David A. Knepprath

I have been a Manuscript Reviewer for Manning Publications, reading and proving feedback on a couple books every year.

Noteworthy acknowledgments:
- https://livebook.manning.com/book/docker-in-action-second-edition/acknowledgments/

A group of parents at my daughters childcare wanted to respond practically in the wake of George Floyd's death. I offered to help out by putting together a site to explain our mission. This was a great learning opportunity as my career has focused on Backend Development. Prior to this project I had not built a hosted website. I decide to build the site using the Hugo framework and host it in AWS.

ShrinkWrap - An identity and access management tool which intelligently automates The Principle of Least Privilege.

Managing IAM user permissions is tedious, and harder yet to apply security best practices. If users are not using services over time, then ShrinkWrap will automatically reduce their access exposure. If a user ends up needing access to something they were originally entitled to, then ShrinkWrap provides a streamlined workflow to quickly restore the needed permission… Show more

ShrinkWrap - An identity and access management tool which intelligently automates The Principle of Least Privilege.

Managing IAM user permissions is tedious, and harder yet to apply security best practices. If users are not using services over time, then ShrinkWrap will automatically reduce their access exposure. If a user ends up needing access to something they were originally entitled to, then ShrinkWrap provides a streamlined workflow to quickly restore the needed permission. ShrinkWrap provides reporting on all activities, empowering administrators to glean organization insights and craft more secure policies.

Within the allocated 8 hours, my team brainstormed the idea and built a working proof of concept which integrated with IAM's API to automate user creation, dynamically changing user permissions based on usage patterns, and reporting. We also designed an architecture that could integrate further with CloudTrail to enable more fine grained and realtime functionality. Show less

I successfully completed the 50,000 word count goal for NaNoWriMo 2019.

This was a personal project I had attempted multiple times in prior years, but had never completed the goal. This project resulted in a well defined synopsis of a novel, a 100 year timeline of events for the world of the story, and a collection of characters.

I have been a mentor at a local high school team as well as advocated for corporate donations, hosted teams to give demo's at work, and recruited volunteers.

TITLE
Going Beyond Unit Tests in a Serverless Architecture

DETAILS
Testing is often cited as a challenge of Serverless. Unit tests are easy. Integration tests are hard.

Maria and David will share their journey at Cambia, going beyond writing unit tests to explore the implementation of automated user acceptance tests for serverless components.

They are a few years into their journey applying the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) methodology, which uses plain-English… Show more

TITLE
Going Beyond Unit Tests in a Serverless Architecture

DETAILS
Testing is often cited as a challenge of Serverless. Unit tests are easy. Integration tests are hard.

Maria and David will share their journey at Cambia, going beyond writing unit tests to explore the implementation of automated user acceptance tests for serverless components.

They are a few years into their journey applying the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) methodology, which uses plain-English user acceptance tests to assert the business requirements of the component. They are using Gherkin as a requirements process and the Cucumber framework to implement the tests. This served them well in regards to developing microservices hosting REST APIs, but when the pair initially began adopting a Serverless Architecture they had to reevaluate our BDD strategy.

Fundamental to their new strategy is the open source project LocalStack, which enables them to write more natural black box user acceptance tests for our Serverless components.

David and Maria will give a brief introduction to each of the tools used to achieve this (Gherkin, Cucumber, LocalStack), and walk through a practical example putting them all together. Show less

Led a team to make contributions to the Open Source Localstack Project

I helped groom the backlog of open issues for the project and organized worked for a team of developers to contribute to.

"Type" was in the first wave of words my daughter learned. She wanted to mimic mom and dad working on the laptop. She was so drawn to the concept, she would even say "type" when she saw a piano.

Around 1, we gave her an old bluetooth keyboard to mash on. She proceeded to hack the iPad (which it wasn't paired with 🤷‍♂️) to play her favorite Mother Goose Club songs. But by 1.5, she began insisting on the laptop.

I wasn't worried about the hardware on my 2011 MacBook Air. Naively I… Show more

"Type" was in the first wave of words my daughter learned. She wanted to mimic mom and dad working on the laptop. She was so drawn to the concept, she would even say "type" when she saw a piano.

Around 1, we gave her an old bluetooth keyboard to mash on. She proceeded to hack the iPad (which it wasn't paired with 🤷‍♂️) to play her favorite Mother Goose Club songs. But by 1.5, she began insisting on the laptop.

I wasn't worried about the hardware on my 2011 MacBook Air. Naively I opened a text editor for her to type in. I was shocked at how many things could go wrong so quickly when a toddler starts pressing keys. I would leave it on the lock screen, but this got old fast. Occasionally we would appease her desire to use the laptop by doing Google image searches together, browsing her favorite things (trains, buses, cats).

By 2 she was starting to be proficient at recognizing multiple letters in the alphabet.

Against this backdrop, I was sitting in a talk on Rust at OSCON 2018 when the idea struck.

A toddler proof game that would let her search for images of her favorite things. Show less