The OWASP Top Ten is an industry standard list of the most common vulnerabilities that can affect web sites. This session will start with an overview of the Top Ten, and then take a more detailed look at a few of these vulnerabilities in the context of Drupal. We will review some actual Drupal security advisories.

This session will help teach you about good "web hygiene" and what you can do to make your site more secure. It will also help you recognize when you need to rely on an expert.

Ticket required see: TICKETS

A hands-on training with a Raspberry Pi microcontroller. Materials will be provided. A computer is required, so please bring your laptop.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

Disabled designers have long been some of the biggest movers and shakers in the field. Forced to constantly adapt to a world not built for them, disability has always driven innovation. From audiobooks in the 1930s to touch screens long before the first iPhone, countless technological advances have emerged from (not for) disabled communities. Yet, history has long repackaged these brilliant designers as recipients and users, not creators, of innovation. Why?

This talk will cover the dark history that propelled the medical model of disability to its modern day prevalence, the Disabled Civil Rights Movement, the endless contributions disabled designers have made to our field, and steps your firm should take when approaching inclusive design.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

When working with color on the web, we’ve always had a few choices. What are the new color options in CSS, and what do they add to the variety of color choices we already have?

In this talk, I will discuss:

• What’s new in the CSS Color Module Levels 4 and 5
• An overview of color spaces available today
• How to use some of the new CSS color functions

And more!

Attendees will come away from this session with a deeper knowledge of the new color spaces and CSS color functions to make adding color to your site even easier!

A year of running hands-on genAI workshops with multi-generational colleagues has surfaced what I think are important patterns in the idioms, mental models and folkways common among users whose formative computing experiences predate genAI. I'll share examples of these patterns and their implications; and I'll discuss how such implicit (but unexamined) mental models can mismatch our intentions in dealing with genAI. I hope to persuade you that effective genAI planning needs to start with a nuanced awareness of users' mental models of technology.

See descitpion in 2:15PM slot

Public Interest Technology (PIT) is an emerging field that asks us to create technical solutions that center the lives of people, equity, inclusion, and accountability to address pressing problems. While PIT continues to grow, all technologists can learn how to approach problems like a public interest technologist to ensure technology works to serve and protect those who use it by delivering better outcomes.

This discussion will introduce the practice of PIT and how everyone can critically assess technology's ethical and social implementation across all sectors.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

Please come to discuss the future of NERD Summit. We need to build the NERD Team to create a "many hands make light work" situation.

Link to handout HERE.

This is an introduction to geospatial data. Geospatial data is any kind of information that has geographic coordinates associated with it. We'll discuss different geospatial data types, formats, services, and sources.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

Most people’s first experiences with generative AI was in a chat context.

But LLMs (the tech behind models like GPT4) can generate anything that can be represented in text, from SVGs, to chess moves, to whatever structured data you need in your app.

Prompt engineering is necessary, but mostly not technical at all, and we’ll start with the anatomy of a prompt. This expands much further when you chain prompts together to pull in or push out data (LangChain).

Suddenly anyone with a product hypothesis can rapidly prototype and validate complex user interactions. Let’s get you started.

Ang Buxton explores how to us Google Bard, Google's free AI language model, to strengthen (very human) relationships across romantic, platonic, and professional spheres. We'll explore practical ways to leverage Bard's capabilities through specific prompts, practical applications for the answers, and ultimately gain self-understanding, improve communication, and build deeper connections.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

Some times a good practice is overused, and in that overuse, results in less maintainable code.

Ever felt like interviews are a puzzle with missing pieces? Join this session to uncover what’s beyond the LeetCode clichés. Tech interviews are icebergs, with coding as just the tip. Learn to leverage job descriptions, navigate the six interview dimensions, and refine your approach. Bid farewell to the mundane STAR method for behavioral interviews; embrace a fresh perspective. As a junior in college and soon-to-be Amazon intern with two stints at Delta Air Lines, the speaker spills tea from interview trenches. Ready to ace your next interview? This session is your exclusive backstage pass.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

This is the story of creating ReachYou, a piece of sci fi episodic communal art in augmented reality. An experiment in humane technology. And something made with pure joy.

ReachYou was the product of a multi-generational nomadic experience. A rebirth of a live, software-assisted performance in Kazakhstan by the Goldsaitos. And a reaction to the ever growing attention economy and eventually our isolation (magnified by COVID).

Jonah, the presenter, was the sole engineer, designer, and visual artist.

Come hear the story of its iterative creation and path to the Tribeca Film Festival.

Feel free to use this room if you like.

See description in 3:15PM slot

Please come to discuss the future of NERD Summit. We need to build the NERD Team to create a "many hands make light work" situation.

Link to handout HERE.