Community, DevOps, GitHub

Speaking at KCDC

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC). I had one talk and one workshop:

  • Application security from start to finish (handout)
  • Hands-on workshop GitHub Code to Cloud (handout)

You can download the handouts from the links above. If you attended one of my sessions and want a free copy of my book – ping me and I’ll arrange that.

What is KCDC?

KCDC is a community conference in Kansas City with more than 1,600 attendees. I has no singe-track keynotes but directly dive into the 15 parallel tracks. There are tracks about Development (Java, .NET., JavaScript, and Mobile), Cloud, DevOps, Security, UI/UX, Data/Data Science, and even Testing/QA. There were tracks on two days and workshops the third day.

What made KCDC special is how friendly everyone is and the amount of feedback I received from the audience. For me it was the first time speaking in the US and that really blew my mind. So many people approaching me during these days and telling me what they had learned, what they liked, and what impact the talk has made. This is such a great motivation! And it let to many very interesting discussions about the topics.

My Sessions

My first session was about application security and I started it with some live-hacking Hollywood style – manly to explain what appsec is not. But I think people enjoyed the show. The room was completely full and some of the audience even had to stand in the back.

I was overwhelmed by the great feedback. I think especially developer security resonated with the audience and made some people rethink how they are developing software. But also topics like typo squatting and namespace shadowing were new for most of the attendees.

My workshop was a half-day hands-on workshop about GitHub. The audience was very mixed in regard of their GitHub experience. One person just signed up for GitHub at the beginning of the workshop – some already had quite some experience. That always makes it hard for a trainer. I was a little disappointed that we could not finish all hands-on labs – but at least everybody could follow along and I think we covered enough ground so that everybody is able to finish the hands-on labs on their own. And then again I received so much great feedback! During the breaks but one attendee even wrote me a long message on LinkedIn with detailed description what he had liked, what was new for him, and what features of GitHub he is planning to use in the future. This is so amazing for speakers to receive this kind of feedback! Thank you!

Xpirit at KCDC

From Xpirit we had a total of 5 speakers and 7 sessions/workshops:

And our Xpirit USA team had a booth with a giant Jenga tower so that even our Xpirit Group CEO could add some value:

So in total we were a big Xpirit team with 13 people:

Alex gave a talk about intuitive command-line interfaces with .NET and another one about Feature Flags:

Marcel talked about microservices with DAPR:

Geert about chaos engineering and Azure Chaos Studio:

And Loek explained how we helped a customer to run mission-critical workload on Azure:

Summary

KCDC was a great experience. I met many old friends and made a lot of new ones. I hope you’ll have me again next year. Big shout-out to the epic team of organizers:

Thanks a lot and hopefully we see each other again next year!

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