When you were a teenager, someone probably sat you down to explain “the birds and the bees”. For many, this was an uncomfortable topic; maybe even one that was avoided for as long as possible. In the development community, I’ve noticed a similar approach being taken to discussing the ethics of AI. But in the famous words of Salt-N-Pepa (mostly): “Let’s talk about AI, baby! Let’s talk about you and me! Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be.” AI is not going away anytime soon: it’s wildly interesting, full of potential, and capable of so much good – however, it also has the potential to cause serious harm. So let’s get real for a bit and talk about what should be considered in order to use AI responsibly: bias, misinformation, dataset sources, accountability and more. After all…if you’re not ready to talk about AI, then you’re probably not ready to have it.

Ask nearly anyone about the process of developing software, and somewhere in the answer they’ll (hopefully) mention the users. User research, user testing, user feedback – the end user is at the heart of everything that we build. However, for many companies, making conversations with real users actually happen is a real challenge – especially if you don't have a UX specialist on your team! If this is all sounding familiar to you, then I have a recommendation: take it into your own hands. In this session, we'll talk through setting up a basic user testing program and growing it, so you – the developer – can feel empowered to start usability testing for your own product!

If you've heard people talk about React18, you've probably heard the word "concurrency". Join us for this lightning talk where we take a quick look at what that means, as well as one of the new concurrent features coming in the new release – startTransition – and what we'll be able to do with it.