers, and our bottom line. But what happens when we give in to all this change and start chasing after all these shiny objects without any sort of strategy or direction?

This session will be in a conversation format. Come ready to share your experiences, thoughts, and gripes on shiny object syndrome!

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After hearing last year that this session "was the best social media talk I've ever been to" from one of the attendees, I'm bringing this presentation back with a few new things that we've learned at Evergreen in the last 12 months by managing thousands of Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts.

Bottom line, many businesses are drinking from the fire hose that is social media marketing advice. So I'm going to share with you the most bizarre social media experiment you've ever heard and how it spawned multiple businesses whose existence was built on a foundation of social media marketing. Then, I'll follow up with how you can apply what I've learned to your own business or brand for setting realistic expectations in what social media marketing can do for you.

This is not your mom's social media talk. It won't be filled with platitudes about hustle and grind or make false promises. I'm going to share real tactics that anyone can start using -- some even before the session is over. Buckle up and get ready to hear some every day techniques I've used to help billion dollar brands add 1 million followers to their Facebook page, to guide non-profits to their first 1000 followers, or to usher in the most sought after objective of any audience: monetization.

What are some of the most important technology law developments over the past year? Notable lawsuits and legislation span areas that include privacy, autonomous vehicles, social media, copyright, patents, trademarks, security, licensing, and biometrics. A technology litigator, cybersecurity, and computer forensics lawyer will discuss the evolving tech law landscape, as well as trends that will likely continue to affect technologists in the coming year. Attorney Damien Riehl frequently speaks and writes on legal topics that affect businesses, including the legal implications of the Internet and technology.

Singularity University is a diverse community focused on solving global problems using exponential technologies. Headquartered at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, and founded in 2008, there are currently 126 chapters in 63 countries. We believe that these technologies can create abundance for all communities around the world, and we pursue creating that abundance through leadership, education, and global grand challenges.

Humans evolved based on a linear way of thinking and so it’s difficult for most to imagine the impact that will come along with each of these technologies. There are currently about 20 exponential technologies have the potential to disrupt our lives as much as the internet and mobile did over the next 20 years. While disruption is certain, the future is up to us, to define how these exponential technologies impact the world. These are a few bold predictions being made by futurists/innovators:

– A colony will be built on the moon – 80%+ of the world’s energy consumed will use clean energy – 95%+ adoption of autonomous, electric vehicles – The majority of the known 30,000 diseases will be cured

Co-ambassador of the SingularityU Minneapolis-St.Paul Chapter and a graduate of Singularity University’s Executive Program, Ryan Weber is also a managing partner of St. Cloud-based Great North Labs, an early-stage venture fund and startup school.

Weber will present key takeaways from the Singularity University Executive Program that forward-thinking entrepreneurs and managers can use to plan for future innovation. He will also update local leaders on how the SingularityU Minneapolis-St.Paul Chapter is working to catalyze the region’s business and technology talent to produce global solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

The topics covered will include:

1. Intro To Exponentials
2. Inventory Of Exponential Technology
3. Tools For Being An Exponential Leader

Sorry to break it to you, but if you’re writing software, then you’re writing bugs.

You want to find and squash as many of these bugs as you can before you release them into the wild, but how? Sure, you could hire testers to go out and find bugs - but that costs money and they might not even catch every bug!

Faced with the costly uncertainty of testers, some people turn towards automated testing. If written correctly, automated tests can provide reliable and consistent checks across your codebase.

As beneficial as automated tests can be, I am here to argue that automated testing alone will not save you! No matter how much you automate, your product will suffer without sufficient manual testing to back it up.

In this talk I’ll explain why manual testing is necessary (no matter how many automated tests you have) and how you can best use manual and automated tests together.

Twin Cities Startup Week (TCSW) is one of the largest entrepreneurial events in the United States. Every year hundreds of community members come together to plan workshops, panel discussions, activities, and cultural events. In 2018, TCSW attracted over 17,000 attendees to more than 200 events. This year is already shaping up to be even better, with the introduction of some exciting new updates to the format of the week including concentrations around topics and event-locations.

In this session, the TCSW team will provide a brief history of the week, announce some of the key enhancements to the 2019 plan, and then provide tips on how to ensure that your event/location/community is involved in the next Startup Week.

If you’ve always been interested in bettering your personal and/or professional brand via Startup Week, this is the session for you.

Presenters

Reed Robinson, Co-founder/ Executive Director of BETA
Reed co-founded Twin Cities Startup Week (TCSW) in 2014 when he realized that there was a lack of awareness around all the incredible innovation taking place in the Twin Cities. A startup founder himself, Reed recognized the importance of bringing the great entrepreneurial minds together for a week of celebration. He is the executive director of BETA, a local startup accelerator that focuses on elevating the performance of first-time founders.

Casey Shultz, Director of Twin Cities Startup Week
Casey recently moved to the Twin Cities from the San Francisco Bay Area where she previously managed the Citrix Startup Accelerator in Silicon Valley and Serverless, Inc. a developer tools startup in San Francisco. Casey was lured to the Twin Cities by the high quality of life and thriving entrepreneurial community, which she was introduced to through the TCSW Fly-in Program.

A deep dive into programming on the Misty Robotics platform. (Double Length Session if the organizers allow for it - please plan for 1.5 to 2 hours)

If you are a wizard with JavaScript or a master of Python come by this multi-hour workshop where we'll challenge you to write a skill for a mobile robot—this one. We'll connect you to a rolling bundle of sensor, capabilities, and promise—turning you loose with your favorite text editor or IDE, some user docs, and see what you can do.

Connect Misty to your favorite API, create a sentry bot, or a new friend, the possibilities are endless.

You'll have more context if you also attend this helpful intro presentation and live coding session

My name is Wessam Sonbol, I am a product guy developing products, analytics and identifying ways to resolve the data silos in healthcare since 2000. Over the past couple of years (since 2016), I have been providing product consulting and guidance to some of the top 500 companies. One item stood out to me the most, is the lack of what is a product and what is a project.

In this session, I plan to cover the following: 1. Defining a product vs a project 2. Your customer 3. What does a product team look like 4. Who is a product manager 5. Product roadmap 6. How to manage stakeholders

Come prepared to share your experience

Best Buy is proud to host a conversation about diversity and inclusion in tech. At Best Buy, we value everyone’s talents, life experiences, beliefs and backgrounds so our employees can relax and be themselves. Our goal is simple: Unleash the power of our people and utilize their unique talents, experiences, beliefs and background to create an engaging work environment and a world-class retailing operation.

We recognize diversity goes beyond gender and cultural background. It extends to sexual orientation, disabilities, new parents returning to the workforce, age and beyond. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion where panelists share real life experiences about fostering an inclusive culture that embraces our differences and provides employees an environment where they can bring their whole selves to work

Discussion topics include:

• What has shaped our panelists' thinking and how they approach supporting diversity and inclusion
• Ways they have gone about finding advocates and advocating for others
• Ideas for how each of us can help welcome diversity and foster a more inclusive tech organization
• Ideas for implementing and supporting D&I strategies in your own organization

Moderator

Matt Furman - Chief Communications and Public Affairs Officer

Matt Furman is the chief communications and public affairs officer for Best Buy Co. Inc. In this role, he oversees internal and external communications, government affairs, corporate responsibility and sustainability, community relations, as well as the company’s in-house production studio and event planning functions.

Prior to joining Best Buy in 2012, Mr. Furman was the vice president of corporate affairs at Mars Chocolate, the manufacturer of such iconic brands as Snickers, M&M’s and Dove. He previously held senior communications positions at Google, CNN and in the administrations of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Furman has a law degree from the American University School of Law and holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is admitted to practice law in several jurisdictions, including before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Panelists

Brittani Uribe - Web Developer, Communications A bilingual engineering professional with a focus in digital communication, strong, passion for all things tech and deep-rooted brand love. Skilled in client services, client experience, communications, event management, web development and design.

Bryan Brandau - Director of Web Operations, BestBuy.com. As the Director of Operations for BestBuy.com, Bryan is responsible for infrastructure operations and technology that powers core ecommerce functions such as cart, commerce, catalog, search and browse for all BestBuy.com and Digital properties. He is a hands on technical leader who insourced all Bestbuy.com infrastructure operations previously managed by vendors.

John Hardy - Diversity & Inclusion Manager, Experiential Learning John is passionate about helping others to recognize and invest in their own passions and potential. He and his team currently drive Best Buy's Diversity & Inclusion strategy, partnering with leaders across the organization to create sustainable strategies for recruiting, developing, engaging, and retaining talent. He aspires to build organizational cultures that help people find their greater purpose, both inside the workplace and in within our communities

Sara Heitkamp - Senior Manager, Web Operations, BestBuy.com Sara is a Senior Manager of Web Operations leading the Associate Facing Web Operations team. Sara’s role is to manage day to day oversight and activities related to Associate Facing Web Operations including production support, technical web duties and initiatives in support of maintaining highly scalable web applications and services for the global web properties of BestBuy.com

Back again for another MinneBar the Indie Game Dev Microtalks is a parade of all star local Game Developers will each take the reigns for 6 minutes to present their experiences and learnings as Independent Game Developers in the Twin Cities.

The Minnesota independent game development community has been releasing more products than ever and 2019 is going to see even more releases by local teams. Join us for fun and informative lighting-round style session of stories and lessons learned from local game devs.

Presenters:

• Adia Alderson
• Charles McGregor
• Dev Jana
• Ian Fitzpatrick
• Martin Grider

Are you unsure about whether your big idea has legs? Or maybe you’re confident your idea has a positive ROI but you’re not sure how to design and deliver it. This talk will illustrate how teams move from concept to prototype to customer interviews in a week using a Dojo Discovery Sprint. In this talk you’ll learn how the Dojo Discovery Sprint focuses the team on idea and design discovery more than delivering the next software increment. In many cases, it’s hard to know with a high degree of certainty what the next most valuable software work is when the ideas and designs haven’t been tested with real customers. You'll learn how to test your ideas and designs before jumping into implementation.

Participants will learn how to test their ideas and designs with end-users and customers before committing to implementation.

井の中の蛙大海を知らず - "A frog in a well does not know the great sea."

Software engineering may be difficult, but fostering a working environment that enables skilled engineers to perform their best can sometimes seem downright impossible. Every day, many engineering teams are battling a messy whirlwind of forces like unmovable deadlines, impostor syndrome, psychological safety issues, personnel/leadership conflicts, fierce technological preferences, and more. With teams more distributed all over the world than ever before, cultural differences can exacerbate many of these difficulties.

As a software engineering coach, my job is to not only introduce new technology to software teams, but to strengthen their working relationships within their organization. Coaches aren’t simply technical instructors. Rather, they are change agents that guide a team towards better outcomes for their project as well as their interactions with one another.

In this presentation, I will discuss tips, tricks, and techniques that technical leaders and managers alike can utilize to better coach engineering teams, including concepts like the definition of empathy (and, more importantly, what doesn't count), the trust-influence relationship model, introducing new technologies in a meaningful and consumable way, and a 5-step process to provide teams confidence to own their new solutions moving forward.

In this session, members of the Celarity team will share their expertise on how to find, recruit, and retain top talent. This local agency has been in the industry for 25+ years and has placed over 4,500 marketing, creative, and digital professionals at more than 500 local companies. They've received 4.8/5 stars on GlassDoor with over 100+ reviews, been recognized multiple times as a best place to work, and received many top-partner awards from their Fortune 500 clients.

So, get ready to take notes! They’ll cover their recruiting secrets, best practices, tips, and tricks of the trade so that you can find, recruit, and retain top talent for your teams too!

They’ll answer questions and cover topics like:

1. What makes a passive candidate interested in working with you
2. How to ensure potential candidates find your company and your opportunity
3. How to reach out to qualified people who aren’t finding you
4. Keeping candidates interested throughout the hiring process
5. How to vet candidates to make sure they’re a fit for your team
6. Best practices for closing candidates
7. How to continually engage your employees and keep them on your team

Do you want to know what the 10-step Korean skincare is? Do you want to know why the sun is bad and how you can avoid sun damage (other than not going outside)?

Wait what, why do you need 10 steps?

We will also take a look at the science behind how skincare ingredients work - pH levels, what works with what, and doesn't work with what, and why do people put snail mucus on their face?

There may be sheet masks and product demos. Like literally, putting stuff on your face. Come and put stuff on your face. (Putting stuff on your face is not required. 🤪)

#selfcare

What: A discussion about what it takes to start, grow, and exit a bootstrapped business.

Outline

Bang bang boogie: Bruno Bornsztein (InfluenceKit, Curbly) will talk about how to start, why success and failure can look the same at the beginning, and why knowing your weakness might be your greatest strength.

Let’s rock: Bjork Ostrom (Pinch of Yum, Food Blogger Pro, WP Tasty) will share his experience building a team and growing revenue.

Drop the mic: Kevin McArdle (SureSwift Capital) will talk about what a bootstrapped exit looks like, and how to position a successful bootstrapped business for the next step.

Jennifer will provide tips to enhance skills in the areas of interviewing for success, securing the job offer, and consistently bringing value to the workforce. Specific topics of presentation will include: • How to sell yourself and be your own advocate • Networking for the benefit of yourself and others • Interviewing techniques to help land the job • Ongoing habits to ensure your continued career success • Benefits of traditional fulltime employment vs. consulting

Some of us are old enough to remember our first computer being the one of the Atari Game Systems, Atari 400 or 800, some form of Apple II, or the Commodore Vic 20 or C64.

There are fascinating histories behind the creation of the heart of most personal processing systems back in the late 70s and early to mid 80s.

We won't focus on Intel's 8080, the heart of the Altair, the first personal computer, and the computer that helped to spawn the HomeBrew Computer Club. Instead, we'll start with Chuck Peddle, a microchip designer who left Motorola because the company didn't want his idea of a stripped-down processor to eat market share away at their $300 68XX chip family.

Chuck jumps to MOS Technologies, and develops the 6502 Microprocessor, on sale for $25 in quantities of one.

It is this price point that attracts Steve Wozniak to build a working personal computer on plywood to plug into a TV called the Apple I, to show off at the HomeBrew Computer Club. Fifty Apple I circuit boards were sold for $666.66 each (roughly $3k today). Woz's friend Steve Jobs thinks they could make a business selling pre-assembled computers, "1000 a week."

There will be tales of intrigue, backstabbing, dirty tactics, and cutthroat competition from Don Rawitsch [of Oregon Trail fame], Steve Jobs, Dan Bricklin, Bill Gates, Nolan Bushnell, Jack Tramiel, and Bil Herd.

There may be 8-bit machines on display (Atari | Commodore | Apple).

Some time may be allocated to let others reminisce about their '6502 moments.'

AutoML can automate data preparation, feature extraction, model selection, and model tuning. This can save a Data Scientist loads of time. So instead of hiring four Data Scientists, you may only need two, right?

It’s no secret the shortage of data science talent to help companies produce advanced analytics from their stockpiles of data. There is also a plethora of vendor tools available making promises of turning an analyst into the next great data scientist (which BTW, is possible).

From the depths of the hardcore mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists (who created this stuff in the first place), have created more advanced tools automate the model creation process to help Data Scientists become more efficient, and (hopefully) better at our jobs.

I will demo AutoML, discuss some pros/cons, and what it can do for you.

Link to a version of this presentation: https://www.theunlitpipe.com/lenr-a-primer

With firms like Toyota, Nissan, Boeing and Mitsubishi engaged in research, and patents filed as recently as February by Google, it is worth finding out how this carbon-free sustainable technology is positioned to fill the gap between renewables and traditional nuclear. 

LENR is an acronym for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, but is also known as LANR (Lattice Assisted ...), CANR (Chemically Assisted ...) and describes a category of carbon-free generators of heat energy that have been researched for 30 years.  This year one company has said they will introduce IoT-controlled LENR products into the marketplace that could dramatically reduce our reliance upon fuels that emit greenhouse gases. So shouldn’t we learn more about it?

One potential manufacturer states, “Think of it as an energy amplifier, that turns one unit of energy into many units without any toxic waste or dangerous radioactivity.”

Controversial?  You betcha!  Despite over 1,000 peer reviewed papers from research universities and labs showing the generation of heat, financial backing by the Gates Foundation and Google Alphabet and confirmation of heat production by research heavyweights like SRI International, LENR has come a long way since its beginnings when it was called “cold fusion”. 

This will be a primer on the topic, including some of the science, how the field has progressed and how it might be poised to be the biggest provider of heat energy in industry, the home and even in vehicles.

The session will provide links to researchers, organizations, commercial ventures and patents filed by those trying to be first to market with a device that may generate thousands of kilowatts of heat from a core the size of a cigarette that can run for six months on a single charge using the same materials you find in today’s laptop batteries.

Digital assets like Bitcoin were just the tip of the iceberg. Blockchain based distributed ledgers can take the friction out of managing stakeholders and when applied to illiquid assets like private company stock - the benefits are manifold - from easing capital raises to streamlining transfers to onchain voting + dividends to liquidity and more. Learn about how you can tokenize your company!

A growing business hired me to add to their software-development team. A queue of worthwhile, interesting projects greeted my arrival. Alas, with flourishing order volume came an unforeseen, sudden result: an overwhelmed SQL Server instance. This urgent situation led me to shelve my project work and delve into optimizing our SQL Server implementation. Over about a year, I improved our database performance considerably. Our applications became faster and had fewer database-related errors. With far fewer urgent database issues, I could resume project work. Trial and error, plus some other resources, taught me practical ways to improve our database code and to troubleshoot SQL Server performance. I want to share some of these tips with you!

I will teach some rules of thumb for writing better-performing SQL Server queries quickly. I will also show how to troubleshoot performance with SQL Server execution plans. If you are unfamiliar with execution plans, don’t worry! We will go through how to use these diagrams to see how SQL Server runs your queries and how to fix problems. Execution plans show a lot of information, and I will share what is important and what you should ignore.

Whether you know a little or a lot about developing for SQL Server, you will learn tips you can use Monday morning to make your database code better. Even if you use an object-relational-mapping framework like Entity Framework or NHibernate, knowing how to find bad SQL Server queries that ORMs generate will help your performance. I look forward to sharing what I have learned with you!

Google Tag Manager can drastically reduce the time you spend managing marketing code requests for websites and apps.

This is based on a presentation for non-developers, but with a more technical focus for the Minnebar crowd.

This presentation assumes a basic understanding of Google Analytics

The focus will be on web and PWA implementation, although most features are available to apps as well.

GTM Can:

• Make your life easier
• Make your non-developer coworkers happy
• Make you more popular at parties

GTM basics

• General web implementation
• WordPress
• Apps
• Migrating from existing Google analytics

Pre-packed goodies

GTM comes with many sorts of marketing and conversion tags already defined. You simply need to fill in the templates

Workflow, roles, version control and testing

Walk through the process of creating a tag, testing and deploying.

Teaching an old site new tricks

• GTM can help enforce roles, permissions and accountability for code changes to an existing site
• Add new sorts of tracking and even new features to existing site elements

Managing multiple sites

Show techniques for deploying a single customized container across multiple properties

Best friends forever

• Google Analytics events
• Google AdWords
• Google Optimize
• … and the rest

I'm co-founder of a startup which

1. Produces and sells a relatively small quantity of a relatively high number of customizable physical products, and
2. Has future plans to build a complementary digital product.

Soon after jumping into this idea it was clear we would need a web application to support our product's discovery, selection, customization, purchase and interactive experiences. We looked at using existing marketplaces and web-site building platforms such as Squarespace or Wix. These didn't work for us for a couple of reasons

1. The customizable nature of our products
2. The large number of individual skus we would be managing
3. Our customers can create skus dynamically.

This made using “off-the-shelf” solutions unworkable, even for early prototyping and experimentation, and meant we needed to build a custom web application. Among our non-functional requirements were things like

1. The ability to iterate quickly
2. Security
3. Reliability
4. Support growth and scalability (reasonably)
5. Support future iterative exploration of our digital product
6. Can’t be so costly that it sinks the business.

As the only technical co-founder, it landed on me to "figure this out."

During this talk I'll describe how I landed on our solution, an open source version of our web application, and some information about our CI/CD pipeline and hosting infrastructure.

We often think customers are irrational and their mind is a big black box. This session will help participants understand why customers end up making not so smart decisions and its implications on our business. This sessions aims to decode the phenomenon of customer decision-making and some surprising effects that play a role in making those decisions.

At some point we’re all there: we want to get something done, we need others to accomplish it. But getting past differing opinions and competing self-interest is hard. How can we be more successful? We’ll cover some human traits and behaviors that keep us from reaching agreements and strategies to be more successful. You’ll have time to apply them to a situation in your own life giving you concrete actions you can use immediately. Psychology 1001 not required.

Technology is all around us. From your smart watch, to your smart fridge, to the clusters of apps on your phone that buzz with notifications every day - our minds are nearly constantly being affected in some form by a digital product. And these products were designed expertly to get our attention and hold it using proven addictive engagement tactics and visual patterns that ensure our time is spent on them.

How might this interaction with technology be impacting our mental wellness? 25% of people are experiencing a mental illness, and everyone has mental health to look after. Are the products we're building taking that into account? And more importantly, how can they?

Come join us in talking about creating digital experiences that value mental health.

Topics discussed:

• Current tactics, and the impact of designing for mental health
• New design principles, patterns, and thought processes
• How you can design experiences that are mental health friendly

For decades, software architects had been a privileged few. Businesses once encouraged only the best developers to rank up to this elite class, like it was a natural evolution of a developer's D&D character sheet.

Every man is the architect of his own fortune, but few developers were the architect of their own software.

As time progressed, knowledge of software architecture has been shared more and more. Blogs on the Internet have allowed cross-pollination of ideas. Sharing architecture publicly has allowed small companies to hire better and wield an outsized influence. However, many engineers still keep a poor grasp on why architecture exists, how it works, and what needs it solves.

I recently embarked on a voyage to define the software architecture of a substantial new Android project at Mozilla and reviewed many competing architectures employed at major tech companies. I evaluated the state of the industry and came up with an option that meets our needs best.

Come learn what architecture is, why it matters, who is using what solution, and how to apply this knowledge for good.

Update: Here is the interactive scheduling visualization from this session. Enjoy! (Source code at the bottom of that page.)

Did you know we Minnebar organizers create the session schedule based on your votes? It’s true! An algorithm turns thousands of session votes into one giant schedule. When you click that “Yes! I might attend” button, you affect which sessions happen when.

This poses an interesting problem: How do we decide that one schedule is better than another? How do we quantify that?

If you are only interested in 2 sessions, then you want them scheduled at two different times. Easy! But what if you are interested in 30? There are only 7 time slots, so you can only see 7 of those sessions — and you almost certainly will get to. Are some of the schedules where you get to see 7 sessions better for you than others?

In earlier versions of the session scheduler, the answer to that question was “no.” In recent years, we upgraded the answer to “yes!” Come find out how we did it.

In addition to being a fun little brain teaser, this talk has lessons for organization trying to make data-driven decisions that sit at the intersection of data, UX design, and human behavior.

This is a follow-up to my earlier session on the topic. The session before focused on simulated annealing, and the advantages of using a zero-training probabilistic optimizer (which is a fancy way of saying “just let the software guess a lot”). This session delves into the details of what we are optimizing.

This talk does not require advanced math or programming background. There will be some fun tidbits for the math lovers in the audience, but the concepts will be accessible to all.

People expect mobile apps to be fast.

That means the Web Services powering the mobile app you're building need to be fast.

But if you have worked on, well, any app ever, you know that "speedy and reliable" are not how most mobile app developers describe the Web Services they're asked to use.

So, what to do if you're the mobile designer/developer, and not the Web Services engineer? In other words, what if you can't fix the root of the problem, and you're stuck just implementing what's handed down to you?

In this talk, Mike will share various UI/UX design techniques to trick people (in a good way) into thinking your app is faster than it actually is.

This is a design-focused talk for mobile product managers, mobile designers, and mobile engineers who like to create things that don't suck.

This January 2019 report from Indeed, one of the top job sites, showed a 29% increase in demand for data scientist’s year over year and a 344% increase since 2013 -- a dramatic upswing. The rise of AI and Machine Learning may also be a factor in the dramatic increase in demand for Data Scientists. Let us first understand the difference between AI, Machine Learning and Data Science. What companies in town are working on these new innovations? and what are they looking for?. What are the different job titles in a Data Science team? What skills are needed in each of these job titles?. You know how to program and work with SQL but how do you break into this team? What are available courses that you can take in online learning platforms like Coursera, Udacity, Udemy Lynda Edureka, ClassCentral Edx, Emeritus, etc? How about other university programs in town?

Come into the session and let us explore this together.

The goal of this session is to provide tactical advice and recommendations for employers to improve how they hire developers.

This session is open to anybody who's interested. If you have strong feelings about the topic, we'd love for you to join us and share your perspective.

This will be a lecture-style presentation, with a good amount of audience participation.

Some of the things we'll talk about:

1. Coding exercises
2. Hiring for diversity and experience at the same time
3. How to structure the hiring process
4. How to avoid needing to hire someone yesterday
5. How to reduce bias while assessing for "culture fit"
6. Why you should hire junior developers
7. How to mentor, train, and onboard junior developers
8. Where to find candidates
9. Other advice

What if all the time spent building decks and pitching investors were instead invested in building things and pitching customers?

If you're an early stage tech entrepreneur you may think that the VC/blitzscaling/unicorn path is the only option...

Good news - it's not!

For many entrepreneurs, independence is more valuable than anything. There are new models emerging that enable founders to get started more efficiently than ever and get funded while preserving options and control. This session will be an overview of some of the new models (indie.vc, Earnest Capital, Tiny Seed) and examples of entrepreneurs who are charting a different path.

Please bring your experience and your questions so we can learn from each other.

Technology is enabling a transformation in agriculture that is touching all aspects of the industry. Advancements in IoT, machine vision, automation, robotics, and big data are leading to the digitalization of farming and is opening up opportunities that were never before possible.

Minnesota has a long history of driving innovation in agriculture, and is uniquely positioned to lead the way towards more efficient and sustainable farming. In this talk we will put into perspective this exciting time, touching upon the history of technical advancements in farming and dive into how Agtech will disrupt and transform the industry in the years to come.

Once upon a time in a fairyland far far away, serial software entrepreneur “Hot Lou” helped children’s entertainer Twig the Fairy grow her Facebook audience to over 250k followers. Leveraging that audience, they self-published a line of children's books that would have landed them on the NYT Best Sellers list (had they not self-published) and a 6 figure business.

He later applied what he learned to help a billion dollar brands add millions of followers to their social media accounts, some non-profits add just their first 1000 followers, and everything in between.

Today, he’s helping local YouTuber Shayla build her channel & brand “Living on a One Way” to similar heights. With 50k subscribers on YouTube and 10k followers on Instagram, her audience is already bigger than most hope to build and it continues to grow fast.

Join them as they talk about the actual, applicable tactics you can use to grow a large audience on the internet, pitfalls to avoid, and ultimately how you turn that into everyone's favorite objective: monetization.

This session isn't just for those wanting to be famous. It's for anyone who wants to build an audience. Personal or big brands with audiences large or small will get a ton of advice that you don't hear anywhere else, along with plenty of time for questions that Lou and Shayla will be happy to answer openly and honestly.

New to front-end development? Working on a side hustle and have the back end all done and need to figure out the front end, but confused about all the jargon? Are you a new web developer, and not sure if what you're doing counts as working on JavaScript or not (it doesn't look some other JavaScript)? This is a talk for you.

I've done web development on and off since the late 90s, and have been following the trends and the pain points. Expect this to be a talk on what was before, what currently is, and what's coming up next.

CSS Grid is here! Finally, we can build flexible, accessible, and dynamic layouts without all of the tricks, hacks, or complicated frameworks. In this session, you’ll get a taste of the potential CSS Grid opens up, learn the basics of this new layout model, and modernize your web layout game. Explore this new world of layout possibilities and get comfortable with CSS Grid.

Startups aren't just for college kids and garages anymore. Whether you are building an product at night and on weekends or you are a CEO trying to figure out how to compete at the speed of the competition, startups & innovation are more popular now than ever.

This session focuses on how to launch a startup. It will include how you find a problem, build an iterative MVP, influence and validate customer problem and validate a market. At a high-level, this process should be the same in startups and corporate enterprises, but in practice, it isn't. Companies of all sizes are trying to be more innovative than ever; the goal of this session is to talk honestly about how it is, how it could be, why it's that way and what you can do about it.

Matt and Jay have extensive experience innovating in both startup and enterprise environments. Collectively, both presenters have launched their own startups, attended startup incubators and worked in innovation at Best Buy.

Blockchain may not be what you heard about.

You may be familiar with SHA-3, Kafka, Wasm etc. Do you know the "blockchain" umbrella is basically adding just one 40-years old technique to create a unique but powerful glue thus become a big thing? Other than that, there is NO blockchain. There is distributed database, messaging ordering, memory coherence protocol etc.

All the same old metrics apply: latency, concurrency and consistency etc.

Now the real value of blockchain is about the balance between technology and economics, business. A fine balance of this solution creates a unique but powerful economics systems between engineering and real world. A good marriage.

There are public chains, private chains, permissioned chains. Blockchain is a gigantic umbrella for many CS technologies. Don’t get scared, don’t despise, they are made of what you already know and for a reason.

Join me to explore what is blockchain, really. ​ (Bonous) Why blockchain is made for Non-Profit.

Artisanally hand-crafting our own container hosting solutions can be a fun learning experience, but for repeatable production use, let’s look at how to deploy and manage Kubernetes in a reproducible fashion.

Using Terraform, Helm, Draft, Brigade, Duffle, and more, we can deploy and update our Kubernetes clusters (AKS in my case; your mileage may vary!) and applications via a trusted, versioned, consistent process. The Kubernetes ecosystem is a complex space with a baffling array of options; we’ll look at a subset with an eye to repeatable “day two” operations.

With the practical application of open specifications like Cloud Native Application Bundles and open source tools to simplify cluster management and application development, we can more effectively use Kubernetes at scale.

This session is for you if any combination of the following apply:

• The existing professional groups you've attended discuss topics that simply don't pertain to the challenges you face (10X true if you work at a startup)
• You have found yourself in need of professional advice from someone who "gets" your particular challenge(s)
• You could benefit from not having to recreate a proverbial wheel
• You want to learn about better tools, processes, practices, etc. and are happy to share your faves in return
• You can envision a point in time when you may be ready to explore outside opportunities by tapping into a trusted network
• Your organization may someday like to hire a top-notch professional by tapping into a trusted network
• You know at least a couple of professional peers whom you admire and trust (and who are willing to put up with you for an hour a month!)

Come hear the story of how a few coffee meetings turned into a fully functioning peer advisory group for people operations professionals, the benefits this nascent group provides to its members, how it runs, and how you can build your own group too!

This session is being presented by: Heidi Balley (Director of Human Resources, InboxDollars), Kristin Dean (Vice President of People, Arctic Wolf), Natalia Trent (Chief Talent Officer, RightSource), and Victoria Schanen (Vice President of Talent, Kipsu)

Last year was such a success we decided to bring this back and make it a more open format.

If you have an idea to pitch or an active startup looking to grow the team, this is the event for you! Side projects and non-profits are also welcome. "Pitchers" will post up at tables and seekers will connect with interesting projects.

We will have tables organized roughly by industry to add some structure. Health and Wellness, Finance, Logistics, Marketplace, Entertainment, Hardware, Blockchain etc

It may speed up your communication to bring a resume and/or print a sheet with some highlights. Stage of startup/Idea - Just a business plan, have a prototype, growth stage Needs/asks - Want a CTO for a funded startup, looking for UX Designer for POC, Need a JS dev for a phonegap app Goal - Just for fun, Side Project, I will die on this hill, ETC

I was so impressed with the caliber of people involved last year that I am very hopeful we will see Minnedemo presentations this year from people who attend! We had everything from CTOs at large tech companies to current CEO's of multi-million dollar business looking to start a software company serving their industry.

You have been given a task to complete, either on your own, or as part of a team. The requirements seem understandable, you’re ready. Then, with no warning, it blows up on you. There’s missing requirements, you don’t have enough information, privileges, knowledge, or experience to conquer this task. So what do you do?

How do you know where to start? How do you gain experience and insight? What if you don’t have enough time to learn? What happens if you don’t know where to turn next? Are your colleagues or boss too busy? Do you feel supported? Do you feel as though you’re failing?

These are all natural responses to what often may seem an insurmountable task, at the very least, it’s a struggle. There are several strategies we can use to help ourselves move forward, inform teams and leadership (who are responsible for mentoring and leading the inexperienced), and move toward continuous improvement.

This session will cover actionable take-aways like:

Self-analysis Rubber-ducking Effectively raising “the red flag” Proactively improving interactions/communication/solutions

We get it. Move fast and break things. Just ship it! But what's left a giant stored procedure with cursors, temp tables, and mystery calculations. It's a big black box that nobody wants to touch. Let's fix that. We'll open the lid on an example monolith and do major surgery. What's left will perform better, be easier to understand, encourage code reuse, and be easier to test.

(Code and process is designed for Microsoft SQL Server but concepts have wider applicability.)

Most recent materials: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/842/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=90600

Other presentation materials: https://scribnasium.com/talks/

What... it's 2019, and not everyone is totally in the agile groovy? How can that be? Are we in the twilight zone?

Let's review how we got here with a brief history of agile (and a few other meta-process themes) and then we'll take a hard look at why it's still critically important for all of us to use an engineering mindset to lead our teams (and/or peers and products and businesses) towards a more agile-ish way of life.

Have you ever wondered if the content and the functionality you are developing is actually accessible to all? Join us for an overview of best practices for design and development of digital content accessible to people with disabilities. Workshop will provide an overview of the current laws and guidelines, present some common UI challenges, and show examples on how to successfully incorporate accessibility requirements into every step of the Agile framework.

Joint presentation by Nirajan Shrestha & Tea Dejanovic, Perficient, Inc.

Telling a student that coding will help them immensely to find a career as an adult… doesn’t seem to motivate or excite. We invest so much time in making these classes fun, but they are still missing something.

We have been running computer classes for elementary to high school students through community education programs like Bloomington, White Bear Lake, Elk River, and 20 other districts. When you see “Computer coding for Kids” in your community education brochure, that’s us. These classes have been really successful, popular, and fun, but sometimes, we still get the question. “When am I ever going to use this?”

Do you know who is never asked that question? A basketball coach. Some kids might not like practice, but they never ask, “When am I ever going to use this?” Because the answer is obvious! You’ll use this at the game on Saturday! You don’t need to know how to shoot a layup for 99.9% of jobs, and yet, a coach never gets this question.

So how do we bring that mentality to code? How can we make code more like a sport? We do it by making code competitive. We create the games that make practice worth it. That’s Code Championship, our new program for 2019.

How do we get kids excited about computer coding? The excitement kids experience while participating in Competitive Coding can be hard to explain, so here is a video.

We're going to be playing the game during this session, so bring your laptop to write some code and join in the action! You don't need to be a developer to join us!

Sponsored by AngelPolleNation and Avisen Legal, P.A., the Piranha Pool (R) 2019 event is Minnesota's own annual live take on the TV series "Shark Tank." During the session, three local tech startup companies will make a 10-minute investment pitch to, and answer 5 minutes of Q&A from, a panel of experienced, local tech investors. The event winner as selected by the panel gets an automatic berth to present to 50+ local investors at the Thursday, June 20 Gopher Angels meeting. Confirmed returning Piranhas are well-known local investors Ed Cannon, Cathy Connett and David Russick.

To apply as a presenting company, please send your investment deck (in widescreen PowerPoint pptx format) for consideration to Jeffrey C. Robbins at Avisen Legal, P.A. -- jrobbins@avisenlegal.com.

The Piranhas:

Ed Cannon is CEO of Zivix, a multi-patented fingertip-sensing technology for use in real musical instruments and peripheral devices. Ed spent the first years of his career with the Westinghouse Power Systems group before leaving and co-founding Cannon Technologies in 1987. As CEO of this start-up, he lead the team to sales in excess of $100 Million and 150 employees. Cannon Technologies was one of the first truly smart-grid companies, helping electric utilities better manage demand response, substation automation and smart meters. Cannon Technologies was acquired by Cooper Industries (NYSE: CBE) and is an integral part of their Energy Automation Solutions group today. Ed holds a BSEE from South Dakota State University and was honored by them as Distinguished Engineer 2007. He is also an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Minnesotas Carlson School of Management.

Cathy Connett is CEO and managing partner of Sofia Fund, which invests in high-growth women-lead businesses. She is also president and founder of CorConnections, which specializes in guiding businesses through new business initiatives, equity infusions, ownership transitions, and the building of alliances and partnerships. Cathy has served as the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas and, for the last 19 years, helped initiate multiple programs to support the entrepreneurial community, including the Minnesota Seed Capital Network, Women to Women (W2W) investment group and the Sofia Angel Fund. She has also served twice as a judge for the regional Ernst &Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards. Cathy has served on a number of private company boards, including Smarte Carte, Hot Shot Products, Woodland Container Corporation and Vixar and non-profit boards including MDI, Minnesota Project Innovation and the Harvard Business School Alumni Association, where she chaired the board, which serves the 65,000-member international alumni community. Cathy’s formal education includes an engineering degree from Vanderbilt University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She has a diverse operational background in all functional areas, in union and non-union environments and in a wide range of B2B industries and marketplaces. Her experience includes roles at large companies such as Procter & Gamble, Boise Cascade and 3M as well as within start-up and small private companies.

David Russick is an established entrepreneur and angel investor. Russick is co-founder, Managing Director, and Board Member of Gopher Angels, an investment organization dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship and early stage businesses in the state of Minnesota and throughout the Midwest. Russick currently serves as Director of Scalability and Sourcing for Mighty Spark Food Co. Previously, Russick was founder and President of TUBS, Inc., a family owned waste and recycling business operating in the Twin Cities, Denver and Cleveland, Russick also co-founded Bagster, LLC., a nationwide waste services company. He served as President and Board Member prior to Bagster’s acquisition by a Fortune 500 company. In addition, Russick serves on the Board of Advisors for the Dakota Venture Group and on the Business Advisory Group for the University of Minnesota’s Office for Technology Commercialization. Russick has been featured in the “Star Tribune,” “Twin Cities Business,” and the “Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal.” “Twin Cities Business” named him a “2014 People to Know – Finance.” In 2010, Bagster was named by “Ad Age” as one of the 10 Hottest Brands in the U.S. TUBS, Inc. was selected by City Business in 1998 as a “50 Fastest Growing Private Company.” Russick is a patent holder and a graduate of the University of South Dakota. He earned a Master of International Management degree from the Thunderbird School of Global Management with studies at Oxford University, Oxford England.

Your host:

Jeffrey C. Robbins is an attorney with the business law boutique Avisen Legal, P.A. in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For 36 years, he has represented entrepreneurs who start and grow technology-based enterprises and angel and venture investors who target those companies. He is a serial entrepreneur himself, having founded two companies in the entertainment ticketing industry. Jeff represents high-growth, high-potential private enterprises and publicly traded companies. In 2011, he founded AngelPolleNation, a networking organization for investors that holds quarterly events in the Twin Cities. He serves as an advisory board member to Gopher Angels, a Minneapolis-based investor network. Jeff is also a judge for the annual statewide Minnesota Cup business plan competition. He is a board member of Venture Academy, a Minneapolis charter school focused on developing entrepreneurial leadership skills for its students, and of the Minnesota Jewish Theater Company, and also serves on the Business Advisory Group for the University of Minnesota's Office of Technology Commercialization. Jeff was named in 2011 as one of “200 Minnesotans You Should Know” by Twin Cities Business magazine.

Backdrop is an open source CMS that was forked from Drupal. Backdrop CMS falls somewhere between Wordpress and Drupal in terms of flexibility and features.

Backdrop has a clearly defined philosophy and principles targeted at small to medium sized businesses, non-profits, educational institutions, and companies or organizations who are in need of a comprehensive website, on a budget.

This will be a live demo of Backdrop CMS in action. On Jan 15th, 2019 we released the twelfth iteration of Backdrop and we've incorporated new features and usability improvements in every release.

We'll go over things like:

• The awesome Layouts system
• Config management
• Similarities and differences with Drupal
• What Drupal modules are available for Backdrop
• How to upgrade from Drupal to Backdrop

We'll also talk about how to engage with the Backdrop community, get your questions answered, and how to contribute to this exciting project.

Come hear from and interact with a panel of people who work in technology and related fields and for whom diversity is not a metric or a goal, but a fact of everyday life. We will cut through buzzwords and catch phrases to stimulate discussion about what "diversity" means and why it's important in the workplace and in your community. With your participation, we will encourage new thought, challenge existing ideas, and talk about why - really WHY - you should care about diversity and what you can do about it.

Panelists

• Antoinette Smith - Co-founder of Techquity and full-stack developer at Glitch.
• Philip Xiao - Founder and CEO of Homi.
• Jenessa White - Front-end developer at Software for Good.
• Elliott Payne - Founder of Sense Datum, a digital business consulting firm.

Moderated by Jeff Lin

Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore famously predicted that computing power would grow exponentially by doubling every two years (“Moore’s Law”). The implications of such rapidly improving computing power are now evident all around us, but back when Gordon predicted such growth it was hard to imagine a future with such incredible computing power. There are now many exponential trends that are expected to disrupt us as much as the internet and mobile did over the past 20 years.

Many of us are trapped in convergent thinking and need to strengthen our ability to utilize divergent thinking for exploring the future to improve our ability to adapt and innovate. This session is an interactive session designed to help you learn new skills to strengthen your adaptiveness! The two techniques you'll learn in this session are Question Storming and Future Wheels along with an intro to how these could be paired with exponential tech to come up with a Moonshot!

Question Storming - Discovering problems actually requires just as much creativity as discovering solutions. There are many ways to look at any problem, and realizing a problem is often the first step toward a creative solution.

Future Wheel - The Future wheel is a method for graphical visualisation of direct and indirect future consequences of a particular change or development. The Futures Wheel is a way of organizing thinking and questioning about the future – a kind of structured brainstorming.

Nick Tietz, Serial Entrepreneur, former Director of Innovation at Lifetime Fitness and Sr. UX Designer at the Nerdery, and Ryan Weber will be tag-teaming on this session on behalf of the SingularityU Minneapolis-St. Paul Chapter to provide you a primer on coming up with the next MinneMoonshot!

Another year, another Minnebar, another fresh set of facts and discussions around what's happening in Minnesota Tech.

The goal of this session is to give perspective on both what it's like to be a software engineer at different types of companies, while also showcasing a few different local companies.

There will be engineers from 4 different local organizations who will each be interviewed in front of the audience for 6-8 minutes, about what it's like to work at their company.

Think of it like a reverse interview, where you get to sit in the audience and observe, without any of the stress of actually interviewing.

Here are the companies and people that will be representing them:

• Foodsby, Joseph Szczesniak. A funded startup focused on food delivery for office workers.
• Foundry, Travis Meyer. A design and development agency based in downtown Minneapolis.
• Target, Nicole Liang. An enterprise-sized retailer headquartered in Minneapolis.
• Sharp Five Software, Jaim Zuber. A solo consulting shop specializing in software development.

If you're a stakeholder, you've probably asked some version of this question: How much will it cost and when will it be done?

Businesses plan budgets and need to time deliveries -- is a software project any different?

But like asking "What is north of the North Pole?" , it shows misunderstanding. As a developer, I see this costly mistake repeated routinely. Your software is not a vehicle to transport your product. It is your product with additional hidden potential. And creating useful products is a process of discovery and adaptation. Misapplying these questions to a software project will prevent you from capitalizing on those discoveries while you waste time on first-draft features. Perhaps worse, deadline fixation can incentivize toxic internal politics instead of unity around a mission.

Regardless, everyone has a budget. What should a stakeholder ask for if not a timeline and cost? In this session you'll see how asking the right questions can deliver better software, grow your business, and build a stronger company culture.

Are you interested in innovation and startups? Join us in this session to learn the tricks and handbooks that the most disruptive startups of the past decade have used to build their businesses. We will be looking at case studies and principles used by startups and venture capital firms that will give you a better understanding of early-stage growth.

Come join us at this session to learn more about:

• The underlying principles of business model innovation
• The most important factors that drive growth at a startup
• The main growth limiters
• Proven business model patterns

The content of this session is helpful for founders, entrepreneurs, and investors alike. We hope to see you there with us!

Atland Ventures is a venture capital firm ran by students at the University of Minnesota. You can learn more about us at https://www.atlandventures.com/

Websites have doubled in size every three years. For reasons both understandable and idiotic, web developers continue to create bigger and more complicated web projects, and now your node folder is mining bitcoin and the average webpage is bigger than the 1993 video game DOOM. This is a trend we can change.

🐁 Let's shrink the web!

In this high-energy talk, we’re going to be looking at some easy wins for performance improvements like image optimization and javascript concatenation, that can actually make your users’ life better. In addition, we’re going to explore some very friendly process tools for doing all of that without days of editing config files.

Because a small website is an easy website, and an easy website means you can go home earlier.

Your mission is to deliver a whole sandwich to your stomach.

You have two options: - Shove the whole sandwich in your mouth - take bite size pieces until the whole thing is delivered

Which is the healthier choice? Seems obvious doesn't it? The same thing applies to how organizations and teams work. The problem is that the system is usually set up for shoving the whole sandwich in your mouth.

Let's talk about breaking down our work into bite sizes. What are the benefits? Where do we start?

We'll look at some examples of work that has been broken down and, if time permits, show a live example of how to break it down with participants in the room.

Hosted by the organizers of the Whiteboard Challenge Meetup, this is a hands-on session to practice your problem solving skills in a fun environment. No UX experience required! We aim for peer learning, support, and friendship among all skill levels. Build confidence in thinking out loud, get ready for a big meeting, or practice for interviews.

Who Should Attend

Experience Designers, Product Designers, Web Developers, Human Factors Engineers, Graphic Designers, Business Analysts, Researchers, Creatives, all skill levels.

What To Expect

After a brief demonstration, we will break into pairs and start whiteboarding. One person will be the designer and the other the host. For 10 minutes the designer will work through the design challenge on the whiteboard. You may ask questions of the host as needed. Otherwise the host will practice the valuable but difficult skill of listening (this can be the hardest part of the challenge!).

You'll think out loud while working to show how you are exploring and tackling the challenge from your unique point of view. When the 10 minutes is up, the host gives 5 minutes of feedback/co-creation. Then you'll swap roles and do it again with a different challenge. The value of this exercise is more about the process than the solution, but we'll leave time at the end to see other people's whiteboards and discuss.

Hope to see you there!

Do you have an awesome app, but nobody uses it? Want to get a new job without breaking a sweat? Need more donations to your open-source project? Before you can do any of these things, you need to capture attention.

Session topics: * Learn how to use social media to build up attention and direct it towards your goals. * Understand how to build a content model from the Agile ceremonies and where to distribute your content. * Overview of social media platforms, algorithms, and how to make native content for them. * Cover tech specific platforms and how to use them as content funnels. * Learn about ad supported content and where it is cheap or overpriced.

This will be a slide lecture with opportunities for Q&A.

Yes, you! You can build connected gadgets to solve life's minor challenges.

The stack of skills needed to make end-to-end IoT projects is very broad: wireless protocols, hardware, embedded firmware, mobile apps, databases, data analytics. Let's talk about tools and platforms to manage that complexity and make each piece of the IoT stack easier and more accessible. This will be a technical talk with real demos. We'll walk through the architecture and mechanics of making low power wireless sensors to solve practical problems. From simple sensors that monitor doors/windows to geolocating your dog inside the house.

Come with ideas for problems that you want solved. Make the IoT you wish to see in the world.

Topics: WiFi, Bluetooth, LoRa, MQTT, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, mBED, ESP8266/32, Nordic, NodeRED, InfluxDB, Grafana, OpenHAB, Home Assistant

After three years of meeting and pondering how a large company like Target might use Blockchain, there have been many learnings. This presentation is an introductory level to get you up-to-speed on the world of Blockchain in the Enterprise, and what's important for large entities. We will answer the common questions surrounding the usage of Blockchain in an Enterprise context, while introducing the basic concepts of Distributed Ledgers and Consensus Algorithms, and why Distributed Ledger Technology is the right terminology to use when discussing this technology.

We'll also jump into a few efforts underway at Target in the Blockchain space.

How can we avoid only testing for and addressing accessibility in QA? How can we incorporate accessibility compliance earlier in the process? What tools would help us along the way?

I would like to discuss how developers can be accessibility champions and incorporate best practices into the development process. I will have examples to share of easy wins, common things to check for in code reviews, and some more elaborate examples of accessible UI development patterns if we want to look at them. I'm hoping for a great conversation and ideas from the community as well.

Machine learning is putting data once available to only the largest companies in the hands of smaller businesses. We'll discuss the impact that the ability to identify individual people that are in market for a product or service and run ads to all of their devices and email addresses on any online or offline channel has on winning sales and increasing profitability.

Cell phone usage, notably smartphone usage, is rapidly increasing throughout sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). These devices can be tools to combat poverty, if designed with users in mind.

We will discuss many topics including: - How to do user-focused design, and how to communicate with cultural considerations in mind while keeping in mind symbols across cultures have different meanings. - How to address various levels of familiarity with technology. - How to deal with unreliable internet. - How to redesign for an African context.

We will go in depth into these topics and more. There will be plenty of time for questions, discussion, and brainstorming about how we can use technology to combat poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. I invite those who are from who have visited or are from SSA to reach out or show up to lend their experiences. It's also a great intro session if you're not familiar with the topic at all and want to learn more.

1 Million Cups (1MC) is a national event started by the Kauffman Foundation in 2012. 1MC events happen every Wednesday morning in over 200 communities throughout the United States! Every Wednesday one to two Entrepreneurs share their story in a safe environment. The community simply asks "What can our community do for you?".

1 Million Cups Eden Prairie and local 1MC groups is hosting Minne 1MC at Minnebar14 with six lightening round updates from past 1MC presenters. This will give you a taste of what 1MC does every week!

It is organized by community volunteers and the events are free and host free coffee. Learn more and find a community by you at https://www.1millioncups.com. In our region we have Eden Prairie, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Eau Claire, Willmar, Rochester, Mankato, Winona, Des Moines, Fargo and many more that host 1MC!

17 years after founding a startup that didn't quite set the world on fire, last fall I made the decision to shut down my company.

The experience held surprises, both good and bad, and I'll share them in this session along with my views on corporate end-of-life planning, serving customers in a bad situation, the role of venture capital, and when to think about starting the next venture.

This is the unsexy side of being a founder, and the things you want to know before you launch your first business.

Is something bothering you? Of course it is! Share your negativity in a 1-5 minute format. All complaints accepted, no matter how great or small. Come angry.

The Minnebar Code of Conduct definitely still applies here, and at any rate you should figure out a way to make your rant about ideas or things, not people.

PKI Authentication

The talk is focussed on the common patterns on API authentication and spread the awareness and need for enhanced authentication for API's. Very much needed to safeguards every enterprise in current vulnerable environment.

In this session, local Pilot Jason Kaasovic - intent2bhuman, will walk through an FPV drone, explain ways to get into it, share capabilities, discuss the industry, demonstrate flight, and invite Q&A.

There will likely also be some conversation on the experience of residing in the body of a quad while flying through reality.

Also, if A/V equip is available, some example footage will be shown.

This session will give a high-level overview of how to create above average training and animated promotional videos in-house.

Like anything else associated with technology, the ability to create useful and timesaving training and promotional video content is becoming cheaper and easier to do than ever. During this session, I will talk about how I have helped software companies improve their client and staff training/help content via video creation, along with creating animated videos/online ads to help promote products, service, and events, all in-house.

Specifically, we will cover the use of:

• video screen-capture & editing software used
• animation software used
• steps for creation
• audio capture & editing
• tips & tricks

So, if you are simply looking at options to take your office video help/info content creation internally, or, if you are interested in getting into this expanding field, come join us and learn how to make decent video content on a budget.

This is the third year doing this talk and will be packed with new tips, project hacks, anecdotes and #realtalk to inspire you to start (and finish) that project.

This talk is always fast-paced, fun and informative...

I'll go over things like:

Why do a side project?

What if I don't have the coding skills?

How can I learn what I need to code?

How should an experienced coder approach side projects?

What if I don't have the money?

How do I get users?

How do I validate it?

How much time will this take?

What about XYZ myth that says I can't do this?

What about XYZ reason to keep procrastinating?

I'll also go over my own progress on projects since last Minnebar.

We all have unique backgrounds and perspectives that lead us to learn from data in different ways. This is fine, until biases start to creep in and limit the way we work and our ability to be effective.

Too much obsessing over numbers can leave us blind to the human stories underneath. At the same time, failing to appreciate numbers like key business metrics can hamstring our ability to deliver experiences that matter.

So how can we avoid these common traps? In this talk we’ll cover tangible examples and strategies for delighting the humans behind the data... at scale.

The amazing, incredible, annual Minnebar lightning talks session!!!

Anyone can talk. Shorter talks go first, so that if we run out of time, longer talks will get cut off. Most talks are 2-5 minutes.

(In the past, we've had plenty of time for everyone.)

You don't need to prep. But if you have any questions please email me at dfeldman.mn@gmail.com.

Would like to talk about accessibility for developers and UX. This will be intermediate level where I can demo how subtle changes in code or design can have positive impact on people using assistive technology. I will also share some common tools that can be used in the process. You will leave with some important concepts and solutions that will help you design and code accessible web pages.

Many people find salary negotiations painful and awkward, but avoiding them can cost over a million dollars in lifetime earnings. In this talk, I'll go over successful strategies to make negotiations (at least a little) easier and how to increase your chances of better outcomes.

Even when it's not possible for everyone to get a car, often everyone can get something they want out of the process. I'll discuss ways to find creative alternatives to zero-sum negotiations so you can feel confident going into a negotiation and feel good about yourself and the outcome at its conclusion. You'll leave the session with a better sense of how to prepare and what to do during the actual conversation, with a clear starting point for future negotiations.

In order to successfully scale your venture, you must first learn to scale within. That is, you must expand your internal capacity to lead yourself and others well as your company develops over time. It's one thing to have a great idea; it's another thing entirely to grow a business, build a functional team, manage client drama, and troubleshoot any number of unexpected challenges that arise along the way. As your business grows, you must make updates to your own inner operating system in order to grow with it.

In this session, I will teach a simple but cutting-edge framework from the field of neurobiology that will expand your capacity to:

-Act from intention rather than reaction with increased self-awareness -Identify and begin to overcome internal barriers and limiting mindsets -Make clear and rational decisions without feeling overwhelmed or withdrawn, and -Effectively communicate with colleagues and clients in the midst of crucial conversations, maintaining both honesty and respect

Whether you are currently scaling your business, are in the initial brainstorming stages of a great idea, part of a team, or anywhere in between, this is a life-challenging tool that will positively impact every area of your life even beyond succeeding in business.

As event-driven design and microservice architectures are becoming more popular, distributed systems are being seen often and becoming more complex. A once simple web server with a database is now often distributed between multiple databases, caches, services, and systems. By utilizing Apache Kafka, one can reduce the complexity of a distributed system, build fault-tolerant & scalable services, de-couple integrations between different components, and easily expand when new systems are needed.

In this presentation, I’ll go over what a distributed system is, what event-driven architecture is, how it relates to service-oriented architecture, and why we need distributed systems. I’ll give an overview of Apache Kafka, how it works, and how it relates to other message brokers. Lastly, I’ll share my experiences utilizing Apache Kafka as the backbone to build a scalable, fault-tolerant data streaming platform.

<Learn>XML</Learn> and {"FileFormat":"JSON"}, even if you know nothing about programming!

Like "CSV," these two data standards are extremely important for representing data in plain text so that you can easily send it from one computer to another.

But they're so much more complicated and intimidating at a glance!

Learn to recognize, decipher, and write them -- no experience needed.

Imposter syndrome: we all have it.

It's especially hard for those of us still in the job seeking phase in a new tech career or at the beginning of a new tech career. Let's vent, share, and come up with ideas to keep the imposter monster at bay so we can be successful! Or something. I don't know yet, but I personally could use a support group!

You know lean startup methodologies help businesses rapidly and efficiently validate new ideas, reducing risks and costs. But do you know how to start running lean? Join us for a rapid, one-hour session on how to create a Lean Canvas, the foundational document of lean organizations. You’ll leave this highly participatory session with:

• a concise visualization of your business or product • an articulated Unique Value Proposition • a clear and testable business plan • next steps to validate your business or product

Hosted by Modern Logic, a leading digital product agency, this workshop will be facilitated by Brian Krohn, PhD, an inventor and entrepreneur whose lean startup experience spans the renewable energy, medical device, and mobile application development industries. This event will help anyone—from business owners and dreamers to developers and product owners—who is ready to apply lean methodologies to their ideas.

Social media and social networks have grown tremendously to become one of the most significant sources of news, connection and entertainment for people.

However, there's growing dissatisfaction with the companies behind social media platforms. More and more, people are waking up to the reality that "if you aren't paying for it, then you're the product" and people want an alternative.

These platforms have a fundamental problem in their business model. They grew their network while acting in relatively benign ways using venture capital. At some point, they had to shift their focus from growing their membership to "monetizing" the “asset”. Their goal was to make this transition "invisible" to their users to maintain whatever trust they had managed to build.

Unfortunately, this shift has been translated into selling data, selling advertising, and selling access to "eyeballs." None of these companies managed to find a way to any other business model and it's ruining them, their member’s experience, and it could be argued, our communities.

I'll propose a new approach to building a social network based on 11 principles. My goal in this talk is to see if this problem, these 11 principles and this idea resonate with you. If it does, I'll provide you with an opportunity to help move this idea forward!

Join the Make It. MSP. Tech Team and the Forge North coalition to co-create storytelling strategies and gain practical tips for how you can better promote our tech community. Help us explore ways to share what makes our tech community great: its talented and diverse individuals!

Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s (MSP) humble nature is an asset but it can also hold us back. It is vital for our region to step up and brag about our fantastic tech community. Partners in efforts like Make It. MSP., Forge North, Full Stack Saint Paul, DocuMNtary, and others have worked in recent years to discover how we can better tell our region’s tech story to the world. Through national outreach and ambassador training efforts, we have gained valuable insights into what tech professionals and others from around the country are looking for and what may encourage them to relocate to MSP.

To learn more about the MSP Tech team’s efforts to tell our story, visit tech.makeitmsp.org

Explore the power of happiness, how it drives all aspects of wellbeing, and how it's influencing policy,economics, education, business and more. Plus you'll learn about a small Twin Cities startup that is going global, from startup to $million a month with one global contract, through happiness.

Jeff guides guides this session to show you how to create a competitive advantage for businesses through happiness. The Happiness Practice (THP) is an evidence-based mental health solution and a life-transforming and sustainable practice that mitigates and prevents stress and fear, while increasing happiness, mindfulness, and performance. THP empowers leaders to champion and cultivate individual and organizational happiness, while measuring Return On Happiness (ROH) tied to key performance measures. Jeff will share THP at minnebar, helping us all to be happier as individuals and more effective as leaders.

And if you are already happy, the way this local startup is going global is a lesson in itself and will provide value to how you look at taking a product to market so you can accomplish this too.

Any libre software, volunteer, or even startup project will have elements of do-ocracy (rule of those who do the work) but not all decisions should devolve to implementors. Rather, a basic principle is that decisions should be made by the people who are most affected.

Particularly when a decision strongly affects more than those who carry it out, therefore, we need better ways of making decisions that give everyone their say. This starts by letting people by heard by everyone else. Fortunately, we can scale conversations and decisions in a fair and truly democratic way.

• Learn why meritocracy ("rule of those with merit") is a completely bogus and harmful concept.
• Gain a passing familiarity with various ways decisions are or have been made in Drupal.
• Add sociocracy and sortition to your vocabulary and understand how these esoteric concepts can help our community scale.
• See how Visions Unite is putting more democratic decision-making approaches into practice.

The most important things we have to do need to be done together. Giving more power to our communities can help avoid failure also. And our work together is most powerful when we make decisions about it together.

Agile transformations require mindset and capability adjustments for all organizational leaders, especially software development leaders. While in the waterfall-based environment, the software managerial responsibilities include the wide range of people, product, project, and process areas, the agile transition transfers a significant amount of these responsibilities to agile teams. This “loss” can be unsettling for software development managers. Yet, it also lessens the need for focus on delivery (product, project, and process) and gives them more bandwidth for taking care of individual developers and teams.

This opportunity is also timely. A well-known Gallup report from 2017 highlights that 70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work. There is no reason to believe that the numbers are very different for software engineers and it is up to software managers to address and mitigate this situation.

In this session, we will discuss how development leaders can take advantage of the opportunity that the agile transition provides. I will share some examples of what we do at Field Nation and invite all session participants to share what is working for them. Specifically, we want to talk about how we can support and increase:

• Individual growth
• Team effectiveness
• Employee Engagement
• And more

At the end of this session, participants should leave with a toolkit they can use with their teams.

For a long time, JavaScript was missing any kind of processing threads. While the single-threaded model added to developer comfort, it also made the platform unable to do serious and time-consuming calculations, and the only way to circumvent it was to do it on a remote server.

Luckily, with the introduction and widespread adoption of Web Workers, we can now do resource-intensive calculations on background threads. A Web Worker allows you to run JavaScript in the background, without affecting the performance of the page. Even if you are running really resource intense code in the browser, you can continue to do whatever you want: clicking, selecting things, etc., while the Web Worker runs in the background.

In this talk, we will explore:

• Web Workers, how and when you can use them, and their peculiarities.
• Polyfilling for naughty browsers
• Future: WebGL, Canvas2D, and other marvels browser vendors are cooking up.

If you're advertising on Facebook for your business (or want to be soon), WHO sees your ads is as important as the ad itself.

Most beginner and intermediate advertisers sabotage their advertising efforts (and therefore lose too much money) because of audience targeting traps.

In this presentation (from Leadpages Lead Evangelist Bob Sparkins, you'll learn 5 Facebook audience targeting traps to avoid, and what to do instead so you can get better qualified traffic to your landing pages and website.

Attend this session if you are: a solopreneur, small business owner, fresh agency founder, or junior marketing team member... And you are: just getting started with Facebook ads, or you're frustrated by the results you've been getting.

This session includes plenty of time for audience questions to apply what's presented to your business situation.

Want to help steer the content? Connect beforehand on LinkedIn

This session is designed to give a high-level overview of important business and finance issues an emerging tech company faces in financing growth and expansion, and the legal questions involved.

Entrepreneurs should gain a basic understanding of several types of financing, the legal and business issues involved, and how to navigate through them.

Bring questions and real-life situations you're dealing with, and we can work through them together.

Every car company (from Tesla to BMW) is trying to build a self-driving car. One of the major components is advanced computer vision. In this hour, we will look at convolutional neural networks and the latest in open source image processing libraries. This technology will allow the viewer to differentiate between pedestrians, motorcycles, larger vehicles and stationary objects. Feel free to come listen or bring your laptop, a strong beverage, and join in the coding fun.

What can you do with $200 in the States? Perhaps pay rent for a week, but in Haiti a man currently earning $2/day can buy a fishing net with that money and start making $20/day. An unemployed woman in Uganda can buy chicken, vegetables, and rice and start a local market. Or perhaps start a drug store and start selling condoms, tampons, and birth control to the women in her village.

During this session, you're going to hear the story of how a man in Uganda grew up as orphan and had to walk barefoot for 20 miles a day so that he could get an education and escape poverty. Fast forward 15 years and this man now runs a school and microfinance company to provide thousands of people in his village an opportunity to earn a higher income.

He has now teamed up with two Minnesotan entrepreneurs on a mission to provide economic opportunity to 1 million people in East Africa. Learn how the business works, how we're able to provide secure loans to even the poorest people in the world, and how we plan to 10X the economic growth of this Ugandan village within the next 5-10 years.

Are you currently searching for commercial space to lease (or buy) for your business or planning to start looking in the near future? Are you trying to decide if you should renew your current lease or look for a new space option? Are you contemplating seeking a real estate professional to help in your search, but are unsure how to find that perfect person to work with? Do you know what you should have prepared before you even start your search? Come and learn about all aspects of leasing (or potentially buying) commercial space for your business including all the resources you may need in support of this quest.

From incubators to co-working and flex to warehouse and office to retail - are you struggling with understanding the different space types and which is best for you? Are you trying to decide the best neighborhood for now and the future of your business? Do you know how business plans and strategies can or should affect your commercial space decisions today? Are you confused by terms like holdover, incentives, tenant improvements, or gross lease?

During this session I will break down what can often feel like an overwhelming process especially when you are running a business or trying to get one off the ground, all while juggling a side hustle and personal life! From search to negotiations to construction to the ribbon cutting ceremony, I will prepare you for every phase of finding the best digs for your business and brand and remind you how to have fun doing it!

In this session, I'll show step by step from the beginning how everyone can easily pick up machine learning (ML) skills. We'll use open source software, we'll doing ML coding in real time and you'll be able to do it yourself. We'll have a lot of fun together.

Hear from the founders of 5 local companies as they give an Ignite talk on why they built their businesses.

Ignite talks are simple, to the point, and a ton of fun. Presenters get 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds. The result is a fast and fun presentation which lasts just 5 minutes. Following each presentation we'll take a few minutes for the audience to ask any questions.

Presenting Founders

Sean Higgins - CEO and founder of BetterYou

Katrina Anderson - CEO and Co-founder of Clinician Nexus

Phil Xiao - CEO and founder of Homi

Simon and Jesse Okiror - Founders of Suprabook

Bharat Pulgam and Sam Lerdhal - Founders of Runerra

Interested in presenting? Awesome! Shoot an email to Nels@livefront.com and we can chat.

Be the Scrum Master of Your Own Life

How to apply agile software development principles in your daily life

Do you have a to-do list that seems to be a black hole abyss with hydra-like characteristics? Every time you get something done, two more tasks seem to pop up!

Have you ever noticed that some people somehow get more done in a day than others? We all have the same 24 hours in a day, so how is it that the Elon Musks of the world seem to accomplish more in a year than most people do their entire lives?

Learn how to be the Scrum Master of your own life and use the agile principles that the world's most efficient teams use to build the apps and products you use every day.

In this audience-interactive workshop, you'll learn:

• [x] How I scratched my own itch to reach my goals faster in 2019
• [x] How to get $530 worth of tools for $50
• [x] What Scrum, Kanban, and other Agile methodologies are
• [x] How to apply Wolf of Wall Street goal setting/achieving tactics
• [x] Why I bolted a whiteboard into my living room wall
• [x] Be the Scrum Master of Your own Life

Fuzzers, model checkers, and automatic test-case generators work. They find bugs; they expose security issues; they identify design flaws. So why don’t more people use them?

This session will be a tour of some of the tools available to automatically find correctness and security problems in software. We’ll talk about static analysis, property-based testing, and even automated proof assistants, and show real bugs that these systems have found. Come and discuss your experience with software correctness tools, or talk about the challenges you face in building and testing reliable software.

Digital culture has me feeling grumpy these days. I have a list of complaints (see below). It could also just be winter.

If you’re feeling curmudgeonly for whatever reason, let’s help each other snap out of it. At this session, we will:

• Make cocktails

• Play vinyl

• Have a conversation about the threadbare state of digital culture...

• ...and how to cultivate our own humanity in all its non-digital, non-sequitur, illogical, unproductive and beautiful aspects.

That’s all you need to know, really.

My complaints? Well, if you insist, here goes:

• Hustle porn – does anyone really need to work 80 hours a week?

• Success & productivity porn - can we stop with the listicles that enumerate exactly how we need to be like other people to find happiness?

• As long as we’re on the subject, this incessant focus on happiness certainly can’t be healthy.

• Startup culture. Yes, be an entrepreneur. But does everything have to scale? Do we really need to grovel for venture capital? And talk about role models – is it just possible that many unicorn founders are imbalanced people who didn't get enough hugs in childhood?

• Twitter has become toxic. As an early adopter, this makes me sad.

• Social media influencers can just get the f*ck off my lawn.

So, what’s your take? Please come and share. But lest we descent into a grump-off, please also tell us about all the things you do and think about that make you human:

• Do you have any weird hobbies?

• Do you volunteer?

• Do you read books not about coding, business and hustling?

• Do you write or make art?

• If you could time travel for a day, where and when would you go?

• Do you play music?

• Do you know your family history?

• Have you tried a digital detox?

• Have you tried psychedelics?

Building and maintaining the right team is one of the most important parts of running a company -- but for many of us, hiring is a complete black box. Post a job, cross your fingers, and sort through applicants.

This first half of this session is aimed at quickly giving you a toolset to evaluate when to hire, how to set criteria, how to interview, and how to hire.

The second half focuses on how to deal with troubles-- remediating problems, performance improvement plans, and termination. Our goal is to let you know where your responsibilities and liabilities are, and how to be humane throughout the process.

This session is intended to be pretty rapid-fire, and HR questions often require a little digging before we can answer responsibly, so please send any Hiring/Termination questions along to @hawksfire on twitter, or Genghis.Philip@gmail.com before the session and we'll try to get to them.

User Experience Design is a mindset, more than it is a process or a set of specific skills.

Principles of UX are ever present: crafting an impactful presentation, telling the world who you are on LinkedIn, even how you correspond with someone via e-mail. All these forms of content are little "user interfaces" that enable interactions with our colleagues, clients, and customers. UX goes beyond websites and mobile app user interfaces; it includes how you perceive your customers or clients - and how they perceive you.

We will show concrete examples and leave you with thoughts that might change they way you think about everything.

We come in, give an engaging talk for 20 minutes, followed by discussion. The last one we did was a lively Q&A that lasted another 30 minutes.

Join Minnestar Executive Director Maria Ploessl, Minnestar Co-Founders Ben Edwards and Luke Francl, and old friends as we take a deep dive into the nostalgia of the early years of Minnestar, Minnebar, and Minnedemo.

Whether you are new to Minnestar, or you were one of the 135 attendees at the first Minnebar in 2006, this will be a fun and exciting look at the last 13 years of this great community.

Can't wait for your nostalgia fix? Get started here: https://minnestar.org/vault-11-crowd-favorites-11-years-minnedemo/

What happens when a junior dev stops coding for 3 months? What really matters is what happens after the tech reprieve. Learn about how unplugging from technology allowed a junior developer to grow immensely, and how she regained her faith in programming after completing a coding challenge.

Today's world is experiencing in the 4th phase of the Industrial Revolution more globalization and technology than ever before. A global phase where machines can talk to each other and people interact with data through connected devices like a Fitbit, a sensor on a road or in their car, or sensors that can help detect cancer or diabetes. These capabilities are just the tip of the iceberg as a new wave of innovation begins and 5G is ushered in. 5G is the next generation of cellular service upgrading from the existing 4G or LTE services. The speed of delivery and scale will enable devices to scale experiences, data and content in ways that we have never seen before and at a cost that allows for everyday use.
IoT is the Internet of Things, the ability to connect devices that allow for access and provide data which in turn creates knowledge and information. Data that can now use the full-scale capabilities of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Predictive data sciences.
IoT is impacting virtually every market and every vertical in one way or another. Retail will see IoT contribute to the ease of shopping with no check-out lines and predictive maintenance in Smart Products allowing them to live longer, become more effective in our lives and become more efficient. Healthcare is booming with IoT by connecting devices to a lightning fast 5G network to provide data to the gaps in the health ecosystem that is patient care. From Smart medication management, to IoT health patches that can detect up to 20 different proteins in a patient sweat, and even Telemedicine; the ability to read data and act upon it due to the connectivity of IoT health devices will forever change the way Providers and Care Facilities tend to patient's needs.
Smart homes will become part of the everyday family ecosystem as builders and designers create homes of the future that can allow for 'closed home networks' and smart capabilities that augment and enhance a Family's everyday life. Smart lighting will ensure no energy is wasted, Smart heating will always be available, when someone is home and Smart cameras and Smoke alarms can connect to 911 to ensure the fastest response possible in the event of an emergency.

This session will dive into the various use cases in the areas of Smart Retail, Healthcare, Homes & Cities. It will also dive into how 5G is different and why it will drive the next generation of a Connected World.

Clovity is a San Francisco Based IoT company that proves its connected technology through the deployment of its proprietary accelerator called CSensorNet. www.clovity.com

There’s a lot of hype in startupland about the best way to beta test new products.

At When I Work, we beta tested two new products last year. What we learned during the first release made us more effective in our second, which resulted in two successful product launches and a practical playbook for how to launch better betas.

During this session, we’ll share the battle-tested tools and techniques we used to increase engagement, gather more data and build confidence about where to go next on the journey to a successful commercial product launch.

This session is for the entrepreneur or product team that wants to learn a practical guide to building better betas.

About the Presenters Nick Wellner (Principal Product Designer), and Andrew Schneider (Product Marketing Manager) were part of the team in 2018 that designed, built and launched two new products at When I Work - a scheduling, time tracking, hiring and messaging platform that helps hourly workers and businesses work better together.

There are many reasons to make your digital products accessible, but with all of the information and recommendations available, it can be hard to know where to start. In this session, we will cut through the noise and focus on the key areas that you can get going on right away. You will leave with tools, knowledge and resources to start integrating and implementing accessibility into your current processes and systems.

A year ago we revamped our brand and our core website, leaving behind the Minnebar sessionizer (this app) and our old wiki full of data. Today, we still have some remaining work to fully integrate the Minnebar sessionizer, to finish migrating some data, and to automate some tasks for our one employee, our volunteers, and our community. We'll use this time to talk through what we have on the roadmap, connect with volunteers who would like to lend a hand, and take your ideas on how we could level up our current tech offering.

Note: This is not an opportunity for you to sell us your product :-)

In 2015 Target created a new role that would become the community hub and enable culture changes for our massively growing in-house team of software engineers. Our goal was to give awareness to Target’s tech brand and make Target engineers proud by supporting the things they care about. To achieve this, we gave Target engineer advocates a voice to reach the external tech community through our tech blog, support of local conferences, meetups, diverse groups, K-12 tech pipeline organizations, and opensource communities. We also focused on building up our culture with internal hackathons, conferences, lunch and learns, and demo days. Unknowingly, we had taken part in the growth of DevRel Industry. In this talk we’ll discuss the role of a DevRel and why it is valuable to Target and its tech team of approximately 4,000. We’ll also discuss what this means for the DevRel industry. There is a vast frontier of major retailers and other companies that are now realizing the truth that every company is a tech company and that technical community is the key to success.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, interactive art and even Ikea showrooms are all examples of immersive experiences-- But how are they immersive? What makes something immersive? And what skills can we as designers/researchers start to leverage for affecting immersive experiences with our design/research?

With the rise of "immersive experiences" like virtual/augmented/mixed reality experiences, we will turn to adjacent fields like immersive theatre and experiential learning for examining our role in shaping these experiences.

We will be engaging in some (introvert friendly) experiments exploring the "elements" of immersion.

Before the mind reads your message, it has already gathered information based on the visual clues from your type alone. Type is an extremely powerful design element that can literally transform the way people perceive your content. Type influences perceptions, emotions, and feelings of trust in the messages you are sending.

Harnessing this power goes beyond simply selecting a typeface. It requires an understanding of typographic elements, history, pairing, and application. Websites are just a jumping off point for applying these lessons. By the end of this session, you will be able to use type thoughtfully to communicate more clearly, visually differentiate yourself, and even control the way your message is received.

Python's simple structure has been vital to the democratization of data science.

But as the field rushes forward, making splashy headlines about specialized new jobs, everyday Excel users remain unaware of the value that elementary building blocks of Python for data science can bring them at the office.

Join us for a conversation about bringing Python out of IT and into the business. We'll share challenges and successes from writing tutorials, teaching classes, and advocating adoption among new users.

No matter if you're a developer, designer, manager or a business owner, you're a person. And these days, being a person on the Internet can be a minefield. Phishing attacks are trying to steal your information and some of your passwords have been published on the internet. But you have to work on the Internet--living off the grid is not an option.

In this session, I will go over some common attacks that you should be aware of. Also, I will highlight some simple, practical ways to protect yourself while browsing the Internet for fun or work. No doubt, some in the room will say, "This is too hard to be secure," and others will say, "This speaker is not paranoid enough." Security is a continuum, and this is meant to be a point for you, the attendee, to evaluate your personal security practices and think about improving them.

Topics Covered

• Is Your Browsing Secure?
• Is Your Communication Secure?
• Backing Up Data
• Examples of Phishing
• Examples of Impersonation
• Two-Factor Authentication
• Password Managers
• Trust No One vs. Cloud Services

My Experience

I am a professional web developer with 13+ years of building, launching and maintaining dozens of websites both freelance and at a design/development agency. While I am not a certified Security/IT expert and do not sell my services as a security professional, I hope that my experience in trying to understand security and keep my personal and professional work secure can be shared with you in this session.

This session will cover the basic elements of work space selection, negotiation and execution process for any sized company at all stages of growth along with insights to ensure your real estate aligns with your business plan. The speakers bring decades of leadership in site selection, real estate evaluation, business negotiation, space planning and project execution for entrepreneurial start-ups to major international corporations. Some of the session highlights will include:

• Commercial Real Estate Process Overview • Location/Space Selection Criteria • Negotiating business terms reflecting business needs and growth • Creating a winning environment (functionally and aesthetically) • Affirming company “culture” through your space • Building the right team to execute with success!

Interactive Money Talks: Where and how to access funds other than your own. The art of raising funds and leveraging resources towards getting what you need for projects, product development, workforce and other business needs.

MinneStar has created an incredible ecosystem over the years. Many of us are committed to the success of the Twin Cities and the people in it.

How can we make Minnesota the best place to launch a startup by having the best early adopters, beta testers, "social media influencers" around? Having the most engaged community!

Think of it this way, if you were launching a startup, wouldnt it be amazing to know there were 10,000 people out there that are willing to buy your app, give you detailed feedback, connect you with the people you need to take the next step?

Are you willing to be a community ambassador? Mentor? Do you want to expand your resume by doing some work for an early stage startup?

Join us for our open discussion! Should this be an extension of Minnestar? Do we need a formal process to endorse a startup? What would be compelling enough to make you tweet about a new product? Can we extend this to big companies for their innovative work?

Come with questions. Limit 1 ish minute per rant :)

⠀

We have created BoatThing - easy to install and use hardware to assess sailboat performance in a competitive racing environment.

BoatThing gathers sailboat performance data, such as wind and boat speed, from a boat's existing sensor network. It provides both real time and past performance data.

We have used BoatThing during a season of sailboat racing on Lake Superior. We will show the system, the data we gathered and what we learned from the analysis. We will also describe challenges we faced, current work, and future goals for the system.

For as long as I've been coding, I've been writing notes and sketching system diagrams in paper notebooks. But it wasn't until the last few years that I started systematically capturing day-to-day notes electronically. This simple technique can help you become a more effective programmer (and maybe even make the case for your next raise). Join me to learn about the tools to build your own programmer's notebook and how I use Emacs and org-mode for mine.

Come see the sport of the future when live drone racing comes to Minnebar 2019, powered by Twin Cities Drone Racing Entertainment Tech startup Hydra FPV and featuring the Twin Cities' top racing pilots.

Co-founders Marty Wetherall and Joel Stewart will demonstrate their fan engagement platform as spectators watch the pilots' first-person-view video feeds and play along on the Hydra FPV app (iOS and Android) link, predicting the finish order of each heat and working their way up the Fan Leaderboard.

And don't forget to stop by the Hydra FPV table during the day for information on Minnesota's first high school drone race event happening on May 18, including information on bringing FPV drone racing as an irresistible STEM lesson to your school or youth group.

Over the past three years, Tech at Target has shifted from an outsourced, waterfall model to an in-house Product model leveraging Agile and DevOps practices on teams across Minneapolis, Bangalore and Sunnyvale.  As part of this shift, Target rolled out the "Better Every Day" learning culture campaign.

Better Every Day encourages tech talent to continuously learn, drive innovation and share their knowledge across the org. Since 2015, Tech at Target has achieved a nearly 20-percentage point increase in learning culture satisfaction on Target's annual team member survey and regularly get feedback like, “Working in a true learning culture has been an unbelievable experience, in addition to the growth it has provided for my career.”

If you're serious about your startup idea, it's critical to prove it's viable before spending the big bucks to develop it. During this informal session, we'll dive into the mindset of investors and share scrappy validation tips + examples from our experience working with early-stage founders.

Mpls Jr Devs is a community of aspiring and less experienced software engineers that was born at Minnebar in 2017. To celebrate our second birthday, we're engaging our audience in mentorship.

• Mentorship builds meaningful connections to other individuals within the tech community.
• Creating bonds through mentorship strengthens support networks.
• Engaging mentors at every stage of your career curates stepping stones to new knowledge.
• You do not need to be a master of all languages, frameworks, or skills; purely being open to sharing your experience with another is considered mentorship.
• Empathy is greater than engineering; the most sturdy engineering solutions do not hold up to poorly-comprehended problems.

Whether you're self taught, went through a boot camp, studied CS in school, or are just interested in the topic, join us to talk about building mentorship opportunities in MN. We encourage both junior devs and people interested in mentoring to attend as there will be opportunity for those looking to mentor to introduce themselves and network with potential mentees.

This will be very casual and informal.

What will be covered:

What is special about programmers (from a financial perspective)

Basic accounting

• Double entry bookkeeping
• Assets and liabilities
• Cash flow vs balance sheet
• Depreciation
• Calculating present value of future income & expenses
• Taxes
• Opportunity cost

Basic finance

• Volatility & risk aversion
• Economic factors:
  • Inflation
  • Interest rates (real vs nominal)
• Bonds & debt
• Stocks
  • Dividends and buybacks
  • PE ratio
• Other kinds of investment
  • Cash & CDs
  • Index funds
  • Bond funds
  • Real estate
  • Employee incentives
• Leveraged investments
• Efficient market hypothesis
• Long term investment results
  • CAGR
  • CAPE ratio & business cycle
  • Real estate
• Efficient frontier/CAPM

Applications to making decisions

• Evaluating job offers
• How much college education to buy
• When to have kids
• Can I afford a Tesla
• FIRE (does it make sense?)
• Learning & using technical skills

What will NOT be covered:

• Any kind of life guru/Dave Ramsish stuff
• Difficult life situations (that are usually specific to one person)
• Anything political
• Any specific tips on how to make more money or spend less money
• Cryptocurrency

Inspired by:

Moneychimp.com (which is great) http://moneychimp.com

Stanford's Personal Finance for Engineers class https://cs007.blog

The blog Philosophical Economics http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/

^ Check these out if you can't make it to the talk

Ever wondered the why, what and how the software development teams use Agile framework to design, develop, test, deploy and repeat again? Well - wonder no more! I'll teach you the best practices of how people, process and tools come together to consistently deploy enhancements, bug fixes, and performance improvements for users to enjoy.

This session is designed to entice the minds of all levels from Developers to Engineers to Analyst to Product Owners to everyone in between.

I will reserve 15 mins at the end of the session for Q&A.

Tsering Choephel Analyst at Best Buy Corporate Office

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tseringchoephel/

Was your 10th grade health class lacking mental health education? Are you now interested in helping change attitudes towards mental illnesses?

Then this session is for you.

Mental illness effects one in five adults and one in five youth in any year. Lifetime prevalence is 50% so it’s important to learn more about mental illness if you’re an employer, family member, friend, the general public or someone managing a mental health problem.

In this session, Creating Caring Communities, Kay King from NAMI Minnesota (National Alliance on Mental Illness) will help you learn about mental illnesses, the impact of negative attitudes and share 5 things each of us can do to make our communities a better place for people who experience a mental illness.

About NAMI NAMI Minnesota is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of children and adults with mental illnesses and their families. Through education, support and advocacy we strive to eliminate the pervasive stigma of mental illnesses, affect positive changes in the mental health system, and increase the public and professional understanding of mental illnesses. Kay King is a Community Educator for NAMI Minnesota. For more information visit: https://namimn.org/

Speaker Bio Kay King is Older Adults Program Coordinator and Community Educator at NAMI Minnesota (the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Minnesota) and has worked for NAMI nine years. Kay teaches about 4,000 professionals, family members and people managing a mental illness per year in classes ranging from one to eight hours.

Kay is the former Executive Director of a retirement community in the Twin Cities that offers both independent and assisted living services. She managed a home health care agency. She also was a hotel and resort manager with over 25 years of hospitality industry experience nationally and internationally.

King is a family member whose grandmother, mother, sister and niece (fourgenerations) lived/lives with a mental illness.

Event Coordinators: Laurie Healy, Fueled Collective, Head of Sales Dustin Bruzenak, Modern Logic, CEO Aneela Idnani, HabitAware, CoFounder

• This event is sponsored by HabitAware as part of their mental health education, advocacy and parity efforts *

We will take you through our journey of being an idea to a prototype and finally to a fully fledged thriving business and what we learned on that journey that could help you bring your ideas to the world. No investors, no angels, just a belief and a willingness to listen to potential clients.

In this session we will get into how data visualization can be used to tell a better story and can be used to make your product better. We will make sure to hit on some tips to get you started or to advance from where you already are. Look forward to an interactive session because most of us have some data viz knowledge and what works and what doesn't.

Minneapolis-based game development studio Space Mace released their first video game Joggernauts for Nintendo Switch in October 2018. What are some of the things they did in the four years they worked on the project? Well...

Built a game development team. Found a lawyer and created the game studio Space Mace. Booth-ed our game at over 25 events including SXSW, GDC, E3, PAX West, and PAX East. Pitched to publishers and consoles for almost a year. Signed with a publisher. Went full-time. Hired contractors. Kept up morale for over four years. Shipped a Nintendo Switch game. Shipped a Steam game. Saw what indie game sales numbers look like in 2018.

You could say they learned a lot. Developer Zachary Johnson from the team is going to do his best to tell you everything important that he wishes he had known before the team started... if he can remember it.

Back by popular demand! Can you teach someone to have good ideas? What are the tools a professional ideator can use to come up with more and better ideas? We will be building off the legendary organization IDEO's brainstorming framework but filling in the gaps.

For: Product Owners, Marketers, Entrepreneurs, Creatives ETC

No complete model exists but after working on this for over a decade I can elucidate some of the mystery and give you some of the skills you need to succeed!

The Basic Process: Goal Brainstorming Knowledge Curiosity and Questions

You know the data derived from in-app analytics programs can help you make better business decisions. But how do you go about securing and interpreting that data?

Join me for a brief session on how you can implement and use data from in-app analytics tools. You’ll leave this session with:

• Samples of effective business experiments using analytics
• Examples of how in-app analytics enhance product decisions
• Strategies for choosing an in-app analytics solution
• Familiarity with the power of AWS for analytics

This session will be facilitated by me, Andy Rahn, a principal developer at Modern Logic. This event will help CEOs and product leaders who are ready to apply in-app analytics to their decision-making processes.

Crypto Currency Bubble? What bubble? Blockchain is all hype? Think again. Ever heard of a "directed acyclic graph" or a "zero knowledge proof?" No? Then absolutely join us!

Don't know anything about Cryptocurrency, Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology? Don't worry about it - we got your basics covered in this lecture - you'll love it!

In this talk I'll bring you the latest and greatest from the world of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as it relates to business, cryptocurrency, IT and even IoT!

You would not imagine some of incredible technical and logical breakthroughs that are continuing to happen in this space - many of which the main stream isn't even talking about yet. In 2019, big industry is scrambling to keep up - be informed!

This talk will offer concrete examples of how real companies are leveraging this cutting edge software technology to realize new systems and even new markets that you never thought possible!

Saint Paul's tech and innovation scene has been growing by leaps and bounds. Get advice from a Saint Paul-based entrepreneur, foundation leader, and city representative about tapping into the community and network of resources.

Hosted by Glitch's Evva Kraikul, Knight Foundation's Jai Winston, and City of Saint Paul/Full Stack's Mary Rick.

In this session, you'll learn about availability of Computer Science programs both in and out of the school day. You'll also learn what challenges students, schools, and programs face, and how you or your company might be an advocate for the cause!

Andrew Haisting Software Engineer, Livefront Coding Facilitator, Project Success

James Rone Program Manager - Project Success Institute

Everyone knows about TensorFlow, it's the best thing out there for Machine Learning, right?

Well....maybe...

I'm going to demonstrate an alternative that gives the same or better results with less training time and less code!!

Real Estate Investing isn't always about buying and renting it or flipping it. It definitely helps you in growing your investment portfolio multifold. In this session, we will see 20 different real estate investment strategies from buying and flipping to crowdfunding to REITs. Depending upon on your goal and appetite you can be a passive or extremely active investor. As a technologist, I will share my expertise on how I leveraged tech and data analysis skills to grow my portfolio multifold in the last decade without disturbing my day job. I am neither a realtor nor an investment consultant but a simple nerd who learned some tricks

Imagine this scenario: You need to set up your software project on a different computer. How many times will you stumble along the way? How long will it take you to fully set up your project on this local machine? One hour? Five hours? Three days?

Here's another scenario: You're working on your software project, and weird things are happening. Did you mess up your local development environment? Can you remember what you did wrong? Will you have to nuke your development environment and start over?

Here's another scenario: A new member has joined your software project. You need to walk this person through the process of fully setting up the project on his/her local machine and having all of the tests pass. How many times will you or this new team member stumble along the way? How many hours will it take for the project to be fully up and running on his/her local machine? One hour? Five hours? Three days?

In this session, I will demonstrate examples of projects where I have implemented my safeguards against the infamous "But it works on my machine!" problem. With my safeguards in place, you never have to live in fear of the day when something happens to your development environment, you need to set up your project on a different machine, or you're responsible for walking a new member of your team through the process of setting up the project.

What's the secret sauce? The two main ingredients in my secret sauce are a custom Docker image and comprehensive Bash scripts in the project. No, you don't even need to submit a pull request for this.

In the world of cloud computing and hardware virtual machines we are told not to worry about hardware failures. Disks come and go beneath our virtual machine volumes, the NIC in our VM is virtual and might correspond to some sliver of time in a set of aggregated links.

But what if you operate your own datacenter? These things must fail, right? A disk is, after all, a stack of tiny pizza pans spinning at 10k RPM with metal wands shooting electrical currents onto its surface. That can't be safe. There's also a bunch of other garbage between your application and its data - cables, SAS expanders, HBAs, and backplanes! Can those fail too?

It turns out everything can fail, and everything does fail. Sometimes catastrophically and all at once!

This session is about real life data path hardware failures from ambient checksum errors to motherboard-eating power surges.

Please join me for a 45 minute introduction to the basics of personal safety and self-defense. This is appropriate for all skill levels and abilities.

Empowerment self-defense skills translate across all areas of our lives. Whether it’s using verbal boundary setting with a coworker or using full force self-defense to escape an assault this intro to self-defense basics will leave you feeling more confident in your everyday life.

In this session we’ll cover:
• how to use our awareness and intuition to assess situations
• how to use our voice and body language to set clear boundaries
• basic self-defense moves when other options are unavailable

No special clothing or equipment is required.