TechFest Fall 2018

The kind organizers of Houston TechFest recently announced the speakers. I am pleased report I am among their number! I am stoked for the event, and will be presenting on the following:

1. Designing and Running Effective Meetings

• Do meeting at your company drag on and on and on… ? Do you wish they’d get to the point already? Have you ever had to have a meeting after the meeting to make the real decisions? What if there was a way to fix this broken process? What if we could make meetings effective again? Come learn some guiding principles to help make your meetings more effective, and not just the ones you lead! Tips include how to organize your meeting, how to help ensure decisions are made, and suggestions for follow-ups to communicate the decisions, so they don’t die in the meeting!

2. Web UI Testing? Yes, You can! - Co-presenting with Claudio Lassala

• Those back-end guys really seem bought into this TDD idea. What with their interface mocking and SOLID design principles. But is such a thing even possible in the Front-End? Besides everyone knows UI tests are painfully slow!

Guess what ?! Not only can TDD be used in the Front-End, it will improve your designs, just like it does in the back-end. What’s more is you can do with without having to write laboriously slow UI tests! Come learn how to improve the design of your React Components and Redux Store using TDD Best practices, and see why mocking is even easier in Javascript than it is in C#!

3. Demystifying the Whiteboard Interview

• Its no secret that Whiteboard interviews are widely panned by the industry. Just as well known is that you will inevitably have to face one every-time you interview. But why? There must be some pattern or principle that can be learned to make the process less unpleasant, right? Indeed there is! Come learn some simple steps and tool you can use to improve your next whiteboarding interview!

Looking forward to seeing you all there! More information on the conference is available at their website. And don’t forget to pre-register!

P.S. If you haven’t seen Claudio speak, I highly recommend attending one of his User Group presentations! Plus his blog has some great stuff too!