Halihax December Virtual Meetup

OUR SPEAKERSIAN LIVINGSTONE ADVISOR TO MULTIPLE STARTUPS Ian is a Halifax-based technology leader & entrepreneur with a passion for empowering engineers to build the next generation of society-improving apps. Over the last ten years, he has co-founded two companies, managed engineering teams at scale, and delivered products to some of the largest companies in the world. To relax, he enjoys cycling, trail running, attempting to cook, and taking his chocolate lab Franklin to the park. Twitter [https://www.twitter.com/ianlivingstone], Linkedin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/irlivingstone/] ROBERT SHAND INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY ADVISOR @ THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL'S INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH ASSISTANCE PROGRAM Bob is a former video game developer now working with the National Research Council's Industrial Research Assistance Program. Based in PEI, he and the rest of the NRC-IRAP team support Canadian businesses in Atlantic Canada to perform innovative research and development. Website [https://nrc.canada.ca/en/support-technology-innovation] PHIL RENAUD DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING @ NYLAS Phil has been building and leading engineering teams for the better part of a decade, first as a co-founder at Affinio in Halifax, and more recently in starting up the Canadian team at Nylas. He was reluctantly extracted from Nova Scotia to Toronto in 2016. His work centers around User Experience, Natural Language Processing, and growing engineering teams. Twitter [https://twitter.com/phil_renaud], Linkedin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrenaud/] NARSA CHELLURI SENIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPER @ MAXMIND Narsa loves computers and tech and using and building software to solve problems and to have fun. He is a polyglot programmer and lately lovesGo and Postgres. He is an open-source novice but think open-source is the bee's knees. Narsa still very often feel like a beginner, if he ever gave up programming hed love to write for a living. Website [https://twostepsforward.co/about-me/] TERRY SMITH SENIOR DEVELOPER @ CODECOV Terry has worked as a developer around the area for the last ten years. Shes currently working at Codecov leading a small team rebuilding the web experience. When not living all things code coverage she likes to dive deep into topics like graphics rendering on the web, CSS Houdini, and WASM. Twitter [https://twitter.com/DesignCollider], Linkedin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/terry-s-30466921/] MATT JOHNSTON FOUNDER @ GLADE SOFTWARE Matt Johnston likes skiing, skateboarding, writing and building software. In #halihax he is @mattjohnston. Twitter [https://twitter.com/mattjohnstondev] SPONSORS * Dash Hudson [https://dashhudson.com] * Cape Privacy [https://capeprivacy.com/] * Manifold [https://www.manifold.co] * Concrete Ventures [https://concrete.vc] PARTNERS * Dark Secret Software [http://darksecretsoftware.com/] THE RUNDOWN 7:00PM INTRODUCTIONS & WELCOME We'll do a quick introduction and kick off the evening. 7:10 PM   IAN LIVINGSTONE: THE BULLISH CASE FOR THE ATLANTIC CANADIAN TECH ECOSYSTEM What macro-economic drivers have changed that will benefit Atlantic Canada? In this lightning talk, Ian will give his case for betting long-term on the ecosystem that's often thought of as a backwater of technology. 7:25 PM   ROBERT SHAND: 2021 - THE FUTURE IS AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL Join Robert as he brings us through his prediction for the future of technology trends as we start to rely on going virtual. 7:40 PM - PHIL RENAUD: THE DEMOCRATIC ENGINEERING TEAM, AND THE DEATH OF SCRUM Phil makes the claim that fully-remote work under the pandemic has lead to communication challenges between customers, product teams, and software developers. The agile methodologies that have been the norm have proven fragile, and engineering teams are going to have to embrace a new, democratic way of operating - one that puts the emphasis on developer-lead planning and ideas 7:55 PM  A QUICK BREAK BETWEEN SPEAKERS (10MIN) Grab a refill and a snack then come back to hear from our second speaker. 8:05 PM - NARSA CHELLURI: THE FUTURE OF TECH, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING Join Narsa as he presents his predictions for the future of tech - and beyond. 8:20 PM - TERRY SMITH: THE WEB ECOSYSTEM LEARNS TO SLIM DOWN AND MULTITASK Get off the main thread!! a poorly optimized website might say as you try to swipe down and the page freezes. While Web Workers and Web Assembly (WASM) are not new browser features; thanks to some new specification proposals and popular front end frameworks changing their rendering strategy were primed to see the open source community start highlighting the possibility of a truly multithreaded web world. 8:35 PM - MATT JOHNSTON: WEB ANNOTATIONS ARE WEB 3 Joing Matt as he presents his predictions for Web 3. 8:50 PM ZOOM BEERS & NETWORKING