NodeDay Toronto is a one-day Node.js conference by enterprise leaders, for enterprise leaders.

Ahmad Nassri

Opening

Ahmad Nassri is a hands-on technical leader, able to combine a technical background with well-developed leadership skills and a track record of motivating and inspiring teams to produce highly successful products.

Author of various open-source tools and software libraries used by millions of developers worldwide.

Prior to founding Bench CI, Ahmad lead large development teams across various industries in delivering large to massive scale projects. Most recently as the VP of Engineering at Mashape, where he oversaw a global engineering team building Enterprise API products and services, used by thousands of developers and top technology organizations.

State of the Ecosystem

Node.js and the Web Platform

Dan Shaw, aka “dshaw”, has dedicated his career to growing the Node.js Ecosystem. Dan was instrumental in the formation of the Node.js Foundation where he served on the Board as Director. Dan is known as "The Godfather of Node.js” for his tireless efforts to build community and align the needs of developers and business leaders.

Dan is a keynote speaker and speaks about Leadership, Node.js, JavaScript and Digital Transformation. He is recognizable as the “Voice of Node.js” as long-time host of the NodeUp podcast. Dan has created numerous events like EnterpriseJS, NodeDay, SFNode, SFNodeBots, and Nodebots Day to provide opportunities to share knowledge and learn.

Dan created the first consulting company dedicated to Node.js called The Node Firm and then the first commercial entity to productize Node.js with NodeSource. Today, Dan Shaw works across the industry providing leadership as a Strategic Advisor to companies looking grow their presence and work effectively with Node.js.

Digitizing the Enterprise

Lessons from the Trenches – Digitally Transforming a Hundred-Year-Old Telecommunications Company

Innovation is a buzz word that’s thrown around a lot. Everyone is trying to cultivate a culture of innovation and bring new practices into their business – but they often don’t understand that it’s not all about the innovation, but the outcomes it delivers.

By definition, innovating is the act of introducing new ways to do business. To do this successfully within a large organization there are a number of elements necessary, and you need to be prepared to run a marathon every day.

Using a lean approach, we built, measured, learned to fail fast and make changes to our digital experience quickly. Within 80 days, starting from scratch, we re-platformed and re-launched the new telus.com beta site – a website we built with our customers, based on their feedback and suggestions. Not only did we launch a new website, but we leveraged this approach to reengineer our culture, skills and rebuild our entire way of working.

Incubating the team wasn’t just about giving them a ‘sandbox’ to play in. It involved creating a dedicated space where they were protected from organizational pressures and norms. It allowed them to experiment, make choices rapidly, evolve processes and, most importantly, make decisions based on customer needs – all without having to ask permission. We empowered them.

Shawn serves as Chief Digital Officer at TELUS, driving the digitization strategy for the enterprise across all core lines of business. His team is responsible for delivering a best-in-class experience supporting customers, team members and prospects that accelerates TELUS' competitive advantage, delivers on our customer-first commitment, and our goal of becoming the most recommended company globally.

As part of TELUS’s digital transformation, Shawn is using lean startup principles, agile techniques and platform thinking to generate ongoing customer feedback to bring an industry-leading customer experience.

Shawn has been a leader at TELUS since 2008, joining the Tech Strategy team to spearhead the deployment of TELUS' national HSPA+ network and first iPhone launch. Two years later, he joined the TELUS Customer Solutions team as Director, Strategy and Planning. In this role, Shawn was responsible for the consumer products and services roadmap and the delivery of large complex programs including the launch of LTE, the next generation of TELUS' industry-leading wireless network.

Shawn has a storied history in strategy, product and program development spanning over 17 years, he lives in Toronto with his wife Jennifer and their 2 children.

Future Thinking

Adopting New Technologies in a Modern Enterprise

Join Ed as he discusses how Node.js fits into a larger technology strategy and organization. He will dive into how you can think about and address next generation technologies while still anchoring your technology stack on a primary platform like Node.

Ed Cudahy was named chief technology officer in 2016. In this role, he leads the company’s software engineering teams and oversees all technology operations and infrastructure. Cudahy has been instrumental in Condé Nast’s establishment of a first- class engineering organization, dedicated to building high-performing consumer experiences for the company’s brands. His team is committed to creating long-range solutions as Condé Nast transforms into a modern media company, creating content in all form factors and reaching premium audiences on every relevant platform.

Enterprise Node.js

The Node.js Maturity Curve

There are a number of concerns which architect's, operators and developers must address when using Node.js in their Enterprise stack. While there are ongoing efforts in Node.js Core to address observability and debugging gains, today there are ways to implement Node.js at a mature enterprise-grade for mission-critical systems. This talk will explore a real use-case scenario where event-driven techniques provided a more sophisticated level of Discover-ability, Support-ability and Security Compliance for a large scale Node.js microservices cluster.

At nearForm Jason is focused on open source software delivery for the Enterprise market, enabling cloud and digital transformations. Jason previously held roles of Chief Architect at ADP and CTO at the largest US regulated Bitcoin exchange and blockchain provider. A cross-domain technologist & entrepreneur having founded companies in E-Commerce, Consumer Web & FinTech, Jason’s development & architectural expertise focuses on event-driven architecture, distributed systems, enterprise scale computing & consulting based out of New York City.

Microsoft’s Digital Transformation Journey with Node.js and Cloud

The Node.js Maturity Curve

Over the last half a decade, Microsoft has moved more than 90% of our own computing resources to Azure. Digital transformation we have gone through ourselves and look to share with customers and partners is focused on transforming the way you engage with your customers, transform your products, optimize your operations and empower your employees. In this talk, learn how Node.js is helping our products teams and engineers engage better with each other and an overview of the most common scenarios we see in customer engagements with Node.js and Azure.

Chris Dias is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft leading the teams working on Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, and Node on Azure. VS Code and TypeScript are two of Microsoft’s flagship open source projects, enabling developers on Mac, Linux, and Windows to easily build and deploy modern applications. Chris works with many teams across Microsoft to ensure that Azure is a great platform to run modern, enterprise ready, global scale Node based applications in the public and private clouds, be it natively, using PaaS services such as Azure App Service, or even as micro-services deployed and running as containers, orchestrated using Kubernetes (AKS). Chris has spent almost 25 years building tools and platforms at Microsoft. He has a long history of speaking at major industry events, as well as working directly with many Fortune 500 customers.

Brad is currently an architect for Microsoft in the Modern Apps COE. He has delivered solutions for Microsoft’s largest clients in the bot framework, cognitive services, and machine learning domains. With years of experience developing production solutions using NodeJS, he has been able to help our clients utilize best practices to quickly deliver solutions with positive ROI. Prior to his tenure at Microsoft, Brad was an engineering director with significant experience in the consumer measurement, neuroscience, and financial domains.

Open Source / Innovation / Inclusivity

Open Source and Inclusion - Keys to Digital Transformation

As industries become transformed into digital organizations, they have to make two cultural transformations. One is to understand how to work with open source communities in a collaborative way and the second is how to become an inclusive organization at all levels. Nithya has been working on both these areas and will discuss how these are a key part of becoming a digital organization.

Nithya A. Ruff is the Senior Director for Comcast’s Open Source Practice. She is responsible for growing Open Source culture inside of Comcast and engagement with external communities. Prior to this, she started and grew the Western Digital’s Open Source Strategy Office. She first glimpsed the power of open source while at SGI in the 90s and has been building bridges between hardware developers and the open source community ever since. She’s also held leadership positions at Wind River (an Intel Company), Synopsys, Avaya, Tripwire and Eastman Kodak. At Wind River, she led a team of product managers in managing a world class embedded Linux distribution and was a key member of the Yocto Project advocacy team on the board. Nithya is a Director at Large on the Linux Foundation Board and represents community interests on the board.

Nithya has been a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new people in Open Source for many years. She has also been a promoter of valuing diverse ways of contributing to open source such as in marketing, legal and community. You can often find her on social media promoting dialogue on diversity and open source. She has spoken at multiple conferences such as OSSummit, OSCON, All Things Open, SCALE, Grace Hopper, OpenStack, VMWorld, OS Strategy Summit and Red Hat Summit on the business and community of open source. In recognition of her work in open source both on the business and community side, she was named to CIO magazine’s most influential women in open source list. She was recently one of 4 people to win the 2017 O’Reilly Open Source Award for exceptional contribution to open source.

Nithya graduated with an MS in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the University of Rochester, Simon Business School. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a proud mother of two daughters.

Panel Discussion

Security & Privacy in Digital First Businesses

Tara Z. Manicsic is a lifelong student, teacher, and maker. She has spent her career using JavaScript on both back-end and front-end to create applications. A Developer Advocate for Progress, Google Developer Expert, and international technical speaker, she focuses on conveying the codebase she has learned. In her free time she works in her community to educate and learn from other developers. Tara launched & directs the Cincinnati Chapter of Women Who Code and the Cincinnati branch of NodeSchool. Beyond code, Tara still makes things but with solder, clay, and wool.

Jory Burson is the COO of Bocoup, the open source tech consultancy working on web platform standards and performance. Day-to-day at Bocoup, she guides the company's strategic planning process, medium-term development of new initiatives, and business operations. Jory also founded Bocoup Education, where she enjoys collaborating with people to create unique content and high-quality training resources for the Open Web. She has contributed to open source projects such as jQuery, Grunt and Johnny-Five; and is an active participant in web standards and open source development, serving on boards, committees, and working groups for the JS Foundation, Ecma International, and the W3C.

Jory is most excited about researching and improving the web technology standards process, and about creating positive social changes to improve quality of life for open source developers. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her family in Boston and making art. She can be found on GitHub and Twitter at @jorydotcom.

Kyle Hodgson is a Principal Architect at ThoughtWorks, where he advises clients from C-level to developer on technology strategy and best practice. With ThoughtWorks he's led successful re-platform and digital transformation efforts for Fortune 50 enterprises in the retail and telco industry. Formerly a serial CTO, he has architected, designed and built several distributed systems and digital products. Kyle is passionate about several topics in software development, including the .NET open source web service framework Service Stack. He co-authored the ServiceStack Cookbook in 2015.

Joel Chen is Principal Architect leading the Customer Engineering App Platform at WalmartLabs. He’s been developing software for 20 years with experience in low level embedded systems to large scale Enterprise systems. He has been focusing primarily on NodeJS since 2013. After successfully lead the migration of PayPal checkout to NodeJS and AngularJS, he joined WalmartLabs and lead the migration of the Web platform to NodeJS and ReactJS.

Briana Brownell is founder and CEO of Pure Strategy Inc., a technology company whose platform gives enterprises insight from data using AI so they can act faster on customer experience trends and emerging issues. She founded Pure Strategy in 2016 after ten years as a data scientist in the marketing research and finance industries and is a frequent keynote speaker on both technical and business topics including AI, data science, and machine learning. She has lead advanced analytical data projects with top tier companies in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, banking, insurance, utilities, and retail, among many others.

Node.js Core Support for the Enterprise

The Node.js project supports a broad and ever growing range of use cases. As enterprise use of Node.js continues to grow, those of us who maintain Node.js continue to put more emphasis and priority on addressing the needs of those users. This talk will provide an overview of how Node.js core is supporting the enterprise. We will cover Long Term Support, current development initiatives, and future directions.

James M Snell is an Open Source Architect at nearForm who focuses most of his time on ensuring that companies do open source correctly. He is a core contributor to the Node.js project and a member of Node.js Technical Steering Committee.

Scale & People

Beyond the Code

Every day, PayPal processes billions of dollars in payments worldwide. Join me on a tour of PayPal's NodeJS ecosystem to find out what makes it all tick and where we are headed next.

Aaron Heckmann leads NodeJS engineering at PayPal, one of the earliest and largest enterprise NodeJS deployments on Earth. Prior to joining PayPal, he oversaw web development at Pebble where his team received the 2015 MongoDB Innovation Award for creating it's smartwatch notification service using NodeJS, MongoDB and AWS. He was a long time maintainer of Mongoose, the popular open source NodeJS MongoDB driver for which he co-received the MongoDB Community Award in 2011. And in 2010, Aaron sold his startup, Clickdummy, which was built using NodeJS v0.2.

Workshop 1

Developing the digital future securely with GitHub

In this session, we will walk-through the workflow that is the foundation of open source collaboration empowering communities like Node.js. We will then explore how we can enable that speed and collaboration in the enterprise while satisfying compliance and security policies and regulations.

Mike is part of the GitHub Solutions Engineering Team, working with customers to optimize their GitHub experience, from configuration and collaboration, to process and practice. He is passionate about continuous improvement of all the things. Mike graduated from the University of Waterloo, starting his career in QA and development. He made the move to technical sales, so he could help and work with customers directly -- earning experience from traditional Waterfall development to modern Agile methodologies, and onto DevOps and Open Source practices and principles.

Harsh Sabikhi is the Country Manager for GitHub Canada. He is responsible for the overall success of GitHub's customers in Canada. He is passionate about helping all Canadians learn software to better prepare for the future. He started his career as a software developer over 17 years ago writing C/C++ applications for Texas Instruments. Harsh holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University.

Workshop 2

Node.js is valuable to Enterprises, including IBM

Come learn about IBM's Node.js strategy, how IBM is helping the community make Node.js Enterprise-ready, and what we've done to make it easy to create, deploy, monitor and operate Node.js in enterprise production deployments.

Rick Goldberg is the World Wide Design Lead at the IBM Cloud Garage, and has been a designer at IBM since 2001. In his current role, Rick drives the Garage’s design practice, helping business, large and small, use the IBM Cloud Garage Method to find innovative solutions to pressing business problems.

Michael Dawson is an active contributor to the Node.js project and chair of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee(TSC). He contributes to a broad range of community efforts including platform support, build infrastructure, N-API, Release, as well as tools to help the community achieve quality with speed (ex: ci jobs, benchmarking and code coverage reporting). As IBM Node.js community lead, he works with IBM's internal teams to plan and facilitate their contributions to Node.js and v8 within the Node and Google communities.Past experience includes building IBM's Java runtime, building and operating client facing e-commerce applications, building PKI and symmetric based crypto solutions as well as a number of varied consulting engagements. In his spare time, he uses Node.js to automate his home and life for fun.

Workshop 3

An Overview of Customer Node.js Projects with Microsoft Services & Engineering

A discussion and sharing of best practices, pitfalls and mitigation from our work with customer projects on Node.js in the cloud. Learn about how industry regulations, your culture and team dynamics can help make your projects a success. Hear about the investments our engineering is making into the Node.js ecosystem and how you can directly connect with the Microsoft engineering network for Node.js and Azure for own Node.js projects!

Ahmad Nassri

Closing Remarks

Ahmad Nassri is a hands-on technical leader, able to combine a technical background with well-developed leadership skills and a track record of motivating and inspiring teams to produce highly successful products.

Author of various open-source tools and software libraries used by millions of developers worldwide.

Prior to founding Bench CI, Ahmad lead large development teams across various industries in delivering large to massive scale projects. Most recently as the VP of Engineering at Mashape, where he oversaw a global engineering team building Enterprise API products and services, used by thousands of developers and top technology organizations.