Shift Miami 2024

Developer Relations is an industry known by many different names. Developer Advocacy, Community Management, Developer Experience, are just a few examples. You’ve likely heard these terms being used over the last few years and there’s a high chance that someone you follow on X or LinkedIn just announced that they joined Microsoft or Amazon’s “Developer Advocate team.” This talk will help you understand not only what all of these terms mean, and more importantly, why, as a developer, you should care. Mary Thengvall is a connector of people at heart, personally and professionally. She loves digging into the strategy of how to build and foster developer communities and has been doing so for over 10 years. Mary is the Director of Developer Relations at Camunda, a source-available and developer-friendly product that allows you to design, automate, and improve any process across your organization. She's the author of The Business Value of Developer Relations, founding host of the Community Pulse podcast, former curator of the DevRel Weekly newsletter, and co-creator of the DevRel Collective Slack community.

Imagine a world where you are able to “interact” directly with a 5G network requesting for network resources like latency, bandwidth change or specialized networks on-demand through a simple API call. Programable networks are very complex to work with and while these capabilities are traditionally closed off to 3rd party developers, Network as Code gets rid of the complexity and exposes the capabilities to developers enabling innovation and the creation of new value. During this session you will be introduced to some real-world application examples and how you can very easily use Network as Code APIs and SDK to tap into these network capabilities to build or enhance your applications. Akin leads the Site Reliability Engineering and Delivery functions for Nokia’s Network Monetization Business. He has been at the forefront of evolving thought leadership around network exposure to ecosystems within Nokia for over 7 years. This passion for digital ecosystems is evidenced in Akin’s appreciation for Developer Advocacy and his participation in shaping Nokia’s response to the ecosystem’s revolution in multiples roles across Nokia. Prior to joining Nokia, Akin spent a few years at Motorola and Jones Lang Laselle and has had an international career spanning across four continents.

Tired of making flaky API calls? Ensure consistent results with idempotency! This talk dives into idempotence, the key ingredient for reliable APIs. We'll explore: What idempotency is and why it's important Why idempotency makes APIs reliable Which elements create an idempotent API You'll leave this talk with the knowledge to make your APIs ironclad! Adrienne Tacke is a Filipina software engineer, keynote speaker, published author of the book Coding for Kids: Python, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor who specializes in Cloud Development courses. Perhaps most important, however, is that she spends way too much money on desserts and ungodly amounts of time playing Age of Empires II.

This talk explores Standardized Dev Environments significance in enhancing productivity, scalability, and security while uncovering DevEnv-as-Code's potential, implementation, and challenges. Gain insights into standardization of both local and remote dev environments, scalability strategies, and security measures. Real-world case studies showcase accelerated development cycles, providing valuable insights into the future of development practices. Ivan co-founded Codeanywhere, a pioneer in cloud development back in 2009. Concurrently, he established Shift, a premier developer conference in SE Europe, which was later acquired by Infobip—a worldwide communications cloud giant—in 2021. Following the acquisition, Ivan served as the Chief Developer Experience Officer at Infobip, overseeing global developer-oriented operations. Recently, he embarked on a new journey by co-founding Daytona, a platform dedicated to standardized development environments, reigniting the mission initiated by Codeanywhere over a decade ago.

Chatbots are cool, but what else can generative AI do? Generative AI chatbots have taken the world by storm and captured the attention of not just tech, but everyone. While we've already seen incredible progress in how this technology can help us write, test, and deploy code, the reality is that we've only begun scratching the surface of what this technology can do. Join Nylas Co-Founder & CTO Christine Spang as she explores how developers and technical leaders can harness generative AI to better understand their data, their product, and their workflows.

Generative AI coding assistants are changing how we code, but it can feel frustrating when these tools produce irrelevant or absent suggestions. Like any emerging tech, the new tools have a learning curve. Join GitHub Copilot–enthusiast Rizel Scarlett as she shares proven strategies and expert tips to transform your random prompts into intentional ones, unlocking a world of game-changing suggestions. Get inspired, get creative, and get ready to embrace the future of coding! Generative AI coding assistants are changing how we code, but it can feel frustrating when these tools produce irrelevant or absent suggestions. Like any emerging tech, the new tools have a learning curve. Join GitHub Copilot–enthusiast Rizel Scarlett as she shares proven strategies and expert tips to transform your random prompts into intentional ones, unlocking a world of game-changing suggestions. Get inspired, get creative, and get ready to embrace the future of coding!

"DevOps" is the operations people's crafty plan to make developers do other people's work, but we are smart enough to see right through this naive rebranding trick! Baruch suggests you think about it: we, the developers, have written all the code. It passes all the tests; it obviously works, and works well (Are we a little proud? We are!); so we are DONE. Now, out of the blue, a bunch of "thought leaders" (all with an operations background, mind you!) are trying to tell us that we have to learn YAML, Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform to deploy our software because suddenly it is our concern?! In this talk, we'll discuss why developers do or don't need DevOps. We'll consider arguments made by DevOps visionaries and see whether they hold water. Hopefully, by the end of the talk, we'll understand whether DevOps really helps developers to deploy better code to production more often, or if it is just another scam made up by marketing and evangelists. Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch) did Java before it had generics, DevOps before there was Docker, and DevRel before it had a name. He started DevRel at JFrog when it was ten people and took it all the way to a successful $6B IPO by helping engineers solve problems. Now Baruch keeps helping engineers solve problems but also helps companies help engineers solve problems. He is a co-author of the "Liquid Software" and "DevOps Tools for Java Developers" books, serves on multiple conference program committees, and regularly speaks at numerous most prestigious industry conferences, including Kubecon, JavaOne (RIP), Devoxx, QCon, DevRelCon, DevOpsDays (all over), DevOops (not a typo) and others. After a tenure of eleven years in JFrog DevRel, Baruch is the Principal Developer Productivity Engineering Advocate at Gradle

When the term Jamstack was introduced by Matt Biilmann in 2015, it focused primarily on the speed, security and DX benefits of pre-rendering (i.e. statically generating) pages using third-party APIs and services as a backend. Fast forward to 2024 and the term Jamstack has been pushed aside in favor of "composable architectures". However, the differences between the two go deeper than just a swap of buzzwords. In this session, we'll discuss what it means to be composable, whether Jamstack is still relevant and the tools and services pushing web development in new directions. Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is actively involved in the community running developer meetups via CFE.dev and Orlando Devs. He’s the editor of the Jamstacked newsletter and co-author of The Jamstack Book from Manning.

Join Very Big Things as they share the intricacies of Zumba's global communication strategy revolutionized by generative AI, achieving translations in seconds while seamlessly integrating with existing software systems. This session will guide you through the technical and strategic implementation of AI, revealing how it enhanced cultural nuance and efficiency across Zumba’s global brand presence. Alex Nucci is the VP of Go-To-Market at Very Big Things, an award-winning firm recognized with the Webby Award for Top Technical Achievement and Digiday's Innovation of the Year. Alex is from Miami, where he’s been a long time member and contributor to the startup scene, serving as a Venture Partner at Secocha Ventures, and Cofounder and CEO of Blanket.

Developer Experience (DevEX) is not just describing the "frontend" experience - it's about every aspect of the experience your developers (internal and external) have with your product, tooling, systems, etc. Platform engineering has emerged as this general way to remove developer toil, but DevEX is more than that, encompassing everything from deployment pipelines to IaC practices to developer efficiencies and productivity to UI/UX to even APIs. In this talk, we will focus on some of the principles of DevOps (collaboration, communication, shared responsibility) and how a strong DevEX mindset can bring Dev and Ops together. Jeremy is a Developer Relations and Community leader, formerly the Director of DevRel & Community at CircleCI, and previously at Solace, Auth0, and XDA. With almost 30 years in Tech, covering just about every functional area including Support, SysAdmin, Application Developer, Program Manager, and Business Analyst, Jeremy is active in the DevRel and DevOps communities, and is a co-creator of DevOpsPartyGames.com. A lover of all things coffee, community, open source, and tech, he’s a husband and father, and is also house-broken, and (generally) plays well with others.

AI-based copilots are popping up everywhere. But have you ever wondered how to approach building functionality that can understand and transform a user’s intent? In this presentation, we will unveil the process of creating a generative copilot and explore what to do if we want to go beyond prompting with a commercial API. As a practical illustration, we'll examine the development of copilot functionality for visual-based chatbot building solutions. The emphasis will be on how to fine-tune both commercial and open-source LLMs. We'll also delve into assessing the copilot’s performance - highlighting the balance between accuracy and hallucinations which may be an important factor when deciding for a deployment that may break the bank. Emanuel is driving AI innovation at Infobip with a current focus on Generative AI and analyzing the impact of Large Language Models. He joined Infobip after almost a decade working as the Operations Area Manager and Key Researcher of the FAIR AI team at the Know-Center, one of Europe's leading research centers for trustworthy AI, and Graz University of Technology. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology and his M.Sc. as well as B.Sc. in Software Engineering and Information Systems from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb. He is a former Marshall Plan fellow and has been working as a visiting researcher at the Computer Science department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the special issue editor of Frontiers in Big Data - Recommender Systems section, and his main research interests are in the Information Retrieval field of Recommender Systems and a specific focus on algorithmic accuracy, real-time performance, privacy, fairness and biases. His research on fairness in AI and bias in recommender systems was awarded with the Mind-the-gap gender and diversity award of Graz University of Technology in 2022.

The intended outcome of the session: Participants will gain insights into how they can leverage the advanced capabilities of telecom operator networks through APIs to enhance the functionality and reach of their applications. The talk will cover what is GSMA Open Gateway, examples of how mobile operators are working with developers to open up network APIs and the types of use cases that have emerged, and how developers can engage with the APIs via channel partners such as Infobip. Mark is the GSMA Technical Director for Cloud Networks. He has been focussing on the GSMA Open Gateway program federating CAMARA APIs and working within GSMA’s Operator Platform Group. Prior to this he worked for Vodafone Group studying public and private MEC and as technical lead in the deployment of AWS Wavelength into the Vodafone Networks. Within Vodafone he held several technical roles including Video and TCP optimisation, the “Enjoy More” program and performance management. Earlier experience was with P3 as a senior consultant and earlier still near the beginning of time with Orange, rolling out and performance management of their UK network.

How do you get into the zone while coding? Why does taking a walk or taking a shower seem to help solve problems? Everything we do is regulated by complex processes in the brain, and coding is no exception. Sometimes it can feel difficult to control our minds when coding, but to debug the problem we’ll first need to understand it. This talk will dive into the basic neurological processes and psychological behaviors involved with learning and writing code. By understanding the physiological processes involved in the work we do, we can be more in touch with our bodies and more productive as a result. With an education in psychology and social sciences as well as tech industry work experience, Emmy loves to talk about where technology intersects with humanity. Currently, they work as a developer advocate at Wix and love helping and learning from the developer community.

It’s now been almost 8 years since Matt Biilmann launched the term Jamstack back in 2016 on stage at Smashing Magazines SF conference. In this presentation, Matt will go through the evolution of the Jamstack, catch us up with the current state of modern front-end frameworks and platforms, and share his thoughts on where we should all be going from there. Mathias (Matt) Biilmann is CEO of Netlify, a company he co-founded in 2014 and today is one of the fastest growing web development platforms. He has been building developer tools, content management systems and web infrastructure for more than 30 years and is recognized for coining the term “Jamstack.” An active participant in open source, Matt has contributed to well-known projects in more than a dozen languages at all layers of the stack. Matt grew up in Denmark, where he trained as a musician and music journalist.