Ashley has been in technical consulting sales for 10 years, and is the Business Development Manager for Bendyworks in Madison, WI. She is a Co-Organizer of the Madison Women in Tech, and an Ambassador to the Doyenne Group, which helps female entrepreneurs. When not at Bendyworks, she be found at home- painting, crafting, cooking and toddler-wrangling.
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Eryn O’Neil
Eryn O’Neil is a Minneapolis-based freelance PHP developer and tech lead. Grounded in the agency world, she has worked on everything from e-commerce and online promotions to a proprietary framework and CMS. Her philosophy is to build software by placing humans first: both the people who will use it and the developers who will build it with you (and maintain it afterward).
Living in Minnesota, Eryn spends most of her free time teaching blues dancing, flying on a trapeze, and wishing it weren’t snowing.
Marc Drummond
As a front-end developer for Lullabot, Marc focuses on creating great experiences no matter the device, browser or abilities of the person accessing a site. Marc serves as co-maintainer of Drupal 8’s core Responsive Image and Breakpoint modules. He previously worked for a local Twin Cities suburb for 10 years, doing web development and graphic design; he also served on the board of the National Association of Government Web Professionals for five years, including a year as President of the organization.
Marc earned a BA in English and a concentration in Public Service from Albion College in Michigan, as well as degrees in web design and graphic design at Minneapolis Community & Technical College. Marc enjoys living in the Twin Cities suburbs with his wife and four-year-old daughter, as well as their cat and dog, and getting together regularly with family who live nearby.
Kimberly Doberstein
Kim Doberstein is honored to work at the University of Minnesota as a web developer. Kim’s career journey has been a true adventure including the roles of: high school science teacher, teacher trainer, college instructor, technology assessment and integration specialist, project manager, analyst, web designer/developer, web accessibility specialist, information architect, web user experience specialist, and a Girl Scout horse camp assistant director.
From her first JavaScript generated “hello world” over 15 years ago, she has developed a passion for creating easy to use, interactive, standards compliant, maintainable web sites/applications. She is especially interested how we can design websites for all of our users.
When not slinging HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or other code, she is an active yogini, enjoys outdoor photography, and is usually found giggling with her daughters.
Amy Dalrymple
Amy is a web programmer who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband and their three cats. She’s been working professionally with the web for about 10 years, but she built her first website in the mid-90s. Away from the computer, she is an avid knitter and Ravenclaw groupie. She enjoys new adventures, new people, and learning new things.
Brandi Brown
Brandi Brown does all kinds of stuff. The proud owner of a rarely used political science degree from Williams College, Brandi has worked in advertising, web development and brand strategy and software engineering. She is also an accomplished stand up comic who has been featured in many publications, including The Guardian. Brandi has opened such comedians as Maria Bamford, Hannibal Buress, Nick DiPaolo and Wendy Liebman. She’s currently the head writer for Blackout, the Twin Cities’ only all-black improv group (they added sketch) and has joined the American Civic Forum’s political theater group as head researcher. She’s currently freelancing as a brand strategy consultant, researcher and grant writer on top of performing and writing comedy.
Abby Bajuniemi
Abby is a former Professor of Spanish and Linguistics who is bringing her love of language to the world of UX and Content Strategy. As a linguist, she studies how language and society intersect, and how context affects the language we use and learn. She is currently on the UX Research and Design team at C.H. Robinson.
If she could insert a photo of her really cute dogs here, she would.
Erik Gruber
Erik Gruber is an independent writer, storyteller, and web strategist who lives and works in the Twin Cities. He’s partnered with universities, marketing agencies, large organizations, and startups to help them share their story, create useful websites, and (hopefully) have a little more fun.
Lessons Learned Teaching at a Development Bootcamp
Teaching at an intensive development bootcamp yields a wealth of insights in terms of how new learners approach development. While some may feel any educational approach will work for learning development, the truth is, is that the needs of people learning development for the first time differ greatly. Additionally, the needs may not be what you think they are.
In this session, Scott Bromander will share his lessons learned from teaching at Prime Digital Academy, an 18 week program designed to take people learning development for the first time, and position them for day one on the job effectiveness as software engineers. Scott will tackle some of the difficulties faced such as Imposter Syndrome and attaining stronger proficiencies in development quickly.
Those who already have established history as developers will walk away with insights on how to become a more effective mentor. They will have a better understanding of how people new to development approach problems, what struggles they may be facing, and what their needs in learning development are.
Those new to development will have a stronger ability to put into words what challenges they are facing. They will be better equipped to move through struggles they may be experiencing. Finally, they will have a grasp on how to continue to grow and flourish in their development career.
Solidify your approaches by cutting through some of the most challenging aspects of learning development by attending this session. See you there!
IA in Agile: You’ll See the Forest Eventually
How would you solve a jigsaw puzzle if you were only given a fraction of the pieces at a time, told that the pieces would likely change size and shape during assembly, and forced to commit to work in two week iterations? Welcome to IA in an agile environment. In order to be successful within this framework, we must learn to live with an incomplete picture, build in checkpoints to balance focusing on the trees without forgetting about the forest, and evolve our ideas as we work closely with development.
- Designing a cohesive, well-organized system is hard, especially when we’re architecting one bit at a time, but it CAN be done as long as we keep the big picture in mind.
- UX can be successful in an agile methodology, but only if we get comfortable with the unknown.
- Software development is never “done” and agile helps remind us of that.
- There are many ways to approach UX within agile. One successful structure involves UX being a sprint (or two) ahead of development.
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