Minnebar 16 Session Schedule

If you have never been to Minnebar before, one of the things we do to kick off our day is called Sesssion 0. All other sessions throughout the day are a break-out or ‘choose your own adventure’ style. Session 0 is a little different. We start our day together with a dynamic technology community leader, and this year we are honored to be joined by our co-founder Ben Edwards and Chris Messina – best known as the inventor of the hashtag, and co-founder of the very first BarCamp.

Here is a little about Chris (in his own words):

I am a Product Lead focused on issuer experience at Republic, an inclusive fundraising platform that is disrupting conventional venture capital.

I often play product therapist (you can book me via Superpeer!) and help founders and makers nail their launches on Product Hunt.

🤪 Generally, I try not to take myself too seriously.

#️⃣ I’m best known for inventing the hashtag, but I’ve also designed products and experiences for Google and Uber, founded startups, and changed the world with the creation of other social innovations, like coworking and BarCamp.

👔 I am a product designer and have spoken around the world about social technology, product design, synthetic media, founder culture and mental fitness.

🗣 I have twice spoken at TEDx, and SXSW, Google I/O, Microsoft’s Future Decoded and many other leading conferences. I have been quoted in media outlets like The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, Washington Post, and Wired. I have also appeared (briefly!) in The Social Dilemma on Netflix, and in books like No Filter by Sarah Frier, and Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman.

Throughout my career, I have created movements online and off, and acted as catalyst for change in large and small organizations.

In 2004, I helped to organize the grassroots movement that propelled Mozilla Firefox to its first 100 million downloads.

In 2005, I co-organized the first BarCamp and then popularized the unconference event model to over 350 cities around the world.

In 2006, I, along with several friends, opened the first coworking spaces in the world, giving rise to a global movement.

Then in 2007, I invented the hashtag, changing the social media landscape forever by providing a means to galvanize popular social movements.

Interested in Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality? We've got just the immersive experience for you.

New challenges often lead to new opportunities so the local team at REM5 rapidly accelerated their development in "WebXR" - immersive, social, virtual spaces that you can experience right from an internet browser on either a computer or VR headset - to make the space as accessible as possible.

Join the fun - see you there!

About REM5

REM5 is a full service, vertically integrated VR company. Founded in 2017, REM5 operates a flagship entertainment and event space in St. Louis Park, Minnesota that serves over 10,000 guests a year. REM5's impact driven arm, REM5 For Good, is a global leader in using VR to enhance K-12 education and social equity initiatives. REM5 Studios is a digital immersive experience design studio.

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

You would demand PROOF, as is your right.

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

We got:

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

💪 This thing's going all day long

💪 In the main hallway area of Minnebar

See you at the arcade!

Meet Skippy at Minnebar!

Skippy is your helpful neighborhood delivery robot. Skippy will be traversing Minnebar delivering treats, snacks and swag - watch them in action in our gaming arcade all day long!

About Skippy

Skippy is great at ordering groceries or a restaurant meal from your favorite local spot, and picking it up to deliver right to your doorstep. You can track Skippy and the status of your order every step of the way. Skippy is currently serving customers in select neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.

Built by a team at the Minnesota Children's Museum, the Big Orange Dance Machine is a traffic message trailer that’s been converted into an interactive dance experience. People use foot pedals to pick a series of dance moves and then join an animated character in performing a dance.

Why Did It Get Built?

Why not? Dancing is fun. Play is fun. And play helps. Play sparks joy. Play builds brains and bodies. Play reduces the negative effects of stress.

The Big Orange Dance Machine will greet people as they arrive in the parking ramp on their way to the north building entrance. Learn more about the Big Orange Dance Machine at https://mcm.org/big-orange-dance-machine/.

You probably have seen people traveling the world sipping champagne in airline lounges or enjoying luxury hotels in places like the Maldives. Have you ever wondered how they do it?

Come find out.

Aaron Hurd is an expert in miles, points and loyalty programs who has written hundreds of articles for Forbes, The Points Guy, Rolling Stone, Robb Report and many other publications. He has spent thousands of hours teaching people how to use credit cards and travel rewards to elevate their travel experiences.

If you are curious about how travel rewards work, are already playing the game or just want to get more rewards out of your everyday spending, this session is for you. We will cover:

• What are miles and points?
• Which miles, points and rewards programs are relevant to YOU
• The quickest ways to accumulate miles and points
• How to use use travel perks of credit cards
• Under-appreciated perks of credit cards
• How to identify the credit cards that will be most valuable to you
• YOUR questions

Feel free to reach out to me prior to the session at aaron[take this out]hurd[at]gmail.com.

• When you are a startup looking for funding, which source should you pursue?

• When is the right time to seek funding (and which source fits each stage)?

  Idea only, MVP, Beta customers, Paying Customers

• What does each source focus on? What are they looking for?

• How much should you be looking to give up at each stage?

These are questions that every entrepreneur asks when looking to fund their company. We can provide insight into each of the funding sources mentioned.

Although we will have a few slides to prompt discussion, this session is meant to be a Q&A session for startups wondering how to fund their company.

This session is being hosted by Joe Morris and Peyton Green. Joe is a serial entrepreneur, VP of Investments and Acquisitions at Traction Capital, a member of Gopher Angels, and a private Angel Investor. Peyton is a senior associate at Traction Capital and interfaces with over 30 startups that are looking for funding on a monthly basis. An aspiring founder himself, Peyton has spent the past 3 years entrenched in the Venture and Startup scene learning what works (and doesn’t work) for founders on the capital raise journey.

Fire up your hot takes, folks. This is going to be a fun one.

Whether you're early-career or have been coding for decades, nearly everyone has got a coding exercise story (or stories). And feelings too.

What makes for a good coding exercise? What makes for a bad one? Why is to so hard for companies to assess developers' technical skills? Is live coding better than take-home? Should they be timed? Should companies pay candidates for their time? What's the most equitable way to do coding exercises? (and the list goes on)

There are so many things to talk about here, and we're going to do our best to talk about all of it!

More details to come.

Remote work has been a part of software development jobs for decades, even while most of us worked primarily in offices. Then COVID came, and forced most of us into full-time remote overnight. What has it been like to suddenly go from a mostly in person work culture to a fully remote one? What do we like about remote work? What do we miss about being in person? What have we learned about collaboration in the last 2 years?

Join us as we talk about the remote work transformation that touched every company in the software industry. We'll share our experience of this transformation at Granicus, and invite you to do the same!

Let's meetup and talk about all things Playdate!

This little handheld gaming device (https://play.date/ for more info) is as capable as it is captivating!

Martin will give a brief talk about how to develop for the Playdate, and then lead a group discussion where we talk about whatever playdate-related topics the group decides!

Bring your playdate (if you're lucky enough to have one already), and your curiosity!

Let's look at what ARIA techniques have to offer developers in creating accessible digital experiences. More importantly we will review what ARIA does not do and how semantic HTML is often a better choice.

From very basic roles and properties to complex widget patterns we will look at the fundamentals of ARIA and how you can incorporate these techniques efficiently, effectively, and best of all provide equitable access to your web applications.

18 months ago I left the corporate life of healthcare software development and started an ecommerce company for physical products. This session will briefly cover the journey and lessons learned on a variety of topics: 1) establishing an agile brand 2) tools for in-house low-volume manufacturing 3) testing product-market-fit 4) planting seeds 5) ecommerce platforms 6) owning a large share of niche market(s)

This session is for both those who are on a similar journey and those considering taking a leap into the startup world. Dialog highly anticipated and welcomed!

COVID-19 has moved supply chain management from the back office to front-page news. And along with it, the discipline of supply chain design – the strategic evaluation of deciding where to locate manufacturing sites, warehouses, and other supply chain facilities – has gone from a little-known niche to a C-suite priority.

In this talk, I will introduce the ways that analytics is transforming supply chain management, and how open-source languages like R and Python are changing the paradigm of supply chain analytics. I will give a short example of how a manufacturer can design its supply chain network and understand tradeoffs. This example will be drawn directly from my experience in the corporate world and my consulting business.

I will also briefly discuss the mathematics behind supply chain network design - mathematical optimization and operations research.

What separates an okay API from a truly excellent API? Documentation! This session will aim to look beyond simple API endpoint references to more holistic documentation.

A decade plus doing this presentation and this may be the most important one I have done. We are going to cover a lot of ground. I’ll start with the most frequent conversations I have had the past couple of months including:

• If, how will West Coast tech company hiring freezes and layoffs impact Midwest tech pros?

• And the follow up topic, if an economic slowdown or recession is realized… how does that change things?

• Have we hit salary peaks?

• How are remote salaries impacting MN roles, salaries?

• What are the hiring trends in Minnesota, Midwest and remote roles?

That’s where we’ll start.

Please bring your questions, thoughts and opinions.

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

This will be a laid back, casual, engaging conversation.

The current over/under on the number of times I say “sucks” is 6.5 😊

How do mapping apps route you to your destination? How do logistics companies efficiently transport resources across the country? And how can you turn a gnarly programming problem into something that can easily be solved by existing libraries?

In this session, we'll start with a review of mathematical graphs--the kinds with nodes and edges, not the kind with axes and lines! We'll then look at a couple specific problems and discuss the algorithms to solve them.

Lastly, we'll look at resources to learn more about these powerful tools so that you can apply these to your next impossible-seeming programming problem.

Although this topic can get super deep, I promise not to bury attendees in Big O notation (asymptotic complexity), data structures, or mathematical proofs.

Entrepreneurship is hard. And for people without a clear pathway to funding, it’s even harder.

Sometimes well-intended help, support, and feedback isn’t helpful. And in some cases it’s harmful.

If you are on the receiving end of this feedback you may or may not be comfortable speaking up. And you don’t want to risk funding, mentorship, or opportunities. And so the cycle repeats itself. Over and over again.

There are a lot of things that have changed in the MN startup ecosystem in the last 10 years. Which shows we are open to trying new things, growing and learning.

So how do we spotlight the areas for improvement while creating a safe space for feedback? This is where the MN Startup Ecosystem Whitepaper Project comes in.

Come to this session to learn about the project and how you can help underfunded startups gain traction in the Twin Cities.

If you’ve only experienced 3D content at the movie theater or on expensive TVs, you may be surprised to hear that you can make 3D pictures and videos of your own. Not only is 3D photography easy to do, but it’s an art form that’s existed for hundreds of years.

In this session you’ll learn everything you need to capture lifelike 3D pictures and videos at home using tools you probably already have. All it takes is a camera (or two), curiosity, and patience. Along the way, we’ll explore the history of 3D pictures (or stereograms) and discover a variety of high-tech and low-tech ways to view your creations.

Make art and relive memories in a whole new way!

Let's face the facts: Zoom and other forms of video conferencing are here to stay. Forever. Higher bandwidths, sharper images, better audio and video, even 3D is around the corner, as the technology gets better and better. But, what about you? Are you getting better and better at connecting through the medium of zoom? Or are you merely tolerating or complaining about it? Join in this session to learn techniques and distinctions to put you squarely in charge of the quality of the connections you create not only on zoom, but in any human encounter.

This event is aimed at teaching the general attendees of ways to save money on their prescriptions. We will outline the best practices that can be used to make prescription meds more affordable and accessible to the general public.

We all know that eventually our products will be put to rest, but we don't like to talk about it much. It's far more exciting to think about the early days of our product's life when it's learning to walk, learning new words, maybe reading its first book. But what about the end of life? What happens then? Have you planned (or even thought) about that? No one wants your product to go to probate - so how can you start planning now for that eventual end? Do you want to donate vital organs so other products may use them? Do you need to ensure that a child of your product can continue living in your framework? Who gets the proceeds of your product estate - or do you leave it all to the dog?... And how can you use that thought process now to shape your product's life and vision?

We hear the term MVP all the time, but many of us have never really understood what it is or how to use it. In this session, we will focus on MVP misconceptions, the real purpose of MVPs, and how feedback loops build better products. We will also take a look at some popular ways to validate your MVP, which are commonly used by Apple, Amazon, Google and startups.

Join members of the Minnestar Board of Directors and the Executive Director for a conversation about Minnestar and our future. This is an opportunity for you, members of the community, to share your feedback and ideas to influence Minnestar.

Want to hear about a coding project that was probably used by Led Zeppelin, Katy Perry, and Ed Sheeran — all to beat "you stole my melody!" lawsuits? Coder, musician, and lawyer Damien Riehl will discuss his project where he:

1. Used a brute-force algo — not to break a password, but to break music: copyrighting all the melodies.

2. He built (and open sourced) an application to write to disk: 2a. Every popular melody that has ever been written 2b. Every popular melody that ever CAN be

3. Copyrighted everything (all 400 billion melodies)

4. Dedicated everything to the public domain.

...to help protect songwriters.

Hear him discuss how his startup coded and created the project — and how it has already improved copyright law.

Many developers have the dream of coding something themselves, getting a ton of customers, and making enough to triumphantly quit the 9-5.

Those that have tried know it is not quite that easy. I know personally. After building 20+ side projects, I am now gaining traction and supporting my family with my online products.

There are a lot of reasons side projects may or may not go big time. Even a great idea, perfectly coded, may not enable you to leave your employer behind. The key is filtering through lots of ideas and deciding which ones have the best chance of success. In this session we will discuss some of the major factors to weigh when starting a new venture.

If you have one idea, hundreds of ideas, or just want to have a good idea, this session will get you thinking and hopefully inspire you to start something profitable of your own.

You're already awesome -- and sometimes that's easier to realize when you tell someone else. Add some bedazzling with words and you'll positively glitter.

Cover letters provide a special opportunity to feed two birds with one scone -- in convincing someone else how qualified you are, you also convince yourself.

Bring a job posting that feels like a stretch and a willingness to share your transferable skills aloud.

We'll do as many "cover letter makeovers" as we can, helping participants see their beautiful selves in the mirror of everyone else's eyes.

We'll rewrite insecurities like...

"I don't know what I've done that stands out for this job description -- I'm so new to the field; most of my career has been in retail, folding shirts and standing at a cash register."

...into power paragraphs like...

"Eight years of satisfying clients with tight turnaround times has taught me that process is important, but people are everything. I'm always organizing systems and documenting technology to make sure my ducks are in a row for busy seasons. But the secret sauce to staying on top of everything has been my communication skills -- I take pride in my ability to ensure that anyone seeking help from me feels valuable and trusts that I see their needs."

You've got this! I can't wait for you to see just how much.

UPDATE: session recap here

One of my past talks at Minnebar was about using a single codebase with shared Kotlin code for many devices. At the time, I had sample code that worked on Android, web frontend, and iOS, but it was mostly just a demo.

Today, I have just finished spending the last year of my time working at Meetup on a project that was written using Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) for Android and iOS to share logic. All of my cool theory got tested and our code is now running in production. Our Meetup for Organizers app seems fast, stable, and fairly successful.

We were able to share a lot of code: including REST, GraphQL, database, keychain and settings management, translated resources, and repository layers.

Not only was this my first production, work project using KMM, but this was also the first written entirely with the newest declarative UI frameworks for mobile. We used Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI. I even developed a custom Markdown editor in Jetpack Compose code.

I'd like to walk everyone through our experiences taking the least boring technologies available and dumping them all into one project. What might sound like a recipe for disaster actually worked out okay. But there are some interesting war stories to share!

A meetup style networking session among those building Shopify apps and those hosting their ecommerce stores on Shopify.

Everyone is invited to introduce their ecommerce services, apps, and stores as well as give shout out on needs and offers in this space.

Time willing, a short demo on the Shopify Partners featured https://GoodCarts.co app will be shared toward the end.

Almost every organization has initiatives that promote Women in Technology, and DEI broadly. Over the course of her career, Meena has had the pleasure of both participating in and leading these initiatives. She also has decades of lived experience as a woman trying to succeed in technology, who has benefited from the advocacy and counsel of allies along the way. In this interactive talk, she reflects on her personal observations about allyship and some effective tips for those seeking to advance women in technology. This talk is applicable to everyone who works with women (and other minorities), regardless of whether they are individual contributors or people leaders.

As time goes on our IT systems become more and more complex and spread out. In the past a person could simply check on each item every morning and see the status, that is no longer a reliable or feasible way to make sure your systems are good in most modern environments.

I will talk about why it is important to monitor, some ways and applications to do so (specifically free ones that anyone can use), and why this process should be automated with notifications and not left to human eyes only.

Any remaining time till be for sharing other tools and ways that anyone else has used that helped them with monitoring their systems.

"Dates Are Hard", says the conventional wisdom. "Don't program with Dates". But what then? We have to model dates and times in our software somehow! And, apparently, make the same mistakes again and again.

See some of the corner cases and geopolitical oddities that make date handling hard. Go beyond the superficial lists of falsehoods we programmers supposedly believe about Dates. Learn the One Weird Trick to (almost) always handle Dates right, and clean up the damage The Last Team left for you.

AI...ML...Deep Learning...These are all great buzzwords and any company out there in the tech space is certainly claiming they do some form of it (it's pretty much a requirement to be listed on any website selling a product nowadays).

But how do you 'really' do this in an effective way for your company?

First we'll do a brief overview of the concepts so everyone is on the same page with the terms we are using (and for beginners to keep up!)

Then we'll talk through a framework for thinking about AI/ML implementations in terms of company size/goals. We'll spend most of our time on small/medium size companies with a light touch on the differences for large companies.

I've been an Airbnb Superhost for 6+ years. In this talk I will share the lessons I've learned to help you become successful at creating a (mostly) passive revenue stream by hosting guests from around the world.

Bonus lesson: What do you do (and what don't you do) when your guest forgets their cocaine and heroin?

This talk is based on the mini-Minnebar talk I gave in the fall of 2021.

Working from home during the pandemic has changed the way companies think about team collaboration, building community, and the digital tools we use to connect. One tool approaching a tipping point is Virtual Reality (VR). Join this session to learn how local startup Carbon Origins is using VR and robotics to build a virtual gig economy, supercharge safety and training, and change the future of "labor."

Moment.js is big and old, and the creators support the removal of this package in your codebase. The modern web looks much different these days than it did when Moment.js was a huge asset. We can use modern architecture and Javascript's Date object to reduce our dependency on third party libraries.

State management is one of the most challenging problems when developing a mobile application. The source-of-truth for state can be stored both locally and in the cloud. Plus we need to handle network errors, offline states, and incorrect user input. Your grandpa's architecture patterns (like MVC, MVVM, etc.) are ill-equipped to guide developers to properly manage state in their application.

The Composable Architecture (TCA), was built to solve all of these problems. Let's do a high-level overview of what TCA is and how it works.

Dear Entrepreneur, Eduardo Drake here. If you're reading this, I love you already, because you've got an idea to make the world a better place. And in this session, I plan to share with you enough knowledge to make it to patent pending by building and filing your own provisional patent application. If you don't know what a provisional is, don't worry I'll explain . For now it's good enough for you to know that by filing one, you'll achieve patent pending and minimize the amount of ammunition that the patent office can use to shoot your idea down.

In this fast-paced session, you'll learn the exact key principles of building not just one bulletproof provisional patent application, but as many as you imagination can conjure. You'll receive clear and concrete guidance on:

Purpose of the Provisional Patent Application; What to include in the application; What to leave out of the application. How to write a simple set to patent claims; How to incorporate technical content by reference; How to strategically use multiple provisional patent applications to optimize your protection.

In this session, Eduardo's ultimately committed to distilling 25+ years of legal wisdom into the most relevant and actionable knowledge for building a solid provisional patent application. He'll even take you on a guided tour of one of his own provisional patent applications for the craziest, certified-OMG idea you've ever heard of.

Suppose you’ve just designed a new architecture, library, or process. At first, everything’s going great, but over time you notice some issues - issues that stem from people that aren’t using your creation properly! If they’d just use everything correctly, there wouldn’t be any problems, but to your horror people continue to make mistakes and cause your beautiful product to fail.

People will always make mistakes, but the core mistake here is designing without keeping human fallibility in mind. It’s easy to come up with a new architecture, library, or process. But how do you make sure people use it correctly in the long run? Without considering this problem, your software will come up short.

In this talk, I’ll go over the task of maintaining software correctness, along with plenty of examples. By the end of this talk, you’ll have a bunch of strategies for writing software that encourages correct implementations in the long run.

This is everything you need to do a startup and I have created an LLC in 24 minutes, opened a bank account in 20 minutes and set up an accounting system in less than an hour.

If I can do it you can do it.

1. Tricks to raising funds and investors
2. How to build a multi-win system which investors can give you money and have no risk
3. How to take advantage of corporate structures for little knows tax codes during setup
4. The R&D Tax Credit Fun
5. How to build your organization structure so VC or PE realize you know what you need to do.
6. The six policies your startup needs to have down now

LASTLY - the biggest fails I have seen in 27 years and see them every year!

You have big ambitions for your coding project on Saturday. But when it's time to fire up your IDE and start, you just scroll Instagram instead.

You want to hit your work deadline, but you keep getting distracted by small tasks that don't matter.

You keep saying how much you'd love to take a trip to Japan. But it's been 5 years since you've had the idea, and you still haven't done anything about it.

You procrastinate.

You've tried all the things that your favorite productivity guru recommended: pomodoros, GTD, waking up at 5am, time blocking, deep work. They don't stick, because they treat the symptoms of your procrastination, not the root cause.

What's the root cause? It depends. But it has to do with your identity, fears, and ego. Using positive psychology, mindfulness, and one piece of paper, I'll help you find out for yourself why it's been so hard to follow through on your goals.

Here's how the session is structured: 1. Learn - a new mental model for procrastination 2. Apply - the model & start to understand the root cause of your procrastination 3. Personalize - your productivity system based on what you learned 4. Discuss - share what you think & ask questions

PS. Bring a pen.

Splashy visual designs and sexy product launches get attention, but a lot of the best UX contributions fly under the radar. Let's celebrate the unglamorous work that nevertheless improves people's lives, contributes to the bottom line, and is actually within reach for teams of all sizes. I'll share stories about projects where:

• We gave users what they wanted instead of what they asked for (and saved months of development time)
• A small change made a big difference (and $300,000,000 of revenue in the first year)
• We made something new by keeping it the same (and everyone loved it)

The idea is for the participants to answer (and share) questions on a Google Doc about: a) Which companies are using technology "X" and, b) what is the tech stack at company "Y". For example, which companies are using AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure; JavaScript vs. Go vs. Python; Github vs. Gitlab vs. Perforce vs. SVC; MS SQL Server vs. PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. ?? React vs. Vue vs. Svelte vs. Angular vs Ionic vs. jQuery. Wordpress vs. Gatsby vs. Hugo vs. HTML? Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux (Red Hat vs. Ubuntu vs. ??)
Also, what is the tech stack at Cargill, General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Ecolab, 3M, Medtronic? For the bigger companies, probably there will be a different lingua franca depending on where in the company we are talking about. What about startups? What about SMB? We'll put the Google Doc up at the front of the room and share the link to participants and anyone interested.

The goal is to have a map of what companies you might want to be involved with if you are using "X".

Here is an example of reverse Q&A: example of reverse Q&A from PDXPython

The pandemic required many parts of the in-person world to move online. That transition increased the demand for workers with tech skills, with many companies struggling to find enough staff to fill open roles. Most efforts have focused on how to recruit new staff or quickly get new recruits into tech bootcamps to meet demand. But what if we included existing staff who don’t currently work in tech in the strategic planning for digital transformation? Can more jobs become tech jobs? Can those roles be filled by upskilling existing staff? What organizational changes are needed to support this evolution?

This talk will offer strategies for building your tech workforce from existing staff while developing the vision for digital transformation. We will discuss the resources needed to upskills staff, methods to inspire employee engagement, and the potential benefits and risks for the organization.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has proven itself to be an essential component of intelligent systems design over the past couple of decades. Whether it's autofill in your favorite word processor or search engine, language translation with Google Translate or DeepL, or virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, NLP is nearly everywhere, and is allowing us to get computers to speak our language instead of the other way around.

The majority of NLP tasks, especially simple ones, can be accomplished using statistical methods and traditional machine learning techniques without the need of doing any deep linguistic analysis. However, as tasks become increasingly complex, e.g. chatbots and conversational AI, we may no longer have the privilege of ignoring more thorough considerations of how language actually works.

In this session, I will be talking about some common problems which we face when working with NLP, and then consider some applications of formal semantics as studied by linguists in developing more capable NLP applications.

Let's be honest, most of us would not write tests if we did not have to. Does anyone truly enjoy writing them? You know what? I'll just admit it: I HATE IT! However, in my little career working for a fortune 500 company and an emerging startup: I have to admit tests have made my life so much easier! I find myself being able to rewrite the entire codebase (with a different design pattern, framework or program language) and knowing that my tests are there to validate my work I can soundly sleep at night merging and deploying that horrific PR into the master branch knowing nothing is broken.

In summary, this is going to be a talk from a developer who hates tests advocating for writing them. Pretty contradictory and hypocritical? Yeah I know.. that's why its not going to be boring .. DUH! 😜

When I launched my own web site about 20 years ago, it was more of a place to post archived freelance pieces and stories that weren't a great fit for my "real" job. But after I was laid off 3 times in two years about a decade ago, I began freelancing fulltime. And that web site of mine eventually became a full-time business.

I'll walk you through how I made it happen, from the revenue side of the business to the logistics of covering the entertainment business from halfway across the country.

AllYourScreens.com currently gets about 2.4 million monthly unique visitors and I also have a free daily M-F newsletter that goes out to more than 20,000 subscribers.

Getting to this point required a brutal level of work and some luck. But maybe my story can help inspire you to take the next step towards making your dream come true.

Building, growing and sustaining teams has been and continues to be an “interesting” ride… flashback to recent summers:

• 2019 “War for Talent”

• 2020 “Summer of COVID”

• 2021 “Great Resignation”

• 2022 “Great Resignation” + “Great Hiring Freeze” = “Great Attraction and/or Bust”

Whether recruiting in Minnesota, Midwest and/or remote A LOT has changed the past years. The question is, have you?

My view is most companies have not changed with the times and then wonder why they can’t find who they are looking for. And worse, for a time and for some still, can’t retain their current teammates.

So, you’re wondering… now what? What can, should we be doing?

Here the topics you need to be aware of and I'll have a list of "to do's":

• Employer branding (telling your story)

• Career page

• Job descriptions

• Hiring remote teams

• Candidate experience

• Salaries including remote

Your questions and participation are requested

To most of us, computers are mysterious and magical. Have you ever wondered how they work at the most fundamental level?

In this session we're going to look at how players in Minecraft create functional computers using the same principles underlying the device you're looking at right now. You won't need any prior knowledge of electrical engineering, just some awareness of common PC parts. While there have been decades of galaxy-brain advances in CPU architecture design, none of them are necessary to dispel the mystery of how a chunk of silicon (or a virtual voxel world!) can compute.

Demo followed by talk about networking, esp. for software people under the pandemic and in the post-commute world of Zoom. 75-80% of the time, people find their current work through networking; not through ATS systems. What is working now for networking and what is next? We'll break this up into two parts. Part one: Looking for feedback on a startup virtual networking MVP written in Vue and GCP Firebase using ML and NLP. Part two: open discussion about networking, what's out there, and what's next. So what is "virtual networking" anyway? The simplest description might be: It is connecting with people you haven't had coffee with.

I tried a Kaggle machine learning contest ("Hotel-ID to Combat Human Trafficking 2022"), and learned some things about Kaggle and modern image recognition technology, including: dominance of CNNs, image augmentation, picking a model (timm, efficientnet, arcface nearest-neighbor classification), and more.

I'll walk through what Kaggle is, why participate in a Kaggle contest, and a bit about what it's like (including an example notebook). You don't need much AI background, but we will look at some code. If I have time, I'll also present some learnings about image recognition and Kaggle.

I got as high as #7 on the leaderboard, and finished at #9 (of 83) with an accuracy of 0.554 (of 1.0).

There may be people in the room who know more about Kaggle or image classification than me. Time permitting, we can chat and share knowledge.

9 years ago I started Neocities, a web hosting platform designed to give people back their personal homepage and the creativity possible with using the entire browser window, rather than just a tiny text box on an AI driven social network. Since then, we've grown to almost 500,000 sites, 40TB of traffic, 150 million uniques per month and a lot of interesting content!

It hasn't been a cakewalk though, and scaling to handle a large amount of users quickly has led to some... interesting tech decisions. I'll go into the details on our unusual tech stack (We run our own anycast CDN with BGP and our own IP addresses, for one weird example), how to deal with spam/abuse, and how to build to build a small, self sustaining business that was bootstrapped by fans and donations from Hacker News readers. We've never taken a penny of VC funding, avoiding the closures and panic acquisitions of our (far better funded) lookalikes. It's changed my beliefs on how to build a successful startup to something far from the mainstream consensus, and I'd love to poison the well a bit on what makes a successful startup strategy (especially with the upcoming credit crunch).

If you're thinking about starting a solo startup from scratch, or if you ever plan to host a lot of third party content for other people, or you want to meet one of the few thousand (hundred?) people that know how to run an anycast CDN, don't miss this one.

What would happen if you shared the financial data of your company with everybody in it? That thought terrifies many people. But why? Do you really think your teammates would leave if they found out how poorly the company is doing? Are you afraid that your employees would find out that you're making too much money?

If you don't share any information, all people can do is speculate. And their speculation will always be inaccurate for how your business is truly operating.

It's time to stop the speculation and realize the benefits of being an open organization.

We'll discuss how sharing financial information can help:

• Improve inter-company communication
• Lower your stress level
• Make your company more profitable
• Help you grow your business or freelancing
• Build trust

John Eckhardt (Code Pros) will you walk through his experiences of opening up the books to his employees.

We'll walk through how you can set up an easy-peasy financial report to start your sharing journey. Bring a P&L or list of money you've made and expenses you've had in the last month. (don't worry! You won't have to share with anybody who's at this talk!)

The goal of this session is to intentionally isolating and exercising reflective ability. Often repeated Yoda like statements about learning from mistakes (e.g.: "know for next time, I will") do little to cement experiential lessons or ensure effective future application knowledge. A key skill for extracting highest ROI from real world (and artificial world) learning is reflection. This section focuses on the development of reflective practice. Session participants look back upon an experience they learned from before pivoting forward to think about the application of the learning. Although we rarely have time to stop and explicitly reflect on experiences, by occasionally bringing purpose to the practice of reflection we can move towards making this powerful tool more instinctual.

A/B testing is an incredibly valuable tool for data-driven product management. But, it doesn’t come for free and it isn’t the only available method for vetting new user experiences. Taken to its logical extreme, if you were to A/B test every feature in your product, you would be throwing away 50% of your product team’s work!

So given that opportunity cost, is A/B testing even worth it? Well… it depends!

In this session, we’ll engage in some real talk about A/B testing. Join us if you are interested in chewing on any of these questions.

• What makes for a good A/B testing opportunity?
• Why is A/B testing so costly, and how can we minimize that?
• How do you design a good A/B test?
• How do you implement a good A/B test?
• How should you go about interpreting your A/B test results?

Open-source coding for Salesforce? Is that a thing?! I thought they were all about clicks not code. Aren't they a platform trying to make money? Why would they allow anyone to give stuff away?! Why should I even care?

Ryan Blake (Cloud for Good) and Thad Dahlberg (University of St. Thomas) will answer these burning questions and more in this session where they discuss their adventures in open-sourcing an event registration solution called the Summit Events App that has its origin story right here in Minnesota at the University of St. Thomas.

You'll learn about:

• What Salesforce is and the opportunities for developers within the platform
• The Salesforce.org Open Source Commons
• What coding looks like in Salesforce
• What tools are provided to effectively Open Source Code in Salesforce
• How Summit Events App started right here at the University of St. Thomas, MN
• How you can get involved in the Summit Events App and other Salesforce Open Source endeavors

Joining a startup is in many ways an irrational act - and yet it can be a very rewarding experience. Alex Bangs has been a founder and CTO/CIO across three Silicon Valley startups. In this session, he’ll discuss lessons learned from the rollercoaster ride of creating and growing startups, and tips for people who are thinking of joining or founding a startup. Topics will include venture funding and burn rates, timing and luck, nurturing a mission-driven culture, learning and the pit of success, scaling yourself, having a life, and engaging with the community.

When you're new to tech, it can feel impossible to get a foothold into how to make progress. This is the session I needed when I was looking to change direction in 2016. We'll explore:

• Tackling blocks to getting started
• Strategies for mental strength
• Locating resources
• Getting wins big and small
• Networking and connecting with other people

I look forward to sharing what I've learned and encouraging others to go after their tech goals!

Rama will discuss her journey taking a hardware idea to shelf right here in Minneapolis through boot strapping, sweat equity, and University projects.

Teqnizan bluetooth music earrings developed here in Minneapolis and now ready for sale via our website - delivers a safer, stay put device that sounds great for music and is super comfortable to wear.

The music earrings are safer because the ear is not blocked by the earbud, where even the transparency mode is not very comfortable. The earbuds are too big for many customers, either falling out or causing pain in the ear cartilage. The speaker being sealed in the ear canal creates the risk of hearing damage when you really want to listen to your music loud and tune out your surroundings. Not to mention being hit by a bike or a train on way to your commute vehicle.

The Teqnizan earrings come in a beautiful introductory jewelry design. Fully custom design of the earrings is offered by Teqnizan. Most of our users have been surprised by how lightweight the music earrings are at 4.2gms. For comparison the heaviest earrings out there are 7gms.

Be the first to buy this Minnesota product, and enjoy your workouts or study time like never before.

https://teqnizan.com

When you're writing a computer program, you're telling the computer what to do. But what if you could also tell it what your code should do?

Many programming languages have types. A compiler (or type-checker) can verify that those types are correct. But what if you could create new types the compiler could check for you? Things like "a list that contains elements in ascending order" or "this graph contains no cycles" or even "this integer is the minimum element of a particular list"!

F* is a "proof-oriented programming language" similar to OCaml, created by Microsoft Research. It has "dependent types", which give the flexibility to describe constraints like those above, and uses a SMT solver back-end to help you verify properties about your programs. F* programs will be proofs of correctness--- but they will still be working code! The F* language has been used in practice for verified cryptographic primitives and robust parsers. I'll explain how the language works, show some examples, and demonstrate how to put the Curry-Howard Isomorphism to work for you!

• Learn more about F*
• Advent of Code Solutions in F*, as well as livecoding videos

Ancient Indian philosophy, “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the World is One Family)” is becoming a reality with technology bridging the geographical distance. As citizens of “One World,” we were inspired to create better learning opportunities for underprivileged children, particularly girls, in India and engage the local youth in creative ways. Therefore, we founded a nonprofit, Vidya Gyan (Vidya is education and Gyan means knowledge) aimed at improving education and health because ‘Every Child Matters.

We will discuss a couple of examples geared to rekindle the spirit of giving, sharing, and learning about different cultures. A project launched in 2019, “Bridging the Cultural Gap” was aimed at exchanging ‘handwritten’ letters between school children here and in rural India. It was also meant to promote and preserve the art and skills of writing by hand which otherwise is becoming extinct due to the pervasive use of technology.

Another initiative, ‘Scholars to Schoolers’ came about because of the pandemic when the schools suddenly closed leaving the learning void for many. The Scholars (local high schoolers) used Zoom and offered virtual classes to elementary to middle-grade children (the Schoolers). The Scholars volunteered, shared their knowledge, and raised funds to support children’s education in India. What an awesome opportunity for the youth-to-youth connection and giving back to society.

Join us to explore volunteer and technology-assisted opportunities to bridge the learning gap for the “have-nots” in rural India and make our One World better.