CampIO t-shirt design 2014
On Thursday, Aug. 21, Centric held CampIO, Centric’s yearly technology event, in St. Louis as part of the Summer Meeting.
CampIO is an opportunity for technology-minded people across Centric to get together and show off what they can do when not constrained by client requirements and platforms.
The agenda this year was full of topics that spread the tech gamut – including presentations on R, Azure, a sentiment analysis of live Twitter feeds, sketchnoting, BPM, fantasy football drafting and even a talk on how to give presentations.
Approximately 80 people attended the event, which is the largest audience the event has had since its creation in 2010.
After all presentations were given, participants voted on the most creative idea and effective talk. This year, Eric Galluzzo won with his talk on hackathon best practices and won a GoPro camera.
Presentations included the following:
- Some Learnings from “Thinking, Fast and Slow”
- Putting the “Fun” Into Functional Languages
- The Data Psychics: Casting a Cold Eye on March Madness
- Javascript Unit Testing With QUnit & sinonjs
- Converting All Your iOS Apps to Swift…Not So Fast!
- OpenID
- PAAS-sable Al-IAASes and How They Relate to Time Management
- The Different Hats of a BPM Developer
- Goals, Time Management and Guitar Amps
- Why Your Client Should Conduct Hackathons
- Communication Is Not Optional
- Let’s Connect!
- Mobility on the Road
- Dishwashers, Semantics and A Simple Smart Score
- CI for BI: Continuous Integration for BI Projects
- Mobile Cross Platform Development using Telerik AppBuilder!
- Machine Learning Under the St Louis R-ch
- Leveraging Windows Azure
- Sketchnoting: Communicate Ideas
CampIO 2014 attendees and presenters
CampIO Abstracts
1. Some Learnings from “Thinking, Fast and Slow”
By: Joseph Ours, National Software Quality Assurance and Testing Practice Lead
In his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman introduces two mental systems, one that is fast and the other slow. Together they shape our impressions of the world around us and help us make choices. System 1 is largely unconscious and makes snap judgments based upon our memory of similar events and our emotions. System 2 is painfully slow, and is the process by which we consciously check the facts and think carefully and rationally. However, System 2 is easily distracted and System 1 is wrong quite often. System 1 is easily swayed by our emotions. Examples he cites include the fact that pro golfers are more accurate when putting for par than they are for birdie (regardless of distance), and people buy more cans of soup when there’s a sign on the display that says “Limit 12 per customer.” In this session we will, through interactive games, learn how our minds can affect our abilities to investigate, observe, and recall events. We’ll discuss some strategies to minimize our minds erroneous impacts to those abilities.
2. Putting the “Fun” Into Functional Languages
By: Ben Chestnut, Architect, Centric Indianapolis
Having recently attended a “Fast Track to Scala Course” and working regularly with F#, we will spend a few minutes going over some features of these modern Object Functional languages. We’ll review some of the pros and cons of using these languages and showcase a few sample companies using functional languages.
3. The Data Psychics: Casting a Cold Eye on March Madness
By: Jeff Kanel, National Business Intelligence Practice Lead
The technology tie-in will be related to the myth of multitasking, decision fatigue, etc…
4. Javascript Unit Testing With QUnit & sinonjs
By: Joe Setiabudi, Senior Architect, Centric Columbus
Javascript now has become a first class language for development, both server side and client side. But unlike more mature languages or frameworks, as developers we are often still testing our javascript code in combination with our other code – such as running the code in a browser and using its dev tools to debug. With QUnit (a javascript unit testing framework) and Sinon (test spies, mocks, and stubs for javascript), we can run javascript testing as a standalone test.
5. Converting All Your iOS Apps to Swift…Not So Fast!
By: Chris Martinez, Senior Consultant, Centric Miami
With the surprising introduction of Swift, Apple’s new programming language, many developers are trying to figure out what to do next. The answers range from the extreme (re-write everything NOW) to the sublime (I’ll let the new hire learn Swift). Somewhere in the middle lies the truth. This presentation hopes to give some practical steps for developers and project managers to follow in order to migrate apps over to Swift.
6. OpenID
By: Marc Johnson, Senior Architect
I am sick of writing security code. I am looking for a better way.
7. PAAS-sable Al-IAASes and How They Relate to Time Management
By: Michael Scholle, Consultant, Centric Cincinnati
Time management software is nothing new in the world of computing. However, when faced with the dilemma of paying $12 a month to track time per project, I decided to utilize the most logical solution; develop my own web service. Initial investigations lead me to discover two separate but viable solutions; either build an app on top of a pre-built Platform (PAAS) or create my own environment in the cloud (IAAS). Both methodologies looked very promising initially, so I made a choice and began developing a modular time tracking app that will allow ease of use through a web api.
8. The Different Hats of a BPM Developer
By: Jonathan Huang, Architect
Many developers have heard of BPM but do not really understand what is involved with BPM development. This presentation will cover the basics of BPM and the type of development work involved with a BPM project.
9. Goals, Time Management and Guitar Amps
By: Mike Brannan, National Practice Leader – Technology Solutions Services
Music is a universal language dating to the dawn of time and universally popular today all over the globe. Without question, the guitar is the dominant instrument in today’s modern world. But it has not always been that way. What caused the guitar to surge past all other instruments into it’s current dominant position? Amplification. But when people think of guitars, they rarely think of the amplifier, the final and arguably most important part of the sound / music creation process. This talk will explain and demonstrate the fundamentals of one method of amplification useful in guitar amplifiers as well as old-school hi-fi audio. Additionally, it will tangentially explore such deep topics as time management, goal setting, whimsical thinking, and how to avoid becoming a Walmart greeter in your old age.
10. Why Your Client Should Conduct Hackathons
By: Eric Galluzzo, Architect, Centric Cincinnati
Kroger recently started letting everyone on their mobile team take a day off once every eight weeks to work on whatever cool, fun project that they want to. I’ll tell you how it works, and why it’s been such a huge success that the management team has sponsored us to keep doing it.
11. Communication Is Not Optional
By: Danna Baida, Senior Consultant, Centric Cincinnati
Communication skills are important for every consultant, and technical consultants are no exception. Technical people may face additional hurdles when trying to get a message across. This talk considers some of the hurdles, suggests a solution that worked for me, and offers tips you can start using right now.
12. Let’s Connect!
By: Shawn Wallace, National Practice Lead – Custom Development, Application Lifecycle Management
Can a group of new college grads put a connected app into the App Store three months after graduation? Five new Centric technologists spent the summer with a couple of Centric old souls to take Centric’s Contact app commercial.
13. Mobility On the Road
By: Shawn Windler, Senior Consultant, Centric Indianapolis
Automakers suck at UI. They realize that now and are moving towards a more user-friendly “connected car” experience.
14. Dishwashers, Semantics and A Simple Smart Score
By: Aaron Aude, National Portals and Collaboration Practice Lead
A transformation in how consumers research and use products and then share their experience is underway. Historically, consumers formed an opinion of a product on the basis of their own previous experience or through a new experience promoted through a ‘free’ sample. The result of these experiences largely formed a product relationship. Sharing this product relationship involved communicating with a small, often tight nit group of friends and family. Yet in the past ten years, sharing product experiences transformed. It is now not uncommon to share a positive or negative experience with users globally, having no direct relationship with any potential reader.
15. CI for BI: Continuous Integration for BI Projects
By: Mike Brooks, Architect, Centric Columbus
It would seem reasonable to create a solution which addresses two issues related to consumer feedback. First, for a given product, aggregate reviews from disparate e-commerce sites into a common format. Normalize the structure, data fields and layout to give consumers a single view of review information. Second, correlate the feedback (qualitative) with star ranking (quantative) in a repeatable and objective manner. For example, help determine if a user truly”‘likes” a product and is “satisfied” with it despite ranking the product with two stars.
16. Mobile Cross Platform Development using Telerik AppBuilder!
By: Parah Joshi, Architect, Centric Cincinnati
Yes, we are going to build a mobile app using yet another mobile development platform! We will build a small app for Camp I/O that lists sessions and current weather. We will add a location map and see how easy it is to quickly deploy to multiple devices using a QR reader. Testing made easy! We will take a brief look at the “Write Once, Deploy Everywhere” promise and challenge it.
17. Machine Learning Under the St Louis R-ch
By: Mike Kaiser, Manager, Centric Columbus
R You Ready For Learning Machines? We will be showing how we taught ourselves machine learning, the R programming language, and what we learned, applying it against real-world data. However, we are writing this abstract before actually accomplishing any of the above, so you might want to attend just for the chance at seeing a huge crash and burn. 🙂
18. Leveraging Windows Azure
By: Bryan Bennett, Senior Consultant, Centric Indianapolis
I will be presenting on the many aspects of Windows Azure. The Azure platform can be a one-stop shop for all software infrastructure needs. The platform can be integrated with not only .Net but many different programming languages.
19. Sketchnoting: Communicate Ideas
By: DJ Cercone, Senior Consultant, Centric Columbus
When you were a kid, did you draw? Sure you did. We all did. Your drawings were a form of communication. Our daily jobs involve helping our clients communicate their ideas better. What if a new spin on note taking could improve that? Let’s look at a new way to capture notes whether in a meeting or at a conference. Maybe even tie it in to some aspects of UI/UX!
Thanks to all from Centric who participated in this ever-growing, educational and entertaining event!
