Minnebar 15 Session Schedule

Everyone's got them - stories about really strange, funny, interesting, or horrifying things related to developing software. Come prepared to be entertained, and horrified, as developers from the MN Tech and Mpls Jr. Dev communities share some of their very own Developer Horror Stories. This event is open to anyone and everyone who's interested - whether you're an aspiring or less experienced developer, you've been coding your whole career, or you just want to be entertained - everyone is welcome, but be ready to be spooked. If you have a spooky story of your own, submit it to read or to be read by someone else.

In bioinformatics we have been obsessed as of late with repeatability and reproducibility

Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research

There are now more workflow engines and technologies than there are ways to align DNA sequences

Computational Data Analysis Workflow Systems, an incomplete list

In my experience the best of these is the Open Source workflow manager Nextflow.

Nextflow provides a domain-specific language (DSL) which greatly simplifies writing complex distributed pipelines. Nextflow workflows are portable and can be made reproducible.

In this session I will demonstrate writing and executing a simple Nextflow workflow and not talk at all about science. Or at least very little.

...

ok, if you are a little bit curious about science, here is one we made for analyzing SARS-CoV-2 clinical samples: https://nf-co.re/viralrecon

Are you a junior dev or otherwise new to your career in tech? Want to meet others with similar experience and connect with great community members? This is the space for you.

Join this open community conversation hosted by Mpls Junior Devs where you can meet others in a fun welcoming and casual space. Note that this session is open to all and will prioritize voices of juniors/people new to their career.

Kotlin has indisputable benefits. It's terse, expressive, and addresses some of Java's oldest issues at the compiler level. For much of the code we write, the runtime performance difference is negligible.

Occasionally, however, a hot code path will reveal the truth about primitive boxing, immutables, capturing lambdas, or delegates. Do we have to abandon Kotlin to write faster code?

In this session we'll discuss:

• Under the Hood: Where hidden performance costs typically appear
• Measure: Find the hitch in your framerate
• Typesafe Tricks: Rewrite it with zero allocations, all in Kotlin

The Tax Law is ever-changing and fluid and the 2020 tax year is no exception.

This class will go over what type of corporation are you? This is how it is taxed whether a corporation or pass through.

We will do standard definitions between income, tax credits and deductions.

We will cover the: R&D Tax Credit, Depreciation for capital expenses, Deducting and documenting your expenses, and the simplification Rules for small businesses that were released.

I will edit this more but ever since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 it has never been a better time since the 16th Amendment was passed to be an entrepreneur.

Are you tired of fixing formatting issues during code review? Have you thought about adding "Detekt" to your Android project, but got intimidated by the setup documentation? Have you ever wanted to track and report unit test coverage on an Android codebase? At Livefront, we've spent the last year focusing on using static checks to keep our codebases squeaky clean and saving code review for difficult architectural decisions instead of fickle formatting fiascos.

This talk is primarily aimed at Android engineers, though there will be some general commentary on the value of static checking and unit test coverage reporting. In this talk I'll walk through the tools we use on our Android projects, including but not limited to:

• Our new open source library, "Shroud", used to report unit test coverage.
• "Android lint" which helps us catch bugs before they hatch.
• "Detekt" which keeps our kotlin files squeaky clean.
• Git push hooks to keep CI errors rarer than a thunderstorm in December.

Andrew is an Android engineer at Livefront.

I've been doing tech startup life for about 7 years now, I am regularly about 5x more busy than other (non tech/biz) people.

You have to ramp up to it, but it's simple enough: I get a lot done because I'm too lazy to do stuff the hard way. I'm ready to share all my practical workarounds with a little cheeky humor mixed in.

This session is what not to do as a first time entrepreneur, and what to do instead. I will share my career path from accounting to advertising, as well as how I went from wanting to start a company to finding HabitAware's big idea. I won't hold back in telling you what held me back and what propelled me forward. By sharing my entrepreneurial journey I hope you will take away actionable strategies to start yours. This session is ideal for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, but not quite sure where they want to take that interest.

About Aneela Idnani: Aneela Idnani is Cofounder & Marketing/Design Lead at HabitAware, link. For 20+ years, Aneela hid her battle with compulsive hair pulling (trichotillomania), a mental health condition. After sharing this secret, HabitAware created Keen, a smart bracelet that uses gesture detection technology to bring awareness to hair pulling, skin picking and nail biting. With awareness, people can “Retrain The Brain” to healthier coping mechanisms. Aneela is a mental health advocate, author and speaker raising awareness of these very common yet unknown conditions. Aneela is a native New Yorker who proudly calls Minneapolis home.

If you have a smartphone, you can host your own podcast. It’s that simple.

But for those with analysis paralysis or who want to nerd out over equipment and software options, this talk’s for you.

I’ll get into the weeds of the right setup for your podcast, regardless of your previous podcasting experience. We’ll cover hardware, recording software, editing software, and hosting platforms. We’ll also talk about where you should physically record and what tasks you can outsource. We’ll wrap it up with an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about podcasting.

I’ve been working on podcasts for more than 10 years. I host a show called Constant Variables (https://constantvariables.co), where we explain how mobile app development works to people who don't like technical jargon. I also work on a show with Olympian Carrie Tollefson called C Tolle Run (https://ctollerun.com), where we interview elite athletes and other famous people who happen to be runners.

Join us as we flip the script! Hear pitches from some of our awesome local companies about why YOU should want to work there.

Each company will get 3 minutes to pitch themselves and we'll likely have some time where you can ask them questions directly.

Hear from some of these local companies:

• Livefront
• Buzzfeed
• Daugherty

and more!

It's been a few years since I did this at Minnebar and I've been receiving a number questions from startups and enterprise companies (who are creating new teams) about how best to do this during these economic conditions.

I'll give best practices including these topics:

Career site

Job posts

Sourcing and recruiting

Employer branding

Candidate experience

Video interviewing

This session is going to move very fast and it would help if you send your questions in advance => paul@mnheadhunter.com

Let's gather and talk!

A good UX design process breaks down big challenges by infusing fresh perspective with proven tools and techniques. However, none of these tools or techniques are more insightful or guiding than a user study. User studies recalibrate focus by uncovering key customer feedback and perceptions. They are the biggest driver of product innovation to create a competitive advantage.

We presented a 50 minute session last year called: EVERYWHERE UX at Minnebar 14 in 2019. We would like to continue the UX exploration for the Minnesota Tech community by diving deeper into last year's content; this time focusing on the specifics of designing and executing an effective user study.

Hear from startup founders and early-stage employees on navigating their ventures amidst Covid-19.

Have you been collecting a lot of house plants this spring and summer? Are you sick of those fungus gnats? Spilling dirt on your floor? Are you a terrible plant parent who forgets to water your plants and they die?

Do you want to know how I keep 200+ plants alive and I only water once or twice a month?

Come and learn about semi-hydroponics! I will give you a rundown of:

• How to grow your plants in inorganic media such as clay balls and rocks (LECA)
• How to transfer plants from soil to LECA
• What kind of pots to use
• How to mix nutrients for your plants (aka what plants crave)
• The Kratky method which is a passive hydroponics method for growing fruits and vegetables
• Live demo and a tour of my plant space!

Our growing season outside is ending, so lets grow some stuff inside!

Are you curious for a technical explanation of the Bitcoin whitepaper... but grossed out by crypto weirdos trying to make you buy stuff? Let me walk you through it. No shilling, mining pools, or MLMs.... just knowledge of the technology.

I've been in Blockchain since 2015, learned from someone who's been in since 2010. We'll go through the Bitcoin Whitepaper without any funny business. The Bitcoin Whitepaper is only like 9 pages... how hard can it be?

I'm not gonna lie, it's esoteric and weird, but also a natural evolution of online banking. Worth understanding even if you never buy/use. If you are a real curious cat, read before you come: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

We'll cover the broad points of the white paper with a lot of metaphors and diagrams. No time to go through the math. I promise to make the content accessible & worth your time.

With the rapid expanse of the working from home lifestyle, more and more people are forced to learn a thing or two about audio/video setups, lighting and microphones. We spend hours in front of our webcams and often make important first impressions with the hopes that our laptop webcam isn't from too strange of an angle and our audio doesn't sound like a trashcan rolling down a hill.

I've had an in-home video studio for a few years and have recently switched all my design classes to be online. Because of this, I have had the chance to test a few things out and see what works and what doesn't. In this session, I will be talking through the key findings about my setup and provide guidance for a few different budgets on what you could do to get your system looking and working great.

Since COVID, REM5 VR Lab and REM5 For Good have been utilizing a new, "Social WebXR" platform to build art galleries, music venues, classrooms, and museums in order to host truly virtual events. We see this as the perfect tech between zoom and full virtual reality that bridges that gap and fills a need not just for now, but the future as well.

In this session you'll not only get to try this platform right from your web browser (no downloads or login needed), but we'll also do a quick presentation that gives an overview of the technology and how we're putting it to use.

After a great mini-Minnebar in April during lockdown, I'm pumped to bring the full, expanded version back. This is the BEST time to start and launch a project. Many great companies start during downturns, and the only way to go is up.

This is the fourth year for this talk and as always it will be packed with real world tips, tools, resources, anecdotes, and real talk to inspire you to start (and finish) that project lurking in your head. This is not another panel session. This talk is always fast-paced and very tactical.

Many people still think side projects are distractions that don’t lead to anything serious. But the biggest ideas usually start small, accidentally and evolve organically before changing the world. Here you’ll pick up plenty of tools for anyone with no time and no money to get that software idea off the ground.

I'll go over things like: Why bootstrap or do a side project? What if I can't code? Can I use AWS/Google/Azure to code less? What about design? What if I don't have the money? How do I get users? What are the best cheap ways to market? How do I validate it? How to launch on a shoestring? How much time will this take? What about XYZ myth that says I can't do this? What about XYZ reason to keep procrastinating?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is probably the fastest growing and most impactful Machine Learning sub-field. New state-of-the-art language models have been leapfrogging each other for a few years, and it's hard to keep up. Here we'll investigate interpretable ways to generate text, and see how training set and model size affect the output we see. We'll start with simple statistical models and work toward neural networks that use word embeddings, looking at the quirks along the way!

This is meant to be a fun demo of basic approaches not used in production. If you've ever been curious about how algorithms might generate text, this should be a good intro. If you're looking for ways to improve your models' F1 scores, you probably won't find that here, but I'd love to have you join to help answer questions and improve the general discussion. If you'd like to see any of the demos or ask questions ahead of time, feel free to email me (cartford@hey.com)!

Do you feel like you have struggled to find your place in the tech industry? Do you feel like coding is a slog? Perhaps you feel dumb or like an imposter? I know exactly how you feel, because I have and currently have all of those feelings bubbling up inside me, and that’s okay! It took me a long time to feel comfortable in this industry, and in this talk, I will tell you about my journey to find a place in tech through my art and a dash of humor. This talk is for anyone looking to feel inspired to find their joy in the technical industrial complex.

Does your entire web site require HTTPS? If it doesn't now, it better soon! Major browsers now label all HTTP pages as "not secure". Most browsers also require HTTPS to use new features like HTTP/2, service workers, and progressive web apps. Discover the many benefits of using HTTPS beyond just confidentiality, including integrity and trust. Review adoption strategies, including how to use HTTP response headers such as Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) and Content-Security-Policy. Learn about he misconceptions around HTTPS, and that it isn't as hard to implement as you think.

An updated version of last year's FOUNDER FRIENDLY WAYS TO GET STARTED AND GET FUNDED.

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 and tools 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 no-code tools, financing 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.

Let's gather and talk!

Are you an early stage startup? Maybe you recently landed a big client and know you'll need an additional employee or contractor soon. Or you've started the search for a new employee but feel like you're going in circles and not attracting the right type of person. If you have less than 20 employees and are looking to hire again (or for the first time), this is the session for you!

We will discuss how to create a process for hiring including how to create a job description to attract the best candidates, where and how to find candidates, what types of interview questions to ask, and how to make an offer. You will walk away with knowledge that you can apply immediately to your business.

Learn how to develop state of the art code in a remote first world more efficiently and securely. We will cover using Code Ready Workspaces and supersonic subatomic java designed to supercharge containers running in Kubernetes.

Last summer, General Mills relaunched the long-running Box Tops for Education program with a digital twist. Instead of clipping out rectangular cardboard logos from the tops of cereal boxes, users can now scan their grocery receipts with a mobile app to earn money for their schools.

This presented a unique user education challenge. What happens if a user tries to scan one of the old Box Top logos instead of a receipt?

In this talk you will hear about the process of developing a logo detector prototype for the Box Tops for Education app. See practical uses of computer vision techniques such as rectangle detection and perceptual hashing come together to provide a delightful experience for users.

This talk assumes no existing technical knowledge and is for anyone interested in ways computer vision can make your apps better.

As a socially-conscious consumer or investor, how do you determine which corporations are fulfilling their social and environmental responsibilities (and are deserving of your money)?

In the age of Covid-19, racial inequity, and climate change, decisions about where we spend our time and money are powerful. Publicly-traded companies are accountable to customers, investors, and shareholders, including through shareholder resolutions and criteria that companies must meet to be included in some large investment portfolios (such as Blackrock's). Making informed decisions about your purchases and investments can be a powerful way to help accelerate the reshaping of our economy and planet.

We'll look at ways that everyone can make decisions about what to buy or invest in that align with their values.

If hiring developers was hard before, it's even weirder now due to covid. This will truly be a crash course - come expecting to learn about salary ranges and hourly rates, current trends in the market, including covid and what to expect when hiring junior or experienced folks, along with diversity and where to find candidates. This session will hopefully be helpful for employers and job seekers alike - as engineers ourselves we'll share quite a few personal anecdotes and stories.

The heart of good video marketing and visual storytelling is ❤ heart.

We know that if we can move the ❤ heart through good storytelling, we can get viewers to take action.

Whether thats to click, subscribe, share, buy...

If you miss the heart, you lose the power of video.

In 2020, its so easy to get caught up in things the technical gear - the shiny tech. There are so many ways to make Video today - and every day there is a new tool.

Think back: - whiteboard videos - 3d videos - 360 videos - 4k revolution - hdr - vertical video - action camera vs DSLR

There are a TON of different ways you can make video but what works, how much does it cost, how long does it take...

These are questions people ask when they dont know what else to ask.

At the heart of all good video content, you have a good story.

We want to guide you through the questions that matter - the questions you need to ask to not be burned.

You will learn the top places video marketing works (with or without good storytelling).

You will also learn how you can harness the power of visual storytelling specifically for startups.

With the relaunch of the Better Brand Story podcast, you will learn from the best of the best.

This will be fast paced and cover a lot of ground fast. So buckle ☝ up and keep your hands inside the right at all times.

This is my 12th year of doing this kind of presentation... a bunch of slides and then an invitation to continue the conversation.

Frequent conversations I have had lately include (and bring what is on your mind):

What is the local job market like right now? Is this a good time to look for a new job? There have been a number of IT layoffs these past months... how do I play defense? The economy, where are we? Networking virtually, how to do it The economy… how I see it now and as the year progresses

Send your questions in advance => paul@mnheadhunter.com

And every year someone asks, "Why do recruiters suck so bad?". I'll pull the curtain back on what it is like to be one now during COVID -19

Child and parents, buyer and seller, manager and employees, executive and board, partners - you are always negotiating and skill can make a big difference in outcomes. This session will discuss themes and strategies that could help you improve your negotiation abilities.

You have the "Engineering" part of "Engineering Manager" figured out... but how about the "Manager" part?

Many first time managers got the job because of their skill as a developer, despite the fact that programming and managing are two different jobs. To be effective, new managers must develop the leadership skills to guide their teams to success.

In this session, you will start to develop your own leadership style as we break down the squishier parts of the job: building a cohesive and high-performing team; motivating and retaining talented engineers; giving effective feedback; having difficult conversations; and more.

[Note: This is a talk version of a 3.5 hour workshop, and it will be the first time it's delivered. I'll try to come back and update this description with the specific things that made the cut, but if I don't actually get to everything in that final paragraph, please don't hate me.

On the other hand, if there's something specific you're hoping doesn't get cut, let me know!]

This session will go over the major legal issues involved in doing a Series A financing. We will review basic documents and terms. We will also discuss important interactions between the financing terms and the legal documents, and point out some potential problem areas.

A graph grammar, or a graph rewriting system, is a set of production rules that modify graphs, just like a formal grammar modifies strings. Graph grammars have found applications in procedural content generation (like the game Unexplored), software verification, and Quantum Field Theory. We won't be covering that last one.

Sadly, most graph rewriting systems suck. They're quite hard to use, often with custom IDEs that make them unsuitable for embedding in a larger project. I tried to do better, and introduced a language called Soffit as a ProcJam project in 2018. In 2019 I pushed the boundaries of what Soffit could do by participating in the Advent of Code. You can try Soffit through an online front end.

Unfortunately, Soffit mostly fails at its goals.

But hopefully you can learn something about graph grammars, constraint programming, category theory, and language design from my failure!

There is a widespread belief in start-up circles that launching a content-heavy news web site is one of the dumbest things you can do. And there are certainly a lot of reasons why it's hard. Editorial costs can be high, there's a lot of competition and the digital advertising market can be unpredictable.

And yet, it can be done. Rick Ellis is the founder of AllYourScreens.com, a successful news site that's based in the Twin Cities. It covers television and the media with a Midwestern take on Hollywood. It is also a business that makes money and in this session Rick will outline the lessons he's learned along the way.

When you try and do something new, It’s hard to not mess up along the way. This is a light hearted exploration of some of those mistakes, and ways they could have gone differently.

Pulling from my experiences as well as those of some friends, I explore a few decisions that could have gone differently, try to suggest some ways we could have done better, and chronicle the learnings we hopefully took from the experience.

Because, it’s like the saying goes, “we know a thing or two, because we’ve seen a thing or two”.

Games have proven to engage, excite and inspire players to feel, share, and come back for more the next day. The user experience (UX) of games is what we should all strive to give our users.

This presentation will go through a few simple examples of how e-commerce can integrate gaming standards into their own websites to provide guests simple joys that games can. We'll also look at why gamification is a tricky word that means more than adding badges or high scores to your site. Come and analyze a few popular websites with me and find out if they are winning the game.

This presentation covers the four archetypes described in the book "Zen and the Art of Making a Living" by Laurence G. Boldt[1]. The presentation is not about career development, but rather about how archetypes can be helpful as we undertake our Life's Work.

Archetypes are simply personas which we visualize to provide reassurance and guidance as we address various challenges. The archetypes described in this presentation will include:

• The Hero
• The Magician
• The Warrior
• The Scholar (Student-Sage)

I read this book 25 years ago when I was exploring career strategies. I often reflect back on these four archetypes as I am tackling a variety of challenges in my work and life.

I am looking forward to sharing this model as presented in the book, and hearing from the audience on models they have successfully used in addressing challenges.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Making-Living-Practical/dp/014311459X/

Calling all BIPOC techies in the greater Twin Cities area! Want to meet others and connect with great community members? This is the space for you.

Join this open community conversation hosted by Techquity where you can meet others in a fun welcoming and casual space. Note that this session is for BIPOC people at any stage in their career (or with curiosity about the tech community).

If you’ve been paying even the briefest of attention to Kotlin news over the past couple years, you’ve probably heard the word “coroutines” about a thousand times. Maybe you’ve avoided them because “coroutines” and “suspending functions” sound too complex. Or you’ve read about them but couldn’t explain what they are to someone else. Perhaps you’ve even used coroutines without knowing exactly what is going on.

This talk aims to teach you the fundamentals of coroutines. I’ll explain the core concepts behind coroutines, why you might want to use them, and provide a mental model for reasoning about them. This talk will help both people new to coroutines and those who want to deepen their understanding of them.

Your technology organization needs a mentoring program!

• It's easier than you think.
• You can do it now.
• You don't need special skills.
• It's inexpensive to start.
• The benefits are measurable and substantial.

The key is to keep the business goals for the program at the forefront. When mentoring and learning become vital, expected parts of work, and when you measure results, you're on your way to success.

I'll show you how I started and nurtured a technology mentoring program at SJV Data Solutions. Participants included software developers, managers, and product professionals. In under a year, this program improved products and advanced careers. The positive effect on the bottom line was unmistakable. The program's benefits far exceeded expectations. Plus, a well-designed mentoring program scales; most weeks, I spent under two hours running the program.

On a personal level, conducting this mentoring program is the most rewarding thing I have done in my technology career. I can't wait to share these ideas with you!

A turtle race is a simple thing: pick a turtle, put it on the starting line, let it go. Turtles, though, have their own way of doing things and not all of them cross the finish line. Our customers can be much the same: we put them on the starting line, but their journey to the finish may not follow the path we expect – and there is a lot we can learn if we pay attention to our turtles…er…customers.

The turtle race follows a simple formula: pay your race entry fee, wait for your heat to be called, pick a turtle, carry it in its bucket of water to the race starting line, set it on the line when the race caller says, “Go!” and hope your turtle goes. Forward. In a mostly straight line. Much like a turtle race, we expect our customers to understand that by providing them with a nice bucket of water for travel, the freedom to Go! (hopefully forward), they will get to the finish line. Like those turtles, though, customers sometimes veer left or pull into their shells. Once we give them our product, our app, they may not use it the way we expect them to – so how can we learn from those turtles and customers who go their own way? Are there ways to think differently about your race track and provide a good experience for all of your racers? Through watching a turtle race in action, and walking through some examples of where customers behaved just like the turtles in the race, we can all learn to see the opportunities provided by watching the turtles who didn’t cross the finish line.

Everything in software is broken.

Breaches happen everyday. We get so many offers of free credit monitoring from companies that lost every bit of our data to the dark web that it makes no sense to buy any.

In the past few months, every certificate check on Windows was broken. Every VPN on non-Windows was broken. Every app and service seems to be breaking all of the time. Now, the most powerful bank trojan horses have been open-sourced for any criminal to use and improve.

I’ll give a crash course in the best ways to not crash your apps with remote code execution.

Security is not magic. Hackers don’t break your code like it appears in the movies. You can be a respected expert who other engineers come to for security advice. But it all starts with simple steps that any developer can perform.

Some modern languages offer more safety than the gold standards like C/C++ or even Java. If you’re not aware of the ways in which programs break, you may not know which patterns to use and which to avoid. Not knowing what to look for, you could be allowing critical, zero-day security flaws to pass through your code reviews without even a warning.

We will examine well-known security exploits, how code broke, and how coding with style can help you avoid these problems.

Have you ever had a great idea, bought a domain for it, and then subsequently never done anything with it? Or maybe you let it lapse long ago, and deeply regret it now.

If that hits close to home, then this is the session for you!

What to expect

This will be an audience participation-heavy session. Come prepared to share your favorite domain and the idea/story behind it, and also to be entertained.

With this session being fully virtual, you'll be able to share either via the chat in Crowdcast, or tell it live (with video) using Streamyard.

With only 25 minutes, we hope to hear as many domain stories as possible.

Even prior to the pandemic, eXtended Reality (XR) was carving steadily a niche in the way we entertain, learn, work. With the pandemic, the need to conduct online activities became only more obvious. Probably, the most well-known application of 360 degrees orientation is the real estate switch from 2D pictures and videos to 360 degrees introductions to their product (selling properties). In the short span of 50 min, we can introduce you to the ideas and definitions and the basics of creating a 360 degree orientations, which can be used as a foundation for further inquiry and training in virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality.

Join the hosts of The tech.mn Podcast, Kevin McArdle and Jac Stark, for a special live show. We will be discussing the history of tech.mn and recapping the last year.

Let's gather and talk!

Do you struggle to answer any of the following questions:

• How do we empower teams to make good business decisions?
• How do we make sure everyone knows why they’re building what they’re building?
• How do we deliver meaningful experience advancements and not just incremental improvements?
• How do we scale Agile and DevOps without reintroducing friction and brittleness?

In this session I will identify common Agile and DevOps pitfalls behind these struggles. I will draw on many years of experience diagnosing and repairing broken Agile and DevOps implementations. I'll present a set of customer-centered principles that avoid the trap of “doing more work faster”. Finally, I’ll illustrate how to incorporate these principles into existing Agile and DevOps practices in order to deliver “the right thing at the right time for the right reasons”.

Nobody F'ing Cares

From trying to get feedback on your business plan to A/B testing one of your next awesome-sauce features the reality is that the only person who really cares is YOU -- and you gotta get over yourself :-)

Being too early to market is not your today problem. Being too late might be.

Why did the VHS tape format beat out the clearly superior BetaMax? And why do people like me keep invoking that example when hardly anyone relevant anymore even remembers the "Be Kind Rewind" plea at long gone business models like "Blockbuster Video" ??

"Don't let the perfect get in the way of the pretty good"

The reality is that very few users will actually use 90% of the software you create for them. Hours will be wasted on features nobody cares about because entrepreneurs are often blinded by their own brilliance!

Say it with me: "Feedback is a gift!" ; but not all feedback is actionable...

In this likely expletive laden session we'll commiserate on how lonely it is to be right most of the time ;-)

By the end you'll learn to embrace the eventual heat-death of the universe and be at peace with the fact that nobody f'ing cares.

#ShipIT

Have you ever spent hours solving what feels like it should be a simple problem in your code? Have you felt the pain of getting to the end of a sprint only to find feature you've spent the last week working on isn't actually what the customer wanted? Do you frequently find yourself having long conversations with the rubber duck you keep on your desk while you wait for your code to compile?

These all might be signs that your feedback loop is too long!

The length of your feedback loop is determined by the amount of time it takes from doing some work to when you see the result of that work. In this session we'll look at different ways you can increase your productivity by shortening your feedback loop and how short feedback loops are critical to the learning process.

The Startup Game Show is an interactive jeopardy-style game show hosted by Nels Pederson and Sean Higgins, CEO of BetterYou.

Players will be challenged on their MN startup knowledge for a chance to win some fabulous MN themed prizes.

Participating is simple! Simply show up and get ready to demonstrate your Minnesota Startup knowledge!

Tired of online meetings that take forever, but don’t go anywhere? Want to streamline your project management process?

Learn how to empower every participant, quickly identify problems, and come up with prioritized, actionable solutions in less time than a standard meeting - even while working remotely!

Using design sprint principles developed at Google Ventures, Everyday Design Sprints helps your team prioritize problems and make decisions more efficiently.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR: Sean E. Williams is the co-founder of TeleThera, Inc., a tele-medicine company connecting therapists and patients. For his day job, he's a certified design sprint facilitator who runs the Launch Coworking Space in Austin, MN, and the Mayo Clinic Business Accelerator in Rochester, MN.

Join us as we flip the script! Hear pitches from some of our awesome local companies about why YOU should want to work there.

Each company will get 3 minutes to pitch themselves and we'll likely have some time where you can ask them questions directly.

Hear from some of these local companies:

• Buzzfeed
• Jamf
• Total Expert
• Best Buy

and more!

It's been a busy year for epidemiologists, and surely you have questions. Wondering about COVID-19, social distancing, the difference between "quarantine" and "isolation", whether a wedding is a good idea (it's not), or something else? Come to this Q&A session to hear from a real live epi!

Please submit your questions in advance, which will make it easier for Marijke to answer them during the session.

Speed up your browsing and protect your privacy and security by setting up a Pi-hole! It is free small DNS server that is "a black hole for Internet advertisements" that runs on a Raspberry Pi. We'll talk briefly about the Raspberry Pi, then learn how to setup Pi-hole on your network for use with all of your devices. With a low cost Raspberry Pi and an hour of setup time, we now surf faster and more securely, with nearly 40% of our DNS queries blocked. Its amazing how much more enjoyable using the web can be, you'll cry when you have to surf without it.

This session will dig into beginner-level serverless python development using Zappa and Flask to deploy AWS lambdas.

For this example, we'll create a simple slackbot that requires running a query in order to demonstrate asynchronous and task-based Zappa workflows. We'll also explore ways of mocking lambda to help with local development of serverless apps.

While this session will focus on Zappa and Flask, I'll try to reference other possibilities in case those don't work for your use case.

If you need money for your startup what do you think you need to do?

If the answer is "pitch my idea to as many Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors as possible" you may have accidentally joined a cult!

In this biting and witty session local contrarian capitalists David Duccini and Jade Barker, recently off a whirl-wind tour of Investment Banking exams that has allowed them to launch Silicon Prairie Capital Partners a "Modern Investment Bank Inspired by Crowdfunding and Powered by Automation", intend to break down the MYTHS surrounding startup capital formation!

You'll learn how to spot people who are "for vanity" instead of "for profit" and some tools to check yourself to see if you have the power to get to the next level?

You'll also save yourself a ton of time trying to get coffee dates with people who are NEVER going to invest in your big idea, but are full of "oughta-do" advice! (Hint it comes down to just three reasons)

You'll discover that most competitions, incubators and accelerators are just another form of "beauty pageant" and that many of the so called "judges" have zero experience in startups (and most are just corporate sponsors of the events.)

You'll learn the power of the word DISCERNMENT and hopefully come to realize that you may have been outsourcing it to the wrong people.

Lastly you'll learn that YOU can now by-pass all the gatekeepers and raise capital publicly using Investment Crowdfunding laws such as MNvest and Regulation Crowdfunding all while maintaining control of your destiny!

Forms development has always been a cumbersome affair. From programatic I/O, to validation, to masking, developing a UX friendly form and doing so with a simple, clean, maintainable solution has been just short of impossible. Not anymore!

ku4web-components brings a simple, declarative "HTML" only solution to Angular, React, Vue and Vanilla Web. All solved with the same simple declarative solution. Zero cumbersome configurations. No external JavaScript. No transient state management.

A validated form with masked inputs in Angular, React, Vue or Vanilla Web is as simple as:

<form> <ku4-validation for="phone" pattern="\(\d{3}\)\s\d{3}-\d{4}"></ku4-validation> <ku4-mask for="phone" template="(___) ___-____"></ku4-mask> <input id="phone" name="field" type="tel" /> </form>

More on ku4-form and more from ku4web-components at ku4web-components.kodmunki.com

Let's gather and talk!

Finding the right price for your products or services can feel daunting and experimental. If you find yourself looking at your competitors for price guidance or using cost-based pricing, you're missing an opportunity to use your pricing as a powerful marketing tool.

The good news? As long as you deeply understand your customer, you can confidently price your products and services right. In this session, we'll teach you how to apply the Value-Based Pricing framework to your business so you can develop a winning pricing strategy that will resonate with your customers.

You'll learn about the Voice of the Customer, identifying which of those voices is most powerful in your industry, and how to apply these insights to a value based-pricing framework and set your prices. This is a beginner-level session, for those currently trying to set their prices, or for those who are looking to deepen their knowledge of pricing best-practices.

Over the past few years I've hired a number of part-time, remote tech apprentices, all have gone on to get full-time jobs in tech. Join me to share tips and best practices in working with tech apprentices. Projects include cloud, DevOps or Dev - also machine learning. Cloud vendors include Azure, AWS or GCP.

Topic will include - How to find candidates - Preparing/interviewing - Stages/Tools for working together - Graduating apprentices

For the past three months, I have been using AppGyver's Composer Pro to build Gomigo, an app that helps you keep in touch with friends by automatically planning hangouts that work for everyone. (Launching soon)

In this session, I'll give an overview of: 1. What AppGyver can do 2. How to get started 3. Some of the more nuanced tricks and pitfalls I've encountered in my approximately 600 hours on the platform

AppGyver is a sophisticated enough to build just about any app, but also simple enough for a non-coder to be able to do 95% of the work on their own. There is a learning curve, but the price tag (FREE for any project with less than $10 million in revenue or funding) makes it worth the while.

If you are a junior developer starting in the realms of software engineering, things can often seem a little intimidating. You would assume after four years of college or a 6 month bootcamp where you spent your time learning the in-s and out-s of data structures and algorithms you’d be ready for the real world. But you quickly realize that there is not just one way of solving a problem, and something that seemed the best approach in theory (that you learnt in school) can very likely not be the right solution in the workplace because of constraints like maintenance, resources available etc.

There are so many things to learn, and as soon as you’ve learnt one framework or tool, there seems to be something new out there. As a Junior developer myself who recently graduated college, here are some tricks and tips I thought I’d share that helped me to learn how to improve and made my transition easier.

TDD has been with us for a long time now, but still many teams are not utilizing testing to ensure that their codebase is clean. This presentation will address why it is a good idea to do TDD walk through what TDD how it works.

Users don’t need millions of applications, they need interactive Web! https://youtu.be/et40qdGNOpc

Zack and Jaim spent their younger years making $$$ at supposedly unwinnable games. They later realized the lessons they learned at the card table helped them when starting their own businesses and navigating the startup world. This session will cover basic blackjack and poker strategy and how to apply those lessons to succeed in your own business.

The number of kids being homeschooled has doubled this year, but it can be hard to learn about the homeschool community, especially during a pandemic. In this presentation, I will cover the questions that tend to come up about homeschooling and answer them from both a parent and a marketer's perspective.

We will talk about:
* The differences between homeschooling, virtual charter schooling and distance learning from a legal and practical perspective,
* Who homeschools and why
* Where to find homeschoolers
* The major "styles" of homeschooling
* The history of homeschooling and where I believe it's headed
* How to avoid sticking your foot in your mouth when talking to homeschoolers.

I have 3 kids who have never attended school, 2 of whom are now graduated and in college (my youngest just started 9th grade). I am a former board member of the Minnesota Homeschool Alliance, have run a few homeschool groups and have been running a homeschool business for the last 5 years, so I have experience with this topic from a lot of different angles. I will be happy to answer whatever questions you have.

How many times have you installed/deleted an app from your phone because you just need the functionality once? I have better odds of guessing how many jelly beans are in the jar than guessing how many parking apps I've downloaded and deleted!

From the perspective of phone users, one-time-use apps are clutter that get in the way of how they want to use their phone. Ugh. I guess the annoyance of downloading and deleting is better than trying to use a mobile-unfriendly website from my phone.

App Clips, coming this fall to iOS 14, is the solution to both of these problems. In this session, we'll answer your burning questions like: "What is an app clip?" "How can someone discover my app clip?" "What do I need to create an app clip?"

If you're determined to build the next great parking app, or if you're interested in learning how you can earn some love from users, this session is for you!

With lots of great local opportunities for startup founders, where do you start? Don't you wish you could ask questions and hear directly from leaders of these programs?

Now is your chance. Talk to and learn from these great folks in a fun and casual environment:

• Danielle Steer - Lunar Startups
• Jessica Berg - Minnesota Cup
• Diane Rucker - University Enterprise Laboratories
• Elizabeth Caven - Gener8tor
• Casey Schultz - BETA
• Katrina Becker - Finnovation Lab
• Jess Stalbaum - Techstars

In this session, I'll give the listeners my step-by-step guide on how I launched IndieStack on ProductHunt, got over 500+ upvotes, and earned product of the day.

ProductHunt can be scary but with some tricks, up your sleeve, anyone can pull it off. Even with their first launch (like mine).

Come join and learn how to make your next ProductHunt launch a success!

ProductHunt Link: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/indiestack

Engagement with Star Tribune journalism spiked to an all time high in the last six months as readers from around the state and around the world sought more information about Coivd and the news around the killing of George Floyd. In this session we'll dig deep on the engagement numbers to see how these two events are reflected in consumer behavior trends. We'll also review some of the important journalistic work, commercial policy (yes we'll talk about the paywall), and technical mechanics of meeting the Star Tribune's public service mission of informing the public during a crisis.