2017 Schedule and Sessions

Ever wonder how your company’s network could be compromised and your data stolen? Come hear tales of hilarity and woe as a hacker reveals naughty ways into the networks of today’s businesses, and what you can do to protect yourself against them.

We’ve heard all the buzz with devices like Oculus, Vive and HoloLens, but there are new Mixed Reality devices from Acer, HP, Dell, Lenova and even more coming. It’s hard to predict the future in technology, but it seems likely the AR/MR/VR devices will grow a lot. Let’s discuss the sweet spots of the various devices and what markets benefit from them. You’ll walk away with a solid understanding of the market place, where you should invest your time according to your interests and what the development platforms look like. This will help you to get started and which device(s) will fit your needs!

Human testing is an important part of everyday software building. To support your QA person or team, maybe your developers hard coded some things and they’re using precious development time changing them around every few weeks. Or, after the 50th time setting up the same conditions to test a relatively small part of your application, you might be asking yourself if there’s a better way to do it. Using tools like Postmaster, Telerik Test Studio, or Selenium, you can add automation to save time and nerves on your project. Automation can also be a great opportunity for development and QA to collaborate. We’ll take a look at: when automation is appropriate, how you can integrate it into your regular testing practices and/or regression testing, how to code for test automation, and Telerik’s coded steps.

We all use SQL Server every day in our jobs, so it pays to know what SQL Server can do for us that will make our jobs easier.  This talk will introduce you to some key features of SQL Server that you might not know about but will definitely want to use once you learn about them.  First, we’ll discuss temporal tables, which provide a convenient way to track all of the changes made to data in a table.  Second, we’ll talk about the JSON support built into SQL Server 2016 and what capabilities it provides us.  Finally, we’ll talk about the windowing functions in SQL Server, which provide powerful analytic capabilities to use against our data. After this talk, you will better appreciate some of the rich functionality built into SQL Server and understand how to put these capabilities to work in the applications you build.

I will describe ways to create, manage, and secure enterprise web sites, portals, and intranets.

The Google Home, Google's smart speaker, was released last October to some fanfare, a number of jokes (Yes, it kind of looks like an air freshener), and a severe lack of customization.  This finally improved a few months later once the Actions SDK was introduced, allowing developers and companies to create their own actions. Things get really interesting, though, once you start looking at api.ai.  This natural language interaction site allows users to create all the Intents (Tie user requests to actions), Entities (Objects used by your action), and configure integrations needed to create a Google Home action.  You can control what happens whenever users say certain expressions, how intents tie together, and even which pieces of data you want to grab from a user's statement. In this session, we'll walk through what api.ai has to offer, how you can use it to configure all the interaction points for a user, and even how you can integrate with external web services.  Combined with the ability to quickly set up your Google Home action settings (and even use the same logic for other integrations), you'll be up and running on your Home in no time!

The Stevens Point Area Public School District, City of Stevens Point, Mid State Technical College, and UWSP have collaborated on work to create a Community Area Network (CAN). The Stevens Point CAN will allow non-profit institutions to own and maintain a shared fiber optic network which will allow for low priced, high speed data transport and internet access. The Stevens Point CAN is looking for other Anchor Institutions such non-profits, healthcare and educational institutions to join the CAN. This session will explain the current plans for the CAN as well as how to potentially become a member. A discussion of Fiber-optic construction, maintenance and design will also be included.

The .NET family of languages covers a wide range of different programming paradigms. Until recently, data analysis wasn't well-represented in the .NET world.  With today's proliferating amounts of data, all developers should consider learning more about data analysis.  Enter R, a language tailor-made for data analysis.  With the release of R Tools for Visual Studio, .NET developers can use this powerful language using familiar tools. 

Trying to find a path to modernize your applications, simplify your production environment or introduce DevOps?  This session will provide you with a basic understanding of Docker:  what it is, who is using it, why, and when and where it could help you.

For every developer, the day will eventually come where the user experiences an error that just can't be explained. Even after hours of research and contact with the user, you are left with nothing more than a blurry screenshot of "Object reference not set to instance of object" and no idea where to go next. Even if you are successful at designing your application to be robust and maintainable, the wrong error can sideline you for days while you track down a mystery. If we put all this thought and effort into making our code work well, why not spend some time thinking about when it breaks? Great design isn't only reserved for code that actually works. In this talk we'll admit to ourselves that we aren't perfect developers, and face the truth that eventually our code is going to break. We'll talk about how to make sure we have the right resources to solve the problem when it happens. We'll go over some design strategies that will make sure errors are as clear and informative as possible. We'll talk about defensive coding and how to handle other developers' errors. And we'll look at some code examples along the way to see how others have done it right and wrong.

In this talk I will discuss a perspective on Innovation that recognizes the other awesome facets available to us in our industry. Then I will summarize practices and systems that support these. After joining me I hope you consider investigating and experimenting with these to bolster the excitement that drove you to a career in computing.

The Internet of Things (IOT) is a hot buzzword these days and it seems that Telemetry is showing up on everything and has become more dependable. With growing numbers of adopters of sophisticated mobile devices, where are the best opportunities for breakthrough ideas combining these technologies, where should investments of resources be made, and what skills should be developed to remain on the forefront of the technologies?

Company executives want to know that you’ve got security covered. Period. They don’t always want to know how it’s done, or how cool and cutting edge the tools you use are. Bottom line: No one wants to be in the headlines as the target of a successful breach. The threat landscape of cyber security has been changing in recent years and while there’s never been a silver bullet, it’s important to be reminded of our past, understand the present and prepare for the unknowns of what is to come. We will cover the evolution of modern cyber threats, and the methods by which the industry is responding.

Even in a world of micro services and serverless architectures, managing some form of state is unavoidable. As applications scale, issues of concurrency and load distribution can become daunting challenges. This session will provide an overview of the actor model and how it can be applied to help address these problems. Specifically, Microsoft Orleans, a distributed virtual actor model, will be used for demonstration as well as a basis for comparison against the larger actor model ecosystem.

It takes a village to raise a child, or complete a project. But that Village is made up of a variety of team members with different backgrounds, knowledge levels, generational experiences and expectations. In addition our villages are changing Villages (teams) are collocated, remote, shared across multiple projects. In this interactive session gain insight on how to lead the Village (team) and maximize the attributes of individual team members as well as the utilizing the changing dynamic of our Villages to make your projects successful and less stressful for the entire team.

I will go over the underlying principles behind neural network technology with some examples/live demoing.

Internet facing web applications are the first target attackers seek out when casing a company. They are often the entry point for high impact attack chains, and start with the use of simple vulnerabilities that could have been detected prior to deploying the application to the public. Understanding how to detect and mitigate the most common vulnerabilities is key to protecting your business. Using the Open Web Application Security Project framework as a guide, I will demonstrate the real world use of common tools and frameworks that can be utilized to find the low hanging fruit in a newly developed web application. I will also show how attackers leverage these vulnerabilities to form complex attack chains leading to the compromise of host servers. Demonstrations: Automated SQL Injection, Broken Session Management, Cross Site Scripting, Scanning for Public Admin pages, Unprotected REST API.

Sponsored by New Resources Consulting

Location:
Guu's On Main (Back Patio)
1140 Main St.
Stevens Point, WI 54481