Ben Chartrand

Engineering Lead at BNZ

Kids, Coding and You

How to get involved Let me show you how you can get involved with children, teaching them about code and tech. Whether it's one child or class, a weekly session or one-off, we'll cover everything you need to know to get started, run sessions kids will want to come back to and more.

Bio

Ben is a full stack dev with over 20 years experience. His passion for tech and desire to share has led to Ben volunteering at local schools, running coding clubs, for five years.

Prae Songprasit

UI Front End Developer @ Xero

Shin, Zen, Bi. Truth, Zen, and Beauty. A Kyudo approach to software and personal development.

As a Japanese archery practitioner and Front End Developer, I find a lot of shared principles between the two practices. This will be a brief intro/demonstration of Kyudo, and how I've adapted it into my own work.

Bio

I started Kyudo and Front End Development about 7 years ago. Both practice's demand for detail and respect for the audience had significant impact on who I am today. I contribute back by being in NZ Kyudo Federation committee, and co-organise Wellington Web Accessibility Meetup.

Stuart Whitehead

Technical Delivery Director, Springload

The nuances of giving feedback

Giving and receiving feedback is confronting, awkward and stressful – it’s hard. When my team shared their desire for better feedback, I made it my mission to understand what that meant. I embarked on a journey of discovery, the learnings of which I’d like to share with you in this session. No matter your role, I hope you’ll leave with a clearer picture of feedback and how to harness it for good.

Bio

In my role as an engineering manager at Springload, it’s my role to oversee client projects and to support the members of our technology team. Technology is my profession and people are my passion.

James Newton-King

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Build high-performance APIs with gRPC

gRPC is a modern high performance RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework that can run in any environment. gRPC is based on HTTP/2, Protocol Buffers and other modern standards-based technologies. Together with excellent tooling, it helps you create high throughput, low latency, real-time services. In this talk I'll introduce gRPC and compare it with familiar REST-based JSON APIs. You will see how to create gRPC services on ASP.NET Core, and how to integrate gRPC with dependency injection, logging, and authentication. Learn how to use gRPC to create lightning fast microservices and frontend applications.

Bio

James Newton-King is a Principal Software Engineer on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, where he builds server frameworks like MVC, SignalR and gRPC. James also created Json.NET, one of .NET's most popular software libraries.

Jackie Wang
& Cliff Ahleong

Intern & Senior Test Engineer at ANZ

How to make the most of your internship, before and after

Are you interested in technologies and want to be part of it? Working in tech is not the same as you studied, it’s not just about writing a piece of code, or submitting a paper. It takes a lot more to become a capable developer. The summer of tech internship provides a great opportunity to bridge the gap between the workplace requirements and the student experience. In this talk, we will talk about Cliff’s experience of being selected for a summer of tech internship role and how he made it his own experience. How if you’ve been selected, what you can do to develop an individual development plan that helps you explore the role, build the connections, and get the feedback.

Bio

Cliff is an intern for ANZ from the summer of tech program 2019. He has 4 years’ experience in Kiwibank payments team and looked after the daily transactions. The internship journey, brings him from the bank back office to the digital world. He’s all about making website memorable with excellent user experience, bringing his passion and experience to the internet banking team, and learning everything about what it takes to be a great developer.
Jackie is a senior test engineer at ANZ. She is interested in how engineering practice and product management shapes the technical world these days. She is also keen to promote the agile testing practices and explore the possible career path for testers. In her spare time, she’s learning how to grow vegetables and travel as much as she can.

Josh Espinas

AWS explained with food

I will be walking through the structure of how a fast food restaurant operates then using this to draw parallels to how a software company can use AWS. From a fast-food restaurant's ingredient storage, to the communication methods they coordinate themselves with, to where each restaurant branch is, this food catering analogy will be mapped to many common AWS services to reinforce your understanding of AWS.

Bio

Having recently completed my AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam is what inspired me to write this talk. The exam is largely based on your breadth of knowledge across many different AWS services rather than a depth of knowledge to be able to use them. So thinking about all these services in terms of this food catering analogy really helped. I enjoy trying to teach and communicate technology ideas to anyone with little background in the topic. Outside of work as a devOps engineer at Xero, I follow and play music, I follow and play basketball, and I follow and play video and board games.

Rory Braybrook

Microsoft Identity Architect

Programming in the "dark" ages

Computers have been around since the 1940's and so has programming in one form or another. But what was it like to be a programmer before the Internet, before the PC, before stackoverflow and before the gaming graphic card? Let's take the Tardis and find out.

Bio

I'm a Microsoft MVP and have been involved in the industry for many years. I'm heavily involved in the tech. community and present regularly to user groups and conferences.

Kate Pearce

Head of Security, Trade Me

Colourful Cryptography

Cryptography can be a daunting thing, with all sorts of buzzwords and maths. People throw around terms like encrypted, hashed, private key, public key, nonce, and blockchain. What?
Turns out it's really all about information, and the maths is a detail.
In this session i'll give you the overview of what it all is, how it all fits tother and when to use what, how to use it and why all those things. EIL5, not quite - but EIL10 - YES!

Bio

Kate Pearce is Head of Security at Trade Me (which you may have heard of). Previously she was a professional computer hacker (pentester) and has broken into everything from cars, to cellphone networks, to websites (which you may also have heard of - but she can't name!).

Anuj Sharma

Automation in Testing

15 years ago, software testing was primarily a manual activity performed by humans. It usually came in the end of software development and testers took most of the blame when the go-live date wasn't hit. Fast forward to today, organisations want to ship code/features to customers as fast as possible and without sacrificing quality. This obviously has changed how we build & test software. The focus now is on automating all the tests and reduce the manual testing effort. Automation has become quite popular recently and its not showing signs of slowing down either.
So how do I get started in automation in testing ? Do I need to learn how to code ? And as a developer, how do I extend my skills into this area? I'll attempt to answer these questions using my experience with automation over the recent years.

Bio

Passionate and curious about software testing, I have explored various domains of this field including performance, security and automation. I love learning and talking about testing and anything that related to it.

Rachel Collingridge

Head of Engineering at Xero

Imposter Syndrome - how to thrive when you feel like a fraud

I’ll explore what Imposter syndrome is and talk about my personal experiences of not feeling good enough. Mostly, I’ll focus on describing a variety of tools, tips and tricks to help the audience build their self-confidence and self-compassion toolkit.

Bio

A classically trained musician, I was accidentally drawn into software development 20 years ago. Most of my IT career has been spent crafting code until moving into leadership a few years back. Now I work to build high performing delivery teams and ensure engineers are equipped to grow their careers and happiness.

Aleisha Amohia

Koha Developer, Catalyst IT

Walking the walk

Diversity and inclusion have become buzzwords in the tech industry - there’s a lot of talk, and not a whole lot of action. But for myself, and many other people who study and work in tech whilst also representing various marginalised communities, we need action to make this industry a place where we can thrive, and have the space to effectively create and contribute. I'll discuss why diversity and inclusion are important, and what action you can take today to make tech more welcoming and safe for everyone, especially in Aotearoa.

Bio

Aleisha Amohia (Te Ātihaunui-a-Papārangi) (she/her) is a passionate young advocate for diversity and inclusion in all spaces, but especially the technology industry. Born and raised in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aleisha gets her energy from her supportive whānau and friends, and is driven by the idea of a future where STEM industries care less about innovation for profit, and more about ethical innovation for people and planet.

Ivan Towlson

Principle Software Engineer, Microsoft

TBC

Something awesome.

Bio

TBC

Hannah Gray

Principal Engineer, Xero

Loving unlovable codebases

No matter where you work, what industry you're in or what language you code in, we all have one. The elephant in the room. You know, that thing. The code noone wants to touch. It might use legacy frameworks, it might be a monolith, it might have no testing and it might grow mould. But it's still alive and running in production, for insert key business process here. So what alternative is there to ignoring, groaning or suffering through it? Is there one? Can you begin to make a difference? I not only think you can, but can prove it.

Bio

A back end .NET developer, turned manager, turned developer who has been around the block a few times, I'm usually found deep in the intersection of people and process meets technology. I've been at Xero longer than most of the furniture (not kidding), and love to talk junior talent, sci-fi and how to make things better one small step at a time. Currently leading a small team of possibly deluded developers on a crusade to uplift engineering capacity across the organisation within our legacy codebases.

Craig Spence

Do You Want To Build A Build Tool?

Tooling for code generation, transformation and interrogation has improved in leaps and bounds over the last few years! We now have things like Webpack, Prettier and ESLint, that can manipulate code in powerful ways, speed up development, and provide insight into how our applications work. But how exactly do they work? Some of the ideas that make these kinds of tools tick are rather tricky, and not the kinds of thing you come across in day-to-day web development... This talk will be Code Tooling 101, and act as an introduction to Abstract Syntax Trees, and all the weird and wonderful things you can do with them. We will start together at the TypeScript compiler APIs and learn all about code interrogation, code transformation and code modification. We will then see how we can apply those same ideas to build our own tools, or contribute to the amazing tools that the community has built! By the end of the talk, attendants should have an idea of how ASTs work, how they are used in code tooling, and how they can be used to manipulate and interrogate code at a structural level! This will open up the doors to creating custom schematics, lint rules and codemods, and hopefully encourage everyone to have a go at contributing to open-source tooling projects!

Bio

Craig is a Software Engineer from New Zealand, working at Spotify in Stockholm. He loves building cool things that help teams build cool things! He also loves punk rock, Disney's Frozen, and his cat Cosy.

Ben Amor

Returning Organiser

Ben has worked with of the biggest names in Wellington, including alumni of both Xero and Trade Me. To widespread astonishment, including their own, they're all willing to work with him again. He brings a great sense of fun, a quirky sense of humour and a sterling can do attitude to everything he does and we think it's just splendid that he's joined us for the fourth Wellington Code Camp.

Bevan Arps

Founding Organiser

Bevan is the driving force behind Code Camp Wellington as well as the Wellington .NET user group. He's an alumnus speaker of TechEd and Code Camps in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Over his long and storied development career he's written code you can bank on as well as some that's right on the button. We can only hope he's not going soft as Code Camp moves into its fifth year and we're delighted that he's brought his vision and zeal to the committee for another round.

Jevon Wright

Organiser

Architect, leader, entrepreneur, crypto-currency expert, drummer, and founder, Jevon wears more tech hats than a professional tech hat wearer. She's worked with the top firms in Wellington across multiple stacks and builds teams as well as she builds software. Her own venture runs so sweetly that I believe she's forgotten where it's hosted, it hasn't needed looking at for so long. She's working with Xero at the moment so I assume the stock price will double again shortly. Absolute legend 17/10.

Nanda Hibatullah

Organiser

Nanda has made waves like a good humoured bowling ball as he has leapt enthusiastically into the Wellington Tech lake. He brings to the committee a vast supply of energy, irrepressible optimism, and boundless good cheer. He currently works at Flux Federation where he’s building great software and glueing teams together.

Rachel Collingridge

Organiser

A two time code camp speaker with an unparalleled feedback record (source: I asked some people. They said they liked her talks) Rachel brings a wealth of knowledge, her network of, ooh, everyone in Wellington, and the ability to run slowly for a very long time. A unique blend of cranking developer and inspiring leader, she currently works at Xero as a Head of Engineering.