MN tech community, your votes have been tallied and your voice has been heard! From an original list of 39 amazing talks, you have voted and selected the talks that will be taking the stage at the 2021 (mini) Minnebar.

Don’t forget to grab your tickets!  We’re looking forward to seeing all of you at Target Field November 6th — and we also hope to see all of the other 31 incredible submitted sessions and more at Minnebar16 at Best Buy in the spring.

(mini) Minnebar
Saturday, November 6th 2021
1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Target Field & live streamed
Tickets HERE

Without further ado, with 646 (!!!) votes tallied, we are excited to announce the top 8 finalists taking the stage at (mini) Minnebar:

Presenter Session Title Session Description Session Type
Ahnaf Prio JUNIOR DEVELOPER : LEVEL UP!👾🆙 If you are a junior developer starting in the realms of software engineering, things can often seem a little intimidating. You would assume after working a year or two or after numerous hours of spending your time learning the in-s and out-s of data structures and algorithms you’d be ready for the real world…But you quickly realize that there is not just one way of solving a problem, and something that seemed the best approach in theory (that you learnt in school) can very likely not be the right solution in the workplace because of constraints like maintenance, resources available etc. There are so many things to learn, and as soon as you’ve learnt one framework or tool, there seems to be something new out there. You’re doing web dev? what about mobile applications or even smart home apps? You collect data in your app, so what about data science? As a Junior developer myself who has been doing this for the last 3 years, I would like to talk about some tricks and tips I thought I’d share that helped me to strive to be better and atleast “try” to keep up! Development
Abby Allen Parenting Makes Me a Better Product Manager Since the start of the pandemic, parents have had to play full time employees and full time care givers to our children. Far too often, we talk about our kids as a distraction from our core work, but our children surprise us with their insight, teach us to see the world in a new way, and inspire us to be better. As a Product Manager, I’ve found these lessons especially important as I strive to build products that make the world a better place for our kids and a workplace culture where they can thrive as adults. By sharing my experiences as a parent, I hope to combat the implicit bias in our culture that says performance at work suffers when we become parents, especially when women become mothers, and focus the conversation on how parenting helps us be better teammates, teaches us how to really listen, and gives us the courage to create a better world for all our children. This talk will be loosely based on my medium article: https://productcoalition.com/becoming-a-parent-made-me-a-better-product-professional-a056e1e7f2f3 Other
Tyler Webb How to Get Your First 100K Followers (And Why They Don’t Matter) This session will outline the data-driven strategies I’ve used in my 7+ years of social media management to grow a number of Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, Facebook and YouTube pages to 6-figure follower counts and 6-figures in earnings. I’ll outline the growth strategies that have allowed me to reach 10’s of millions of people per month across the several dozen social media accounts I currently manage, how I keep these brands and communities engaged, and how I adapt to the evolving landscape of organic algorithms and privacy updates. Finally, I’ll explain why I believe all of this growth to be unnecessary, and highlight examples and strategies I’ve used to monetize much smaller accounts for myself and clients. Startup/ Business
Ramsey Shaffer Sentiment Analysis for Stock Market News Today, the news has more influence than ever before on the performance of stocks and cryptocurrencies. Thankfully, the world of open source code is quickly developing ways to process and codify large swathes of text. In this talk, we’ll showcase a few methods for quantifying the “mood” of stock market news using sentiment analysis techniques in Python. Development
Matt Decuir Developer hiring trends + job search and hiring advice The job market has shifted dramatically as a result of the pandemic, and some really interesting (and positive!) hiring trends are happening as a result. Remote work is not going anywhere, salaries are inflating fast, and it’s a really good time to be looking for a new (dev) job. On top of that, employers are all hiring for the same positions (e.g. senior software engineers), which makes for immense competition. We’ll talk through these trends and what they mean for job seekers and employers alike, during this session. Development
Kelly Heikkila Building an accessible B2B web application At Accessible360, we audit and train customers on making their websites, mobile apps and documents accessible to everyone. To track that work and provide to the customer, we needed a fully accessible web application for our staff to work in and our customers to interact with. Over the last four years we have built a very complex but fully accessible application called the A360 HUB. I’d like to share our experiences tackling tough but very interesting problems when building an application such as this. Development
Jeff Sussna Delivering Strategic Outcomes with Scrum & Kanban According to the Agile Manifesto, the highest priority is “continuous delivery of valuable software”. Too often, though, Scrum and Kanban lose touch with customer value in favor of just doing more work faster. Teams suffer from tunnel vision, unable to see beyond the next user story or the current sprint. Design feels restricted to nibbling at the edges of the user experience. Customers and stakeholders become frustrated by the inability to provide visibility into anything beyond “the next two weeks”.

This talk presents an approach to Agile that shifts the focus of tactics and strategy from outputs to outcomes. This shift overcomes the conflict between agility and strategy. It lets Agile teams use familiar practices to deliver business and customer value, not just work.

The talk explains how to:
* Use outcome-driven planning to align strategic direction with tactical implementation
* Connect Agile ceremonies to customer needs and company OKR’s
* Bring together product, design, development, and operations perspectives
* Iteratively make meaningful experience improvements

 Design
Jeff Lin Airbnb as a Side Hustle How to turn your property into a source of passive income in the laziest way possible. Startup/ Business

 

We hope to see you all at (mini) Minnebar on 11/6!