What is your code coverage? Why not 10% more or less? Is testing this feature more important than shipping the next? Many teams spend too much time and energy on testing the wrong things. In this session, an enterprise developer turned startup entrepreneur will dive into the costs and benefits of testing. You will learn about the organizational and social dynamics that drives teams to over-test. You will come away armed to convince your team, your manager, and your business to ship more and maximize test value. Check your dogma at the door and let’s ship some valuable software.

We all know that code reviews are beneficial. We’ve been told time and time again that they should be part of our development process. But – like most best practices – a practical implementation is challenging (and time consuming). Your team is convinced they are a great idea. You’ll have an opportunity to squash bugs in the least costly of development times, learn new things from your talented teammates, and build a stronger foundation of trust. Awesome. Everyone is on board. But now what? What tools are out there? What are you actually looking for? How often should the reviews happen? In this talk, you’ll get a practical guide to making code reviews effective. Whether you’re the reviewer or reviewee: there are ways to make sure this really is a great idea.

Speed matters. You can greet your guests with a gorgeous site, but if it loads painfully slow, many of them will never see it. People can have slow internet connections anywhere, but mobile connections face particular challenges. If your site takes more than a second to load, you’ll see traffic swiftly drop away. So how do we beat the one second barrier? We’ll begin our quest by dissecting the anatomy of a request for a web page. When you go to a URL, how exactly does a browser look through your HTML to determine how to display a page? We’ll see how front end assets like CSS and JS files as well as fonts and images offer some of the biggest opportunity for improving page load speeds. We will also briefly cover back-end caching tools key to a quick page load. Media heavy sites may not entirely load in one second, but there are still ways to make a site feel like it’s loading quickly. By the end of the session, you’ll be ready to speed out the door to make your site as fast as it can be.

It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight. Whether or not you were a child of the 70s and 80s, you know the opening lyrics for the Muppet Show theme. You know Kermit the Frog and Fozzie the Bear, Waldorf and Statler, Miss Piggy and Gonzo. The Muppets were not human, but they were terribly human-like. The conflicts on the weekly variety show airing in the late 1970s were the stuff of legend for kids growing up at that time. What can we learn from these puppets who showed us how to be better and worse and everything in between?

In this presentation, Tonya Oaks Smith will argue that the Muppet Show is simply a display of what we see everyday when we manage our social media presence. Take a time machine back to childhood and see how various personalities interacted on the Muppet Show – and how those very characters appear day in and day out on the social web. We’ll talk about how the Muppets serve as a microcosm for the social web, and then we’ll talk about how to deal with things when they go awry.