Learn more about our 2018 talks here!
Keynotes
Julia Evans
Julia Evans is a software engineer at Stripe. In her spare time, she runs a programming blog about what she’s learning (systems programming, often!) at https://jvns.ca/ and publishes zines at https://jvns.ca/zines. She thinks it’s important to understand the fundamentals of how your systems work.
Safia Abdalla
Safia is the founder of Zarf, a platform for independent writers who produce paid subscription content for their readers.
Invited Speakers
Dinah Davis
The Innerworkings of Ransomware
Dinah Davis is the Director of R&D at Arctic Wolf Networks, responsible for the development of the AWN CyberSOC product. Dinah holds an M. Math in cryptography from the University of Waterloo. She has over 16 years of experience in the tech industry with time spent as a Security Software Developer at the Communications Security Establishment Canada and BlackBerry, and as a manager at TrustWave and D2l. Dinah is also the founder of Code Like a Girl, a publication whose goal it is to change society’s perceptions of how women are viewed in technology, which has over 25 000 subscribers and a vibrant online community.
Josh Bowman-Matthews
Remembering MegaZeux: Concurrent, Assembly-ish Actor-based Programming for Teens
Josh Bowman-Matthews builds web browsers and sustainable communities for a living. He gets excited about demolishing barriers to participating in open source projects. He also sings in a barbershop quartet.
Christina Truong
Why You Should be Building Design Systems and CSS Architectures
Christina is an independent developer, focusing on inclusive tech education and technical consulting services. She has over 10 years of experience as a front-end developer. As an educator, she has taught 1000+ students in college programs, coding bootcamps, workshops and many more with her online courses.
Speakers
There will be 20 total lightning talk speakers - the full list will be available soon.
Murphy Berzish
Formal Methods for Everyone: Practical Tools for Computer-Aided Reasoning
Murphy is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo researching formal methods and computer-aided reasoning. Murphy is also the developer of the Z3str3 string solver, which is used by many getwork security, and test generation.
Breanne Boland
Of Tracked Changes and Diffs: Moving from Editorial to Engineering
Breanne Boland is a software engineer with Truss, a San Francisco-based infrastructure consultancy. In the last two years, she has supported the first standardized CI for a US government agency, been the voice of UX in an engineering organization, and dove deep into the world of infrastructure as code. Before becoming an engineer, she was a writer, editor, UX researcher, and content strategist, which led her to an enduring passion for awesome, useful documentation.
Fatema Boxwala
Notworking with a Whale: A Tale of Dockers, Networks, and Problem Solving
Fatema Boxwala is a CS student at the University of Waterloo. At school she’s involved with the Women in Computer Science Committee and the Computer Science Club, occasionally teaching people about Python, Git and Systems Administration. At work she’s been an intern at Rackspace, Yelp and Facebook.
Rudi Chen
How to make a real-time collaborative text editor in 5 easy steps!
Rudi is a big fan of rock climbing, and pen spinning when he’s not on a wall. He is currently working as a software engineer at Figma.
Tina Fletcher
Why I Prefer Good Testing Over Excellent Testing
Tina loves being challenged every day to solve new testing, communication, and leadership problems. You’re most likely to find her planning test approaches for new features, discovering ways to promote better collaboration between groups, or experimenting with techniques to help enable quality-focused development and decision making. Some of Tina’s favorite projects to date have been helping D2L to go “all-in” on AWS, building Analytics applications in D2L’s Brightspace learning platform, and leading the team responsible for testing BlackBerry Hub. Tina is currently a Senior Test Strategist at D2L.
Claire Janke
Dealing with Bad Architecture Decisions: A Case Study
Claire Janke has been a software engineer at Etsy since 2013. She enjoys overanalyzing television shows and starting new craft projects that she occasionally finishes.
Andrew Louis
How giant human-powered calculators became the internet
Andrew is a software developer from Toronto. After learning about the Memex and finding out that it was never built in 1945, he decided to try to build one of his own. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ShopLocket, an ecommerce startup acquired in 2014.
Kelly McBride
Taking the Fun Out of Everything: Automating Neopets
Kelly McBride is a Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo. She’s interned at Facebook and Akamai as part of the co-op program. Finally realizing that enjoying coding outside of work requires writing code that does fun stuff, she’s begun to write code that incorporates her hobbies like rhythm games or Neopets.
Tim McLean
Protecting cryptography code from timing vulnerabilities
Tim is a software developer and independent cryptography consultant based in Waterloo. Previously, he helped found a Toronto-based healthcare startup, KoNote, building their engineering team and leading the development of a secure platform for sharing patient information. Now, Tim uses that experience as a consultant to help companies develop robust and performant solutions using cryptography.
Erika Pierre
Erika Pierre is a front-end web developer working with vanilla JavaScript/ES6, AngularJS, and responsive design on major web applications. Outside of web development, she enjoys Beyoncé, summers in Montréal, and cats.
Jordan Pryde
Introduction to Software Defined Radios
Jordan Pryde is a fourth year University of Waterloo CS student and a Product Security Analyst at BlackBerry. Jordan is a licensed Amateur Radio Operator (VA3PRX), executive member of the UW Amateur Radio Club and long time member of UW Computer Science Club’s Systems Committee. Jordan came to Waterloo from British Columbia and wishes there were more mountains in Ontario. He can be found on the #csc IRC channel on https://freenode.net/.
Alex Rhatushnyak
Why Lossless Data Compression Is Important and Fun
Alexander Rhatushnyak is a native of Siberia. He is studying data compression and related algorithms since 1991. He immigrated to Canada in 2006 soon after obtaining a PhD in Computer Science. After 2011 he lived and worked in various places in the world, including Ontario, Quebec, UK and USA. His current occupation is in software engineering.
Keefer Rourke
Keefer is a second year computer science student at the University of Guelph. As a total Unix nerd, and a strong advocate for Free Software, he has a passion for computing and ethical, open-source software that respects its users. In 2015, Keefer founded Tokumei.co, an alternative, self-host-able social media platform designed to combat anti-patterns of advertisers online.
Siddhartha Sahu
Managing Connections with Graphs: Uses and Challenges
Siddhartha is a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Waterloo, where he explores real world connections that can be modelled as graphs.When not thinking about research, he spends his time reading, travelling, cooking, and taking a lot of pictures.
Anastasia Santasheva
Imagining a world with Ethereum
Anastasia is a Systems Design Engineering student at University of Waterloo. She was recently building payment and accounting systems at Coinbase, and will continue this after finishing her last four months of school. She spends her free time thinking a lot about internet privacy. Occasionally, you can find her DJing Radio School of Life on BFF.FM or watching the Great British Bake Show.
Sunjay Varma
How Rust Makes Advanced Type Systems Accessible to the Masses
Sunjay Varma has been learning and teaching programming ever since he started to learn about it over a decade ago. His depth of understanding comes from having explored a variety of different languages including Rust, Python, JavaScript, Haskell, C, C++ and more. Sunjay refined his skills by building an extensive open source portfolio and working in advanced positions in many different areas. He has worked on projects ranging from game AI to the compiler for the Rust programming language.
Max Veystman
Remote code execution in your text editor!
Max Veytsman graduated with a degree in Computer Science from UofT and went on to work as a security consultant, software developer, and most recently, startup founder. While most of his work hours are spent running a company, the urge to play with functional programming and break things has never left.
Mentorship
Would you like to mentor StarCon speakers as they prepare their talks? We are looking for both remote and in-person mentors. Apply here before November 17, 2017!
Call for proposals
Information can be found here. The call for talk proposals for StarCon 2018 is now closed.
Contact
If you have any questions, please email Anna Lorimer: [email protected]