OUR SPEAKERS

Gabrielle White

Senior Service Design @ Nova Scotia Digital Service



Gab White is a multi-hyphenate person (designer-developer-hobbyist quilter) who absolutely dies for the creative pursuit of solving big problems. A former self-employed designer/dev, Gab can now be found in the public service at the Nova Scotia Digital Service where she helps try to make it easier for Nova Scotians to do stuff with the government online.

Twitter, LinkedIn

Domenic Rosati

Software Developer @ Manifold

Domenic Rosati is a software developer in Halifax. He works at Manifold doing all kinds of software things. He loves Star Trek and Math and Data things.

Twitter, LinkedIn



Alanna MacNevin

Development Team Lead @ Talkatoo

Alanna started her career as a software developer 7 years ago when she volunteered with an NGO in Lima, Peru as a Drupal Developer. Since coming back home to the Maritimes she has worked with several startups in the Halifax area and is currently the Software Development Manager and Software Developer (React, Node, && Electron) with Talkatoo. She is endlessly curious and excited for new challenges.



Twitter, LinkedIn

SPONSORS

PARTNERS

THE RUNDOWN

6:30pm – Doors Open with Beverages & Food in Auditorium

Sign in, grab a snack, help yourself to a beverage, and chat with others in the Halifax technology community!





7:00pm – Introductions & Welcome

We'll do a quick introduction and kick off the evening.





7:10pm – Building and scaling in government with the Nova Scotia Digital Service with Gabrielle White

In 2017, I quit the self-employed designer and developer life and joined the NS Government as part of the Nova Scotia Digital Service. Since joining the team I've learned that the technical part of building modern, scalable digital services is the easy part. The people and the process are the hard parts. This talk explains how my team redesigned a paper-based process to become a modern digital service by introducing agile ways of working, starting with user needs, and collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team.

Topics: Government, Scalable Teams





7:50pm – Everything you wanted to know about gRPC by someone who knows nothing about it with Alanna MacNevin

An introduction to gRPC Remote Procedure Call (gRPC), Google's lightweight open-source RPC framework. This presentation will go over what gRPC is, concepts around gRPC, what problem it seeks to solve, the benefits of gRPC over other services to enable communication between distributed services and systems, when to use gRPC (and when not to), and demonstrate a working[tm] example to demonstrate all that we've learned.

Topics: RPC, Messaging, Architecture





8:20pm – Quick Break





8:35pm – Becoming Observable: Running Software with Observability with Domenic Rosati

Testing and running software is hard. This talk goes over the observability mindset and habits that help you verify software does what you want it to do and continues to do so. As an example, we will go over the lifecycle of running a NestJS microservice and how we can develop it in an observable manner.

Topics: Distributed Systems, Observability, Monitoring, Metrics, Traces, Logs

9:05pm – Beverages & Food in Auditorium

We'll finish off the evening with some time to socialize with further beverages & food.