This session will be full of light hearted lightning talks about times when developers have broken code, froze up during an interview or failed in their position at work. Speakers will also go over how they grew from the experience and what they learned. I hope that this session helps to remove the anxiety of messing something up or even learning how to code. Failing is part of the process of becoming a developer. We have all written code that broke an application or froze up during an interview. How we grow from these experiences can really shape how we apply ourselves in our work. I think it's important we share these stories too because it could help someone that is in a situation like that or is nervous of trying something new.

Speakers:

Jeanette Head - Staff Engineer @ Pivotal Tracker

Jeanette Head is currently a staff engineer with the Pivotal Tracker team. She can be heard saying controversial things such as, "JavaScript isn't that bad" and "I love CSS," both of which are limited expressions of her love of the full-stack web. It's probably the result of Stockholm syndrome from building web applications for seven years. She's spent the past year helping teams on Tracker do product research and build exciting new things. Outside of the technical, she snowboards whenever possible, is a beginner ice hockey player, and is a crazy cat mom to kitties Sid and Simba.

Meagan Cooney - Senior Engineer @ Ibotta

Meagan Cooney is a senior engineer at Ibotta in Denver, Colorado. She has worked in tech for almost a decade, as everything from as a GIS Intern to QA engineer. She once even interviewed at a company where she already had a desk, and still managed to fail it. She enjoys reading and writing fiction and traveling.

Tori Huang - Software Engineer @ Gusto

Tori is a Software Engineer at Gusto building an awesome experience for accounting partners. She started her career as a mechanical engineer and made the jump to software engineering after attending Dev Bootcamp. She has worked in startup environments for the past four years where she thrives building new things with fast-paced agile teams. Outside of work hours, you can find her backcountry skiing, biking, running, climbing, and generally living it up in the great outdoors.

Blu Mays - Front End Developer @ DCP Midstream

Blu Mays is a front end developer for DCP Midstream. She comes from a non traditional background with a degree in Psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder. Blu came to learn about web development through online research and fumbling around HTML and CSS before deciding to change her career and go to a coding bootcamp. Her biggest goal currently is to be more active in the Denver developer community, and continue to grow her career

Mark Scheel - Google Developer Expert and Android Developer

Mark Scheel is a Google Developer Expert, Google Developer Group (GDG)
organizer and a decade plus Android developer who has recently shifted
focus to programming Google Assistant interactions. He has given
technical talks in Paris, Hong Kong and at conferences and Meetups
across America including Droidcon SF & Boston, 360 AnDev, Big Android
BBQ, AndroidTO (now Droidcon Toronto) and GDG Boulder, GDG Denver, GDG
Los Angeles, GDG Boston and many more GDG events. Mark is excited to
share some of the many, many mistakes he has made during a 20+ year
career.

Vui Nguyen - Senior Software Engineer, iOS and Embedded/IoT Applications

Vui Nguyen is a long time software engineer, currently doing iOS development professionally. Vui has also done embedded/IoT development as a hobby, and is an Intel Software Innovator (volunteer developer evangelist). At the height of her IoT mayhem, she was doing demos and talks of her IoT projects at meetups and conferences. This experience has resulted in a few demo wardrobe malfunctions, which she has lived through to talk about today. In her spare time, Vui enjoys all kinds of fishing, including shellfishing, and she and her husband recently celebrated their anniversary by catching clams, crabs, and mussels over on the Oregon coast. They are parents to a schnoodle dog, two Reeve's turtles, and a plecostomus fish.