Tech Talks
The GSA CTO team hosts in-depth Tech Talks, where presenters discuss technology topics affecting the agency. Each Tech Talk is a 30-minute informal meeting with an audience of internal GSA members. Demonstrations are often provided along with follow-up Q&A. Registration is limited to internal GSA personnel. To register to attend a Tech Talk event, please contact Joe Novak at Joseph.Novak@gsa.gov.
For general questions about the Tech Talks, please contact the GSA CTO team at cto@gsa.gov.
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Salesforce Lightning for Gmail with Prerana Bhatt
September 21, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Salesforce Lightning for Gmail is a brand new way to experience Salesforce right from within Gmail for CRM customers. Lightning for Gmail provides ability to integrate Salesforce with Google G Suite email and calendar applications. Salesforce team will provide demo to highlight how users can perform various actions in Salesforce from within Gmail which helps to increase productivity, efficiency and eliminates duplicate efforts.
Location
Virtual and 1800F Room 2213
Who
Prerana Bhatt
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Google App Scripts to the Rescue! With Mark Vogelgesang
September 7, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Recently, Google App Scripts were made available for development by everyone at GSA. App Scripts yield tremendous power and can help automate many tasks that previously required manual intervention. For instance, do you want to automatically send calendar invites based on form responses? Or perhaps you want to scan a particular team folder to ensure that sharing settings are as expected. With a little bit of javascript knowledge, you can quickly start producing scripts for use by yourself and your team. In the talk, we will cover some app script basics, talk about the approval process for their use at GSA, and a quick example app.
Location
Virtual and 1800F Room 2213
Who
Mark Vogelgesang
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DevSecOps – A Case Study (D2D migration to Cloud) with Kishore Kakani
August 17, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
The objective of this tech talk is to explain the use of DevSecOps framework to migrate application workloads to cloud. The CTO team is collaborating with various teams (incl. IDI, security, and application development leads) to define and build DevSecOps framework to help migrate application workloads to cloud. The goal is to ‘develop/deploy/operate’ through automation. As part of this journey, the CTO team worked closely with the D2D team to migrate D2D applications to cloud by building some of these automation pieces and work towards that final goal of developing automated CI/CD pipelines. In this presentation, we will go over the D2D migration steps in detail and understand how DevSecOps automation process can help build repeatable infrastructure/application deployments with minimal manual intervention, and shorter provisioning times.
Location
Virtual and 1800F Room 3334
Who
Kishore Kakani
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Creating InSite pages with Joy Gatewood
August 10, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Have you ever wondered how to create InSite pages? And perhaps why? And how you could maximize your InSite pages to improve acceptance of your program? Maybe you’ve wondered how you could create self help pages that for your customers - that also cuts down on phone calls, emails and meetings?
We’ll quickly walk through how to request an InSite page. Then provide a quick overview of GSA’s style guides that include federal guidelines and laws that you must keep in mind when creating online content.
Finally, we’ll show how helping customers complete their tasks on your InSite pages can improve customer satisfaction, and improve productivity and efficiency.
Slides will be shared that will go into more depth and include:
analyzing InSite page visits with Google Analytics analyzing searches and using the results to understand your customer’s keywords improving your InSite pages’ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) using a shortcut - like insite.gsa.gov/myprogram - as an easy way to communicate with your customers and improve your branding using customer feedback - like “Rate This Page” to continuously improve your Insite pages by using the voices of your customer If you’re mystified by InSite and don’t know where to start this talk is for you.
Location
Virtual and 1800F room 4143
Who
Joy Gatewood
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Data-to-Decisions (D2D) & GSA with Kris Rowley
July 26, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
D2D is a GSA-wide initiative and cultural shift to bring GSA datasets together, ensure consistency of reporting, and empower employees at all levels with the outcome of building a data-driven organization. It is a capability used to aggregate data, store data securely using modern cloud technology, and develop flexible reports for your customers. During this tech talk, Kris Rowley, GSA Chief Data Officer, will present D2D’s portal capabilities, offer discussion around what D2D can do to help better support our daily jobs, and answer any data related questions specific to the business. The D2D team hopes to continue contributing to the to the improvement of GSA’s overall customer experience by helping reach insights quickly, collaborate meaningfully, and build a community around data.
Location
Virtual and 1800F
Who
Kris Rowley, GSA Chief Data Officer
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Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and GSA
July 20, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Do you ever wonder how applications are synced across multiple devices? How you are able to receive instant updates to your mobile apps? This is possible because of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. APIs are software programs that enable computer programs and systems to talk directly to each other.
If you would like to understand how APIs work, then this Tech Talk is for you! Ryan Day and Joe Castle of IC and the GSA Digital Service team are going to explain APIs with particular focus on data transfer over web protocols and RESTful design with considering endpoints, nouns, and verbs. They will also demonstrate popular commercial and GSA examples while discussing the value they provide to the Agency and end consumers. Furthermore, information will be provided about GSA’s API strategy, API inventory, and API standards for those wanting to create APIs.
Location
Virtual and 1800F
Who
Ryan Day and Joe Castle
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Application Performance Monitoring within GSA's PBS IT
June 20, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
IT applications are getting more robust and complicated each year. Applications developers are expected to deliver more features while improving application performance for end users.
This can be a challenging endeavor without the right tool to baseline and track application performance and identify where the bottlenecks are occurring.
During this tech talk, Phil Klokis and Allen Samuel will present how PB-ITS has used Riverbed ARX to improve application performance and identify usage of the application in supporting application rationalization activities.
Location
Virtual and 1800F
Who
Phil Klokis and Allen Samuel
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The Agile Product Owner: Beyond the Books & Classrooms
June 6, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
As organizations embark on Agile transformation, many traditional project managers or business and technical leads are often assigned the Product Owner role with limited (or no) training or even an understanding of what the new role truly entails. In the midst of changing environments, conflicting mindsets, and other change-related issues, they are expected to start operating within a Scrum team after a few days of CSPO training and perhaps some reading. So, what are some of the tools and real-life experience required from a Product Owner?
During this Tech Talk, Alicia Cyrus will explore the differences between product ownership and traditional project management, and share some approaches on how Product Owners can effectively manage relationships and the responsibilities of their new role.
Location
Virtual and 1800F
Who
Alicia Cyrus, CTO Office
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Internet of Things & GSA/PBS
May 17, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Did you know that PBS at GSA uses The Internet of Things for Their Smart Buildings? The next Tech Talk on May 17th at 1 pm will have GSA-PBS IT’s Charles Matta and Andrew Vanjani sharing their insights into this very exciting topic.
They will talk about PBS and smart buildings, and The Internet of Things within the building industry, PBS, Federal Facilities and the real estate industry. How it works, Applications, Risks/Rewards, Cybersecurity, Contracting, Innovation and Opportunities will all be discussed.
Location
Virtual and 1800f
Who
Charles Matta and Andrew Vanjani
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Version Control and GitHub
May 9, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Version control software allows multiple people to manage changes to a project at the same time without getting in each other’s way. At GSA, we use it to help share and collaborate on open source software but it can be used for many other things as well. In this session, we’ll talk about the basics of version control, look at how you might use it on your projects and take a tour of the GitHub ecosystem. This is a beginners session and no coding experience is required.
Please join Sara Cope from the CTO Office in this Tech Talk for a friendly introduction to Version Control and GitHub.
Location
Virtual
Who
Sara Cope, CTO Office
