KEYNOTES

Friends in low-code places  – Cindy van Epps, (LinkedIn profile) Consultant, Project & Team;  The people opportunity and challenge with new ways to create automation

Jeff woke up on Thursday and decided he needed a reusable piece of software to manage his travel expenses, so he pulled up a no-code development platform, navigated through a set of graphical icons and whipped up an application in minutes. Then he shared it with friends through his website. Voila!

Tease this apart together, in this keynote. Cindy will explore the people side of the history of how we got to no code and low code. The technology part is simple to explain.  It’s the people side of this evolution that is both interesting to understand but also inspiring to extrapolate into our future as BAYers (Build Automation Yourself).

Designing a Developer-Led Culture –  Ricardo Miguel Silva, Sr. (LinkedIn profile) Developer Marketing Manager, OutSystems.  Many industries are rapidly undergoing digital transformation, and this inflection point is a prime opportunity for diverse software engineers to input radically new ideations. Impactful developers have unique backgrounds, perspectives, and paths to entering the field – outside of the traditional CS degree.

By giving developers of all backgrounds a platform to launch and implement their ideas, enterprises with lean teams can build applications faster, better, and more in line with the business’s requirements from the onset.

This session will dive into how business and IT leaders can work together to empower a developer-led culture, allowing companies to build mission-critical apps without the need for large development teams.

Breakout Sessions

Demystifying Low Code: Where to start? – Jason English, (LinkedIn profile) Analyst, Intellyx.  Will businesses go loco for low code, or will it become a no-go? Analysts will throw around a variety of terms and definitions for what constitutes low code, and vendors will tell you they are low code, if they think you are that kind of customer. But where to start in thinking about your own enterprise’s journey to low code?

How Medtronics created its LC/NC program – Lori Breitbart, Sr. (LinkedIn profile) IT Program Manager, Medtronics.  Lori will be sharing the LC/NC experience at Medtronic and the Citizen Development Program that enables it. The agenda will include information about how Medtronic got started on the LC/NC-Citizen Development journey and how it has structured the program to give LCNC developers the freedom to build business functionality.  Lori will share tips for both LCNC and traditional IT, as well as lessons that have been learned during this journey.

Dispelling preconceived notions of DIY task complexity – Michiel de Bruin, (LinkedIn profile) CSO, Odesso.  Technology advances over the past decade have emboldened us to take on projects and processes that would normally seem way beyond the scope of our skill sets. We are equipped with digitized tools that enable us to fulfill many of our DIY desires. Many of us still make assumptions regarding the complexity of certain tasks (Creating a mobile app, automating daily tasks and the like. These preconceived notions typically come from experiences that may be years or even decades old. This presentation will seek to dispel commonly held beliefs and enable us to re-evaluate what may be outdated information.

From ‘Hello World’ to The World at Large – The Contract, the essential connection between an app and the rest of the world. – Dawie Botes, (LinkedIn profile) Technical Support Engineer, Twenty57.  Join Dawie on a journey of an app as you move from the initial build to adding the technical requirements to maximize flexibility and extensibility to match growth. Discover how you can use no-code tools to deliver a scalable backend for an app with data saving, security and performance in mind as we deep-dive into the contract; the API definition that governs your application access.

Low-Code Capabilities of Digital Product Design Platforms – Jason Beres, (LinkedIn profile) SVP, Developer Tools, Infragistics.  Low-Code and No-Code solutions have revolutionized the app making process by simplifying the way digital product teams can accelerate app delivery. In this talk, you will learn how digital product design platforms that include low-code tools will accelerate your time to market with an end-to-end design-to-code system that brings your team together in a single working environment.

Learn about:

• What are Digital Product Design Platforms

• Comparing the tools in the market today

• How Enterprises can solve problems with design to developer handoff with these tools

• Using Low-Code drag & drop WSIWYIG tools

• Getting production ready code from Digital Product Design Platforms

Text Nudges, Chatbots, Self-service and More: Why Now is the Time for Low-Code CX – Stephen Ehikian, (LinkedIn profile) Co-founder and CEO, Airkit.  Brands like Netflix, Instacart, and Brex demonstrate that digital customer experience (CX) is the difference between survival and extinction in any industry. Yet, most companies struggle to go faster with CX. Customer funnels constantly change, but now there’s more customer data, new conversation channels, and new payment platforms. Low code platforms can manage this complexity and help you develop faster. In this session, Stephen addresses what’s new with low-code for CX, three key features every CX developer needs, and real-life examples of how developers are automating digital CX with quality apps built in low code.

Crossing the low-code and pro-code chasm: a platform approach – Asanka Abeysinghe, (LinkedIn profile) Chief Technology Evangelist at WSO2.  Organizations are now using low-code and pro-code tools to build digital experiences internally and externally. However, not having the right alignment between these two approaches slows down delivery. Different developer personas that work in silos, no connection between low-code and pro-code applications, low-code creating unmanageable shadow IT applications, no single codebase or build pipeline, and interruptions to the professional developer flow are some significant drawbacks. In this session, Asanka will look at a platform approach to bridge the low-code and pro-code chasm.

How Low-Code/No-Code Tools Will Democratize Data – Dan Robinson, (LinkedIn profile) CTO of Heap.  A recent report by P&S Intelligence predicts that low-code development platform revenue will reach $187B by 2030. This isn’t surprising – the need for companies to be able to deliver compelling digital experiences has accelerated, and low-code/no-code platforms can make that happen more easily. The low-code boom is particularly beneficial for the underdogs who are trying to compete with larger organizations, ones that typically have robust armies of engineers to get the job done. Low-code tools democratize access to data, so more teams can access the ground truth of the customer experience. That means iterating more quickly based on data, running on better information, etc. With easier access to data, more teams, startups, and small companies are able to generate breakthroughs. That means analysis isn’t just the domain of the enterprise anymore, or of centralized teams, and many more teams benefit from data literacy. There’s more data than ever, but having a dataset doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get the maximum value out of it. That’s what the next wave of low-code data tools is all about: helping people get value out of these datasets.

Maximizing the Value of Hybrid Dev Teams in Remote Environments  – Adam Morehead, (LinkedIn profile) VP of community, Topcoder.  Gone are the days when IT resided in a singular zip code. While the pandemic sped the need for distributed hybrid software teams, progressive companies had already found ways to maximize the value of developers across geolocations long before COVID became a household name. Adroc will share practical strategies and current examples of how to leverage open talent staffing models and create a successful “community and crowdsourcing first” culture that permeates throughout IT to maximize the value of hybrid development teams in remote environments.

How Low-Code and No-Code can help navigate through the pandemic  –  Kay Lankheet, (LinkedIn profile) Field Services Manager, CLEVR.  There is a shortage of engineers and mechanics to go out into the field to repair or maintain utility and infrastructural installations in people’s homes. One in every five U.S. households had at least one member who was unable to get medical care or who had to delay care for a serious medical problem during the pandemic. Government agencies struggle to serve their citizens with everyday life events like registrations of births and marriages. This is the recent reality of various businesses, organizations and consumers during the pandemic. During this presentation Kay will show how low-code and no-code can help navigate through the pandemic with real-life examples (and their results).

Mastering Power Apps & SharePoint Related Lists – Laura Rogers, (LinkedIn profile) Microsoft MVP, CEO at IW Mentor.  Related lists and parent-child forms, also known as repeating tables or sub-lists, are an important part of many business forms. With related lists and SharePoint lookup columns, there are some important details to understand to work with these types of relationships in Power Apps. In this session, you’ll learn how to configure your sub-forms and repeating tables in Power Apps with SharePoint lists as a data source. This session covers the approach, some gotchas, and a demonstration of how it is built. Walk away with a fundamental understanding of how to build your own business solutions the right way with Power Apps, and apply these principles in many types of SharePoint scenarios.