Abstractions

Abstractions is a new conference that brings together everyone involved in modern software development — designers, developers, DevOps, and community leaders — to teach, learn, and connect with each other.

We've gathered a huge lineup of diverse #speakers, from language creators to community builders to design innovators, and are seeking interesting and unique proposals from our peers in the industry. Join us for three days in August to expand your understanding of the world of modern software development, both inside and outside the confines of your chosen expertise.

Abstractions looks at the software creation process from all angles. Covered topics include: remarkable Design, perspectives on Development, practical DevOps, and effective Community & Leadership.

You can view our full schedule on our website, but check out this list of our invited speakers.

Abstractions Lineup

Larry Wall: Invented Perl programming language. Perl is used to build millions of software products including IMDB, Craigslist, Zappos, Amazon, and the BBC on the web.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Founder of "A List Apart" magazine and the design studio Happy Cog, co-founder of "A Book Apart" and the design conference An Event Apart. Also co-hosts The Big Web Show, a podcast about the web and online publishing.

Richard Stallman: Founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of GNU and important tools GCC, emacs and more.

Allison Randal: Currently the President of the Open Source Initiative, OpenStack Foundation board, and Hewlett Packard open source development manager. Formerly held roles as the Technical Architect of Ubuntu and board of directors member for Python and Perl.

Sandi Metz: Author of "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR)".

Raffi Krikorian: Former Vice President of Platform Engineering at Twitter and current Engineering Lead at Uber's new Advanced Technology Center in Pittsburgh. Lead Twitter's largest engineering initiatives, including integration with iOS and their largest product rewrite

José Valim: Invented the Elixir programming language, an emerging language that has already been adopted by major companies like Pinterest, Bleacher Report, and Lexmark. Also has made major contributions to the Ruby ecosystem.

Saron Yitbarek: Founder of CodeNewbie, a national community of beginner coders. Managing Tech Jobs Academy at Microsoft.

Petro Salema: Tech lead at Austrian tech startup, Genetics. NET Awards tech talk of the year nominee.

Lyza Danger Gardner: CloudFour co-founder, developer, author "Head First Mobile Web".

Mitchell Hashimoto: CEO of Hashicorp, maker of software automation tools such as Vagrant, Otto, and Vault.

Eileen Uchitelle: Security and performance programmer at Basecamp. Rails Committers team and the Rails Security team.

Matt Griffin: Founder of world renowned, Pittsburgh based, web design agency Bearded.

Bryan Liles: Cloud engineer at Digital Ocean.

Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang, the language invented to support Ericsson telephony.

Andrew Clay Shafer: Helped create the DevOps movement. Founder Puppet Labs, Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal.

Lara Schenck: Founder Tacklebox, web design consultant and trainer.

Joshua Suereth:  Scalawags podcast host. Author "Scala in Depth." Google Engineer.

Scott Hanselman: Host of This Developer''s Life and Hanselminutes podcast, Microsoft Web Platform team.

Aaron Patterson: Community leader on projects such as the Ruby programming language and Ruby on Rails framework.

Brad Frost: Pittsburgh based and internationally known, creator of resources for web designers, including This Is Responsive, Pattern Lab, Styleguides.io, WTF Mobile Web, and Mobile Web Best Practices.

Mike Monteiro: Founder of world renowned design studio Mule Design. Author "Design is a Job" and "You're My Favorite Client".

Stephanie Morillo: Writer, musician, and co-founder of #WOCinTech Chat, writer at DigitalOcean.

Casey West: Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal.

Kelsey Hightower: Engineering in Go for the Google Cloud Platform team.

Seth Vargo: Engineer at Hashicorp, author of "Learning Chef".

Jono Bacon: Director of Community of GitHub, formerly of Canonical; author, The Art of Community; founder, Community Leadership Summit. 

And more!

If you are unable to attend because of price, please do not let that prevent you from attending. We have a great scholarship program supported by our attendees and sponsors. Learn more and apply for assistance.

We ask that you read and agree to our Code of Conduct before purchasing tickets.