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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Github with Sara Cope
November 16, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
A Tour of GitHub for Non-Developers: GitHub is a collaboration platform where users can work on open source projects together. In this session, we’ll take a look at the many GitHub features and get you up to speed with version control terminology. We’ll also take a look at a few workflows in GitHub for contributing to open source projects without coding. This is a beginner friendly session for someone who has little to no experience with GitHub.
Location
Virtual and 1800F Room 3211
Who
Sara Cope
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TBM with Megan Sikora
November 2, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Ever find yourself always trying to answer the question of why IT costs what it does or a cost per user? Do your customers want more information as to what drives the cost of the services GSA IT delivers, but you find yourself answering questions with more question? What if there was a standard taxonomy and model that once loaded with the copious amounts of data that we possess that could answer those questions? In fact, what if those questions could be answered and we could drive both ourselves and our users to more efficient and effective uses of our IT? This answer does exist within our Cost Transparency Initiative, utilizing Technology Business Management. Please join us for this TechTalks to learn more about cost transparency and how we can shape business demand and deliver value for money.
Location
Virtual and 1800F Room 3334
Who
Megan Sikora
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GEAR with Chris Campbell
October 26, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Maybe you’ve heard someone talking about GEAR, and want to know what it’s all about. Or maybe you’ve used GEAR to check if a certain technology is approved at GSA. Did you know you can export all of these reports? Do you know how to see which applications belong to a single 2-letter office? Do you know how to get incorrect information updated? The EA team will provide a demo that will walk through the basic lists managed within GEAR, as well as some less-well-known ways to search for your favorite information. Come and see how much information is already available at your fingertips!
Location
Virtual and 1800F Room 3334
Who
Chris Campbell
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Data Sciences October 5th with Amirah Aziz
October 5, 2017, 1p-1:30p
Objective
Opportunities for data scientists—one of today’s hottest skills—are rapidly growing in response to the exponential amounts of data being captured and analyzed. Data scientists are needed in GSA to find insights into this data and to solve meaningful business problems within the agency. In this talk, we’ll explore what it means to be a data scientist as well as data science process workflow, tools, technology, and upcoming GSA training in Data Science.
Location
Virtual and 1800F Room 5213
Who
Amirah Aziz
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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