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.

Sue Hope

Lead Consultant at Sue Hope Consulting

Make your meetings more meaningful

Practical tips and tricks to get the most out of your meetings. We all spend hours in meetings, learn how to make them more engaging, how to structure them and build a safe environment where everyone collaborates.

Bio

Sue most recently has been at Xero working in the Global Learning team supporting Xero's to be the best they can be through building learning around meaningful meetings. Sue is an expert facilitator dynamic and enables, encourages and supports people to develop and grow!

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.

Vanessa Thornton

Senior Developer, Xero

TypeScript for everyone

Have you heard of TypeScript? Do you wish to learn/find out more about this up and coming language, that's taking front end development by storm? Come along and learn everything you need to know to get up and running with TypeScript. Whether you are a junior developer or a seasoned professional there is something for everyone here!

Bio

I'm Vanessa, a senior developer at Xero. This is my third year speaking at Code Camp Wellington. I love teaching people new things so you will generally see me speaking about how to get started on a new language, framework, tool etc. In my spare time I geek out and 3D print a lot of useful things. I'm learning how to build complex electrical components. I also dabble in a bit of abstract art creation from time to time.

David Rawson

Senior Android Developer at Trade Me

How to engineer like a 14th century mystic

How do we settle engineering disputes without restricting autonomy? Through the magical power of Slack messages and PR comments, a 14th century Tibetan philosopher gives us answers.

Bio

After adventures in India and Chile, David decided to settle down and get a "real job" as a software developer. His recent speaking engagements include GDG Sydney DevFest 2019.

Andy McDowall

Development Practice Manager - Trade Me

Big Units - An introduction to sociable unit tests

re the unit tests you write providing value? I'm going to convince you that they're (probably) not by introducing you to the idea of "sociable" or big unit tests

Bio

I'm a Software Engineer turned manager with a nearly 15 years of mistakes (and some successes). I once wrote a single method that required 900+ unit tests, so I certainly know a thing or two about bad tests and would like the believe there's some knowledge of good testing practice in me somewhere.

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.

Erica

Security Nerd at SafeStack

Good hygiene: Wash your hands, brush your teeth, patch your systems

When it comes to development, most of us know it is important to write secure code to keep your app workflows safe. This talk is geared towards the operations part of DevOps, and goes through some common security incidents that plague ops and how they can be mitigated.

Bio

Her twitter bio says “info sec, cat, and ketchup enthusiast” which summarises her quite nicely. Erica is a space cadet (and principal security consultant) for SafeStack and leads their Wellington presence. She also causes general mayhem with Kiwicon, Kawaiicon, and (previously) BSides Wellington.

Lena Plaksina

Just my type: things I learned from writing my own programming language

Do the principles on which a programming language is based shape the community that grows up around it? Heck yes. While writing my own programming language, I was reminded that language creates (not merely carries) meaning. I also learned that you don’t have to be Grace Hopper to write your own.

Bio

Hi, I’m Lena. I’m an avid cat rescuer, learning enthusiast, and Rails Bridge Wellington organising committee member. I started out in design, but fell for web and software development during my first industry internship. I've been writing Ruby since 2015, and I'm currently learning other languages to expand my toolkit. I’m all about finding patterns, building and communicating software in a way that helps everyone understands it, and failing better – mistakes make me a better developer, and I believe that failing is just an opportunity to learn. When I’m not coding, I’m watching movies with my 3-legged rescue cat Warlock, collecting enamel pins, and helping out and/or presenting at tech community events around town.

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.

Kai Koenig

Ventego Creative

How to get back into mathematics as a developer

20-30 years ago the classic path to a software development career was a degree in computer science, mathematics or a closely related field. Our eco-system has changed a lot since then and many developers have joined the industry from all walks of life: self-educated, going through developer bootcamps, cross-training from other professions etc.
While mathematics is not necessarily a requirement to be a good software developer, there are a lot of areas in our day-to-day work that use maths to a varying degree. Think about animations, machine learning, functional programming, lambda calculus and many more.
This talk is for people who are interested in extending their maths knowledge, building up on existing foundations or starting from scratch.
While it's obviously impossible to teach maths in 40 minutes, this session will look at common areas in which maths help us being better developers and at the pathways to build up the knowledge needed. You will leave this talk with an idea of what might be useful to know and brush up on and some guidance on how to get there.

Bio

I'm a trained mathematician and went into software development after uni (and ignored my maths background for a long time).
With the advent of FP and machine learning/data science, I got interested again and found it reasonably easy to adopt these technologies with the help of having an understanding of the maths behind it.
Some of my friends didn't and we wondered why. We realised that the problem was not only the maths, but quite often also that they would struggle with finding ways to start (re-)learning some of it after having given up on math in high-school.

Arun Venkatram

Developer @ Xero

A brief and thrilling list of queuing anti-patterns

Do you work with distributed systems (and attempt to asynchronously connect multiple systems) by passing messages between them? Do you worry about issues of scale often and how downstream consumers can throttle your messages and push them into a DLQ? Do you even DLQ?
We shall attempt to walk through seven patterns to avoid when using queues (some from experience and some from textbooks). Queue up!

Bio

Kia Ora! I'm a Software Developer working for Xero out of Wellington. Our team has solved some hard problems over the last couple of years whilst building out Payment Systems from scratch; and as exciting (and arduous) the journey was, we've learnt a few lessons along the way (especially around queues) that I'm keen to share.
In previous lives, I've worked for security, platform and e-commerce organisations and I'm presently dabbling with React. Outside of work I have a family that keeps me relatively busy and I attempt to play, watch and analyse cricket whenever I can.

Laura Munro

Front end developer @ Xero

Future proof your front-end with Sass modules

Sass has been a staple of any FEDs diet since its inception in 2006. In October last year the Sass team announced the biggest set of changes to Sass yet - Sass modules and the abandonment of @import in favor of new tools @use and @forward. In this session we’ll learn about what the changes are, what they mean for well-established front-ends, and strategies for implementing the changes to your codebase almost pain-free.

Bio

Designer turned developer, Laura is a front-end developer at Xero. She's been working with CSS and Sass since ages ago and loves to talk typography, UX, and everything sci-fi. She has a less-is-more approach when it comes to development, and uses design principles to build maintainable and scalable front end frameworks for the web.

Kristy Johnstone

Trade Me

Sourdough: Baking performance into web apps

Slow web applications negatively impact usability, user engagement and satisfaction. On the other hand, slowly made sourdough bread is delicious and very satisfying. Can we learn something from the art of sourdough and apply it to how we measure, prioritise and improve site-speed performance of single-page apps?

Bio

Kristy is a Wellington based web developer working on a front-end Angular app at Trade Me. She is highly creative with a natural ability to understand the user. When she's not coding you can probably find her in the kitchen eating freshly baked bread.

Simon Carryer

My Year as a Data Artist

Every month of 2019 I published an essay exploring a different aspect of machine learning, through the medium of weird data art projects. From simple things like an algorithm for predicting how long a British Monarch will stay on the throne, to more complicated stuff, like a bot that paints like Bob Ross. In this talk I'll go through what I learnt from those projects, about artificial intelligence, art, and how computers think.

Bio

Simon Carryer is a data practitioner who lives and works in Wellington.

Michelle Burke

Data Architect

For good or evil

Our lives are lived increasingly inside the tubes of the internet and our data is flowing freely through it. Some of us have better opsec than others (and our families are probably terrible and don’t even understand what opsec means), but the applications that we build for interacting with our audience and customers often collect more than they need to. Are you actually doing the right thing or making the world a little worse?

Bio

Michelle has been working in data longer than she’d care to admit. Her current favourite dataset is her Untappd check-ins (if you’re going to invest that much in craft beer, you should get something out of it, right?)
She’s worked for tiny companies and large multinationals and everything in between. She is passionate about data quality, data security, appropriate uses of information, solving business problems, and building welcoming and diverse teams.

Lisa Chong

Agile Facilitator, Xero

Stepping out of the invisible box

When Sammy Griner’s mother posted a photo of him triumphantly clutching sand in his hands on Flickr, no one at the time knew that this picture would soon become the popular meme 'Success Kid' that we now know and have used at some point in our life. Working with Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) is much like releasing an image on the Internet and seeing what creative results come back. Often our customers use our APIs in ways we don't expect. I’ll be sharing some stories from Xero’s Ecosystem team about how we embrace discomfort and learn from uncertainty.

Bio

Curious, quirky and pretty much says whatever comes to mind, I've seen quite the number of hairy projects through my experiences as a consultant, quality analyst and scrum master. And they continue to shape how I work and apply learnings at Xero, where I collaborate with teams and leaders to optimise flow.

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!).

Lester Litchfield

Lead Data Scientist / Trade Me

Machine Learning in the Real World

We hear a lot thee days about the dazzling progress being made in the field of Artificial Intelligence. But what's it really like to build and release machine learning systems? And how do you get started? Lester will share his experiences from building up the machine learning services at Trade Me, and give you some tips to get started with your own real-world machine learning projects.

Bio

Lester helped build the Data Science team at Trade Me, and has built and released dozens of Machine learning services used by millions of users every month. He has recently moved to Volpara where he'll be focussing on cancer detection with AI.

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

Software Engineer, Microsoft

What do we talk about when we talk about separation of concerns?

The principle of separation of concerns advises us to organise programs into distinct parts according to what they do or represent. It’s a principle that sounds great but can be maddeningly hard to apply, both practically and in terms of identifying just what the concerns are that need to be separated. In this talk, I’ll try to pick apart the aspirational phrase separation of concerns into some concrete principles, tactics and techniques. We’ll see real world examples of how they’ve helped keep (parts of) my code sane, how to recognise and apply them, and, just as importantly, when to stop.

Bio

After 30 years in the software industry, working on everything from roadbuilding to pharmaceutical research, Ivan now leads a quiet life checks notes herding cats and building open source Kubernetes developer tools in Rust.

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.

Felix Shi

Senior Security Architect Developer, Architect, Analyst, Security Architect

Ten Years of Application Security

They say history is a perpetual cycle of technological, procedural, and cultural shifts; In some ways, the world of application security is no different. In this talk I intend to cover the changes in the web application security (AppSec) space over the past ten years. Hopefully there will be some practical tips for growing your own AppSec program.
No prior security knowledge required.

Bio

Felix donned many different hats and worked for a handful of startups and corporates. He currently works as a Sr. Security Architect at Xero, and raises axolotls in his spare time.

Kirk Jackson & Andy Prow

10 years of security breaches

Andy and Kirk look back at the last decade of security misfortune, looking at the hacks that shocked us and asking: What have we learnt?
Since 2009, Andy and Kirk have enjoyed recreating security incidents for audiences at tech conferences: from scenes in Mr Robot and blockbuster movies, to demonstrating how ransomware works. In this talk we'll switch our focus to the Real World(tm), discuss how sophisticated attackers are (or aren't!) and help us understand how to defend against these attacks.

Bio

Andy is the CEO and co-founder of RedShield, with staff and customers in New Zealand, Australia, USA and UK. On the tech side he's a seasoned software developer, pen-tester and security researcher. On the business side Andy won the EY NZ Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 (Services Category), and RedShield won the NZ HiTech Awards 2017 for more Innovative Software Product and Most Innovative Service.
Kirk is a Security Researcher at RedShield, where he helps to protect customer websites from attack. He organises the Wellington OWASP Chapter, and has organised and spoken at other conferences, usually on the themes of developer security and defence.

Richard Vaughan

Career Surgery

Whether you're a new entrant to the tech sector looking to set yourself apart from the crowd and score your first gig in a tough post-covid market, or an industry veteran seeking to put polish on your CV and nail the interview process with one of the great tech firms around town, one of Wellington's recruitment legends from our sponsor Younity is here to answer your questions. He's worked with the best in town because he is the best in town and this is a chance to pick up some invaluable information.

Owen Evans, Nick Halley & Ashlyn Baum

Startup Surgery

You've got an idea for the next Decacorn business - something which will make Microsoft look like a minnow and Google like a guppy - and you want to know how to bring it to life. Join three of Wellington's best product thinkers and startup gurus and put your questions to them. How to go about finding product/market fit, defining the real MVP, how to get from the back of a napkin to AWS Cloudfront, and more.

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 Xero 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.