Dave Astels

Dave has been working in the computing industry for 35 years. He started when 8-bit CPUS like the 6502 and Z80 ruled the land and he designed and built his own hardware and hand-crafted code from assembly language. Eventually he went off and got a Computer Science degree and focused exclusively on software for many years. Along the way he spoke at conferences and wrote books. One of his blog posts instigated the rSpec project, which has been imitated in most programming languages. More recently he found himself working with hardware again. This time it’s different. Instead of using assembly language, he is using Python. Dave spends his time these days hacking on projects and writing about them, teaching other people the joys of making things that do stuff in the physical world.

Dave grew up in Nova Scotia and spent more time there, Calgary, Boston, Washington DC, Silicon Valley, and Chicago before finding himself back in Canada; this time in SW Ontario.

Session: CircuitPython: Python on Hardware

Lightning Talk: Primer on Python

Darryl Dutton

As a principal consultant at T4G with over 20 years of experience, Darryl believes that better delivery is achieved through better design on IT projects. His experience in design and delivery of software solutions cuts across a variety of industries including the retail, insurance, manufacturing, financial, and government sectors. He specializes in application design with a focus on data science platforms. Events like DevCon help Darryl get out of the office and talk to real developers who are often smarter then himself.

Session: It’s Time…Serverless Computing and DevOps for Mere Mortals

Simon Gauvin

Simon Gauvin is an expert in the field of UX, mobile and cloud computing with 25 years of experience developing several startup software companies. He was former VP of Applications Technology at Plazmic Inc. (acquired by RIM in 2002) where he led the development of a mobile media platform for Warner Brothers and Disney in the Japanese mobile market. He completed Ph.D. research in Computer Science at Dalhousie University and has been published in several leading academic journals. Simon has authored software patents, invented and developed several new programming languages, and used this work to co-found Vizwik.com, a visual programming mobile app development platform. He recently co-founded another startup, Safelii Inc., which is using mobile and AI technology to help improve health and safety services for employees in corporations. He is also a freelance Chief Technology Officer consulting for small to medium sized companies in Atlantic Canada.

Session: Building Scalable Web Apps in Google Firebase + Polymer Web Components

Axel-Christian Guéi

Axel-Christian Guéi is passionate about artificial intelligence and deep learning. He studied computer science at University of Moncton where he published 5 research papers involving deep learning applications in various domains (security, biometry, content generation with GANs, etc.).

He has worked on multiple AI projects with several companies in New Brunswick. He is currently working as a Machine Learning specialist at Teledyne-Caris in Fredericton. He spends most of his free time conducting deep learning experiments and digging into research papers.

Session: Short on time? Accelerate Your Data Science with GPUs

Sandy Walsh

Based in Halifax, Alex ‘Sandy’ Walsh is the owner of Dark Secret Software. He has been a senior professional developer for over 20 years, a Pythonista for 10+ years and a Golang developer for the last few years. He currently works for Planet Labs on the Public API team. Planet Labs has the largest constellation of cubesats in the world and takes over 1.5 million photos of the entire earth every day. Previously, he was a core developer on the OpenStack Nova project with Rackspace.

Session: Golang 101

Josh Comer

Josh is an SRE Architect at Cvent and a long-time resident of the Fredericton tech community. In his spare time, he likes long thinks about distributed systems and is always looking for the programming language that got away. When not programming, he is spending time with his family and trying to convince his kids to get along.

Session: Mesh Isn’t Just For the Club (Anymore)

Terri McAllister

Terri McAllister is Director of Technical Strategy at Blue Spurs Consulting in Fredericton, NB. She has been with Blue Spurs for 4 years and has had the opportunity to perform many challenging roles. She holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from UNB and has held many different roles in her career such as Software Developer, Integrations Analyst, Technical Support, and Operations Engineer.

Terri leads a team of AWS Solution Architects and DevOps professionals who design, implement, and maintain Cloud solutions for customers. Aside from her day-to-day operational responsibilities as Director of Technical Strategy, Terri’s passion lies in the future of Cloud Architectures, specifically using Amazon Web Services platforms and tools.

She truly believes in the Art of the Possible and enjoys helping customers navigate their journey in Cloud technologies. Terri currently holds AWS Solutions Architect and SysOps Administrator Associate certifications.

Session: Analysis Paralysis and Effective Decision Making

Chris Dail

Chris Dail is a Senior Director of Software Engineering at Akiri, a healthcare networking startup. He has 15 years of experience building software products in various roles including software developer, architect, and manager. Chris is a programming language enthusiast and is passionate about clean, readable code.

Session: The Good Code

Chris Fullerton

Chris is a Senior Solutions Architect at Blue Spurs. He developed his first computer program in 1975 and at one point had JCPenney’s ecommerce site running on his desktop machine.

After spending nearly a decade in Silicon Valley, Chris brings a wealth of knowledge that covers just about any topic in technology and architecture space, but he is truly passionate about Amazon Web Services, security, golf, and single malt scotch. Chris’ role allows him to focus on helping clients identify and solve their business and technical challenges and doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty to help clients succeed.

Chris has spoken at numerous AWS user group events and enjoys talking to clients of the challenges and benefits of AWS. He achieved his first AWS certification in 2013 and currently has 6 AWS certifications, including the Security Speciality cert.

Session: Building Event Driven Architectures with AWS

Brian Dunphy

Brian has been a Front-End Developer, UX Designer, Product Development Director, CTO, and CEO, wearing many hats in his 16 years of experience working with and founding technology companies.

In 2006, he co-founded Radian6 and helped build the highly successful Social Media Monitoring platform from the ground up. Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce in 2011 for $326M.

In 2012, he co-founded OneLobby where he guided the creation of innovative Event Technology products. In June 2014, OneLobby was acquired by Cvent (NYSE: CVT), the leader in the Event Technology space.

Brian is also an active angel investor and mentor to startups in Canada and the U.S. He enjoys working with a bunch of great startups with smart founders who are solving unique problems.

 Session: Rise of the Technical UX Designer: Prototyping w/Framer X + React

Matt Duffy

Matt is a software developer based in Charlottetown, PEI. After a misspent youth in engineering school, he has spent the last 6 years in the software industry serving customers such as utility service providers, insurance providers, mobile gamers and online content creators.

 Session: Adapt & Overcome: Dependency Management in Existing Codebases

Matt Taylor

Matt has been working with Akiri as a Software Developer. He has focused on devops for the last year, designing and implementing the product and working with tools to enable other developers to quickly deployment and test their code. Before Akiri, Matt spent over 10 years working at Skillsoft in their Operations group where he was responsible for the safe and reliable operation of production environments. He is passionate about automating repeatable tasks and working with emerging technology.

Session: Securing the Cloud – How Not to End Up in the News

Andrew Connors

Andrew is a software engineering graduate (May 2018) with a combined 3 years experience working with cloud computing tech, microservices, data science, AI, and backend development. You could say he’s been around the block, but Andrew says his age would make that a joke. He always knew he wanted to be an engineer of some sorts—he’s always loved math, science, and solving problems.

Session: Finding Your Path

James Stewart

Dr. James Stewart is SVP of Video Analytics with Canadian-based defence company Patriot One Technologies. Patriot One is creating a multi-sensor approach to mass casualty threat detection and acquired James’ New Brunswick-based company EhEye, which created an automated weapon and disturbance detection technology that sits on top of existing surveillance camera networks. James brings a strong mix of academic and industry experience having held positions such as Lead Data Scientist with Forcepoint (Formerly Raytheon|Websense), Research and Development Manager with the Information Security Centre of Excellence at UNB (now the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity), Senior Network Intelligence Analyst with Bell Aliant, and Crime Analyst Manager with the Saint John Police Force, where he continues to serve today as a 15-year auxiliary police constable. James is committed to building the security and defence sector given his strong roots in NB with his 3 children Maria, Adam and Becca, and his wife Connie who is a statistics professor at UNB.

Session: Finding Your Path

Danielle Leighton

Danielle concentrates on the creation and implementation of industrial artificial intelligence programs with demonstrable, real impact. She helps clients transform raw sensor data into new insights and data products aligned with their business goals. Undeterred by the messy, difficult world of raw sensor data, Danielle is passionate about calibrating sensor (“IIoT”) data and keeping it in context.

Working with architects, data engineers, developers, and visual designers, she adapts research approaches and machine learning methods as needed over the life of a project.  Her professional background includes energy, retail, healthcare, and government, and she has worked with quantified selfers, biohackers, hacklabs, and makerspaces. She is notoriously unreadable to GSR wearables. In her previous life, Danielle worked with the world’s most sophisticated wearable to date, the hearing aid. Currently, she focuses most of her time on artificial intelligence programs for large scale asset networks.

Session: Finding Your Path

Matt VanTassel

Matt has spent the last 13+ years as a developer and manager in startups and large corporations, most recently joining RISE as CTO. He has led teams through org restructures, engineering process initiatives, production incidents, and daunting deadlines while maintaining morale, quality, velocity, and release commitments. He’s an ever curious leader who believes life is too short to do something that doesn’t fulfill you.

Matt believes deeply in using data to drive decisions, including analytics and customer feedback. He doesn’t just graph and monitor things at work—he’s fully instrumented his side projects and even graphed his infant son’s feeding and diaper change data!

Session: Monitor all the things!

Session: Finding Your Path

Patrick LaRoche

Patrick LaRoche is a manager at Lixar Inc in the Air Division focused on delivering products with Agile teams to clients. Over his years in the industry, he was a founder of his own startup (topLog), ran engineering teams, and helped grow companies from early stage to established. He has continued to focus on improving and optimizing the software engineering process in the search for the holy grail of DevOps, an actual working CI/CD pipeline while remaining agile in product planning. Patrick’s technical focus is typically in infrastructure, attempting to keeping up with the latest in Kubernetes, serverless, and the general fun world of containerized shipping of all things great.

Session: Minimal Likeable Process – Scrum? Kanban? Just get work done!

Erik Scheme

Dr. Erik Scheme is an assistant professor at the University of New Brunswick and the NB Chair in Medical Technologies.

Session:  From Reactive to Proactive – The Changing Role of Technology in Healthcare

Pat Kerry

Pat is CTO at VeroSource Solutions.

Session:  From Reactive to Proactive – The Changing Role of Technology in Healthcare

Alex Keeling

Alex Keeling has been getting paid to play with computers since 2010. In his current role at Brunswick News Inc., he’s had the chance to learn about AWS and serverless architecture. Alex’s current favourite language is Python, and his keyboard of choice is the classic IBM Model M. Working in Moncton and living 30 minutes away in Sackville gives him lots of time to listen to podcasts every day. Let him know if you’ve got any good suggestions!

Lightning Talk: Using and Abusing AWS Lambda

Book Sadprasid

Book is a designer, storyteller, and self-taught developer. With a background in social sciences and love for technology, bridging the gap between technology and humanity is what Book calls “her meaning of life.” Whether it’s through her side-hustle as a visual designer or her volunteer work as the chapter coordinator of Canada Learning Code Fredericton, Book dedicates her energy and time to foster the relationship between the Fredericton’s tech scene and the rest of the ecosystem to better the community through technology.

She has a diverse background working in the startup scene as a Community Manager of an energy company and then as a Technical Writer of an UX design agency. Book is currently leading the marketing team of Ignite Fredericton, community economic development agency and Planet Hatch, a startup incubator.

Outside of Atlantic Canada, Book is one of the main organizers of a smart community conference in Bangkok that expects over 1,000 attendees.

Lightning Talk: Smart Community: What Can We Do To Make This an Actual Reality

Brandon Richardson

Brandon lives and breathes software. When he’s not at home working on some Vue.js side project, he’s most likely at a café somewhere playing with Spring, AWS, Node, or starting a new project he probably won’t finish.

He currently maintains a small project called Find+, a browser extension that has a few thousand active users. He has also recently become an occasional contributor to Git.

He does other stuff too! He loves to sail, ride around on his motorcycle, and hang out with his lizard Su.

Lightning Talk: What It’s Like Contributing to Git

Angus Fletcher

Angus is an independent software consultant living in Fredericton, NB. Professionally, he has worked with a number of small teams trying to build big things. Unprofessionally, he plays music, rides bicycles, and falls down rabbit holes. He is especially interested in democracy in the workplace and worker-ownership, and would like to know if you are too.

Lightning Talk: Shaping Innovation: What Gets Made, How and Why?

Kolton Gagnon

Kolton is an accomplished software company leader with a demonstrated history of experience in engineering development and leadership. Focusing on innovation, technology trendsl, and understanding customer needs, he was able to transform a startup into a multi-million dollar energy data analytics industry leader within 4 years. This opportunity led him to recruit and create development teams, build engineering processes, and define all aspects of the product roadmap.

He is a Javascript / Node.js enthusiast skilled on all levels of the cloud stack ranging from developing complex React.js applications to defining and implementing highly scalable complex big data analytics pipelines.

He enjoys teaching and sharing my knowledge through Canada Learning Code as a lead instructor for many introductory and advances coding courses.

He is currently building innovative solutions for the hospitality industry at Cvent.

Lightning Talk: How Design Systems Can Improve Your Design / Engineering Process

Colin Casey

Colin Casey, a UI Tech Lead for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He specializes in JavaScript but enjoys tinkering with all sorts of programming languages. He is a former co-founder and organizer of the Saint John developer group and loves to discuss code, music, and movies.

Lightning Talk: fiasco.getInstance()