Check out this year's Philly Tech Week lineup!

Threads is a modern, delightful, and powerful communications tool for digital (or distributed) teams that aims to replace Slack, Teams, GChat, for folks who need both synchronous and asynchronous communications in the same space. When we released our AI-powered capabilities (named Tailor) in March, I was tasked with designing the presentation, brand, and tone of this companion. This is the story of how we made our decisions.

Engineering velocity is usually inversely correlated to risk. Or, put plainly; the faster you go, the more you break things. In this session we will investigate how to change that inverse correlation and increase velocity without increasing risk. We’ll look at three areas, Individual, Team and Strategic. Individual coding practices, informed by the latest research on how we program and how AI tools are changing the landscape. Team development lifecycles, how to structure work to create rapid impactful iterations. Strategic planning, to drive high value work forward and not waste cycles of work.

Fearless’ Dir. of Engineer TJ Famodu shares how she build cross-functional teams to serve Fearless’ clients, navigates customer relationships, and handles the legacy migration that is continually coming up with established customers in the healthcare and government sectors.

In this talk, we provide an overview of how we apply state-of-the-art AI towards various consumer products at Comcast. More specifically, we present several ways in which AI is improving the customer experience, including an award-winning voice assistant for your TV, an automated chatbot for customer care and sports highlights generated through media analytics.

The layers of technology that are required to deliver online experiences can be staggering and feel miraculous. It is easy to become overwhelmed, feeling we should understand all of these layers, and end up wallowing in impostor syndrome. This talk will take an opportunity to poke fun at some of the more absurd moments in my own life, and celebrate the miracle that anything we do actually works at all!

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to create an AI-powered chatbot using Python and OpenAI’s GPT API. The session will cover key concepts, including API authentication, making API requests, and handling responses. Students will follow along as they build a simple text-based chatbot that can answer questions and engage in conversation. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a functional chatbot and a strong foundation for further exploration of AI chatbot development.

Have you ever felt inadequate? Told yourself when accomplishing an achievement that it was just luck? Then you are someone who has probably experienced the imposter syndrome. In this talk we will discuss ways to overcome the imposter syndrome and explain importance of finding your tribe of supporters.

What does it mean to be a career IC? What does growth and betterment look like? How do I know what to focus on to get me to the next level? Is a switch into management inevitable? Come hear from an engineer who has puzzled over these questions and more, and learn about quieting imposter syndrome, focusing on your unique skillset, and building a career path that works for you.

How Vanguard’s Security Organization Enables the Developer Experiences, Protects Client Assets and Stewards a Culture of Risk Cyber security is not a one way street. Developers and security experts all need to come together to create the best outcomes for our organizations. Developers need flexibility to create innovative solutions. Security professionals need to help put guardrails in place to keep organizations secure. Learn about Vanguard’s approach on how IT, business and security work together to protect trillions of dollars in client assets.

The software industry is shifting from developing individual applications to creating entire ecosystems. One way to achieve this is by using distributed Microservices and event-sourced data streams. This approach allows for better management of data over time, from raw and emerging data to a curated source of truth. By combining this with a data fabric architecture, we can leverage the capabilities of machine learning to create virtuous data cycles that continuously improve data and provide actionable insights to users.

Let’s discuss if “DevOps is really dead” and where “platform engineering” fits in, why engineering organizations should be excited about it, but also the challenges and potential pitfalls. We’ll talk about how to determine whether your organization is a good fit for the practice and you’ll learn how to avoid some very expensive mistakes.

In this talk, I will go over some of the key provisions of proposed AI regulations (e.g EU AI Act), as well as voluntary frameworks (e.g NIST AI RMF). I will then discuss some of the policies and principles organizations should start putting into place now in order to prepare for the regulatory environment. The talk will end about a discussion about AI differentiation in the market and how building a ‘trusted’ organization can be a substantial, non-commoditized, differentiator.