Technical Workshops
September 22-23, 2020
We add a learning dimension to our annual Techsylvania experience by inviting experts from leading companies to host technical workshops.
Techsylvania 2020 is going back to tech, with a series of workshops dedicated to engineers and their skill-set enhancement. During the two days, you can select from 10 workshop sessions featuring a wide array of topics, focused only on cutting-edge areas of technology.

Accessible only for ticket holders

Capacity of up to 100 people/ session

Addressing hot issues of the 21st-century
Get your Regular ticket
End to end machine learning on Google Cloud Platform
Abdul Haseeb – Customer Engineer

In this workshop, we will cover starting, experimenting, serving and scaling a machine learning solution. We will take a representative problem and cover the following phases of machine learning:
Data Analysis/Inspection: We will perform data analysis (cover few key strategies of data analysis prior to machine learning)
Feature engineering: We will uncover a few techniques of feature engineering, learning of the previous step and approaches for feature engineering that will help you improve data quality prior to kicking off machine learning.
Representative model selection: In this phase we will summarize model selection criteria and select a couple of models suitable to our problem.
Training, Serving and Scaling in Cloud: In this phase we will uncover model evaluation metrics, understand serving skew and ability to scale both training and serving of Machine learning solutions.
Workshop Partner

Fitbit Health Apps for the digital age
Bogdan Purcareata, Staff Firmware Engineer & Alexandru Popa, Senior Software Engineer


In this workshop, we’ll be covering how Fitbit Development SDK works and what tools we offer as part of our complete developer environment. We’ll focus on how the SDK allows us to research and market health solutions and we’ll deep dive with a case study of one of the health apps that we offer to our user
The workshop will be hosted by engineers that are working on the Fitbit Developer Platform (FDP) team. This team is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Fitbit Public SDK (on device JavaScript Runtime & Developer Environment). The SDK is used for developing 1st, 2nd and 3rd party apps for our smartwatches. This is a cross functional team, with members working on mobile, firmware, backend and frontend.
Workshop Partner

Generate thousands of invoices in mere seconds
Tudor Ghiorghiu, Senior Software Developer

This workshop aims to show what approaches we’re taking when designing operation and business-critical systems. We will kick off with a mini-project that applies to scenarios like generating and delivering bank statements, invoices, advanced payment notifications, tickets, and so on.
The main problem that we will try to address here is the scalability and reliability of such a solution while keeping an eye on how we can keep our code clean and modular. We will be using NodeJS together with Serverless framework on top of AWS’s Lambda serverless compute service and a few other services from their portfolio.
We will end talking about some of the advantages of going serverless and reviewing the implications of adopting such solutions from a developer, DevOps, and the business’s perspective.
Workshop Partner

Container Assisted Testing in Build Automation
Alexandru Albu, Solution Architect & Software Developer in Connected Solutions

Container technology is an approach to operating system virtualization that can also be used to assist the build process. In this workshop, we will integrate Docker containers in Maven Build Lifecycle to support programming language and architectural style diversity.
We will start with Unit and Integration testing, and later consider more complex E2E testing strategies for closed systems (such as pull-based middleware), in an attempt to improve Testability and make the system and its development more transparent to all involved parties.
A transparent process, even with small achievements, makes the project easier to track from several perspectives: management, risk assessment and financial. More Testability potential brings more opportunities and excitement for team members, as it becomes capable to accommodate more and more cutting edge technologies.
Workshop Partner

Hands on Enterprise Blockchain
Dan Popescu, Head Of R&D Modex & Loredana Bourceanu, Software Lead


A significant percentage of the IT infrastructures that act as a foundation for businesses, governmental institutions, and organizations, including key enterprise sectors are composed of outdated legacy systems that are unable to cope with the demands and requirements of the fast-paced digital society we live in. As a result, the discrepancies generated by the inability to provide an adequate response to market demands raises a series of red flags that take the shape of multiple operational bottlenecks and friction points which ultimately translate to a decrease in customer satisfaction, financial losses, as well as a predisposition to fall victim to the ever-evolving cybercrime spectrum.
With the ability to provide a tamper-resistant ecosystem for company data, as well as unparalleled levels of traceability of the data introduced in the system, blockchain seems more than suited to rejuvenate legacy IT infrastructures, giving companies a competitive edge and access to a set of valuable characteristics: data immutability, integrity, data traceability, distribution, and decentralization.
During the workshop “Hands on Enterprise Blockchain”, Modex Software Tech Lead Dan Popescu and Loredana Bourceanu will showcase how companies can make a transition to a blockchain infrastructure without needing to lock a significant pool of funds and resources into building a new infrastructure from the ground up. Dan and Loredana will make a hands-on practical demonstration on how the innovative Modex Blockchain Database solution intervenes in the development stack by positioning itself between the database and the existing application server to grant access to a blockchain backend.
Workshop Partner

The Evolution of Open Source Software Culture at Microsoft
Alex Belotserkovskiy, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft Open Source Community Lead

Alex is a technical architect based in Moscow, Russia. He is working with independent software vendors and startups on cloudifying their architecture. Alex is an open source advocate who leads the internal Microsoft Open Source community with the help of Open Source Champions team that spans many organizations and roles. He believes that communities is the way to support the growth of a sharing culture and long-term success of a business.
In this session, we will see how Microsoft became the company that uses and advocates Open Source in every area. This is a story of culture evolution, and we will look at some examples (Kubernetes ecosystem, Linux contributions, application development, to name a few) of how Microsoft is doing Open Source nowadays and how you can work with us if you are building your business on Open Source.
Agenda:
- Introduction
- Kubernetes & Azure Kubernetes Service
- Azure Arc – unified management cloud-based solution
- Linux contributions
Workshop Partner

Automated Bug Finding with Fuzzing
Everest Munro-Zeisberger, CTO and co-founder of Fuzzbuzz

Everest Munro-Zeisberger is the CTO and co-founder of Fuzzbuzz, a cybersecurity startup based in SF that builds fuzzing tools and infrastructure to help developers effortlessly find severe bugs and vulnerabilities in their code. Prior to starting Fuzzbuzz, he built security tooling on Google’s Clusterfuzz team, one of the largest fuzzing operations in the world, before going on to build a distributed fuzzing framework at Coinbase.
In this workshop, we’ll cover the basics of Fuzzing, the powerful automated software testing tool used by security professionals, researchers, and hackers to find severe bugs and vulnerabilities in mission-critical software that have eluded manual testing.
We will learn about the most effective modern fuzzing techniques, and why security teams at companies like Google and Microsoft trust fuzzing to detect the severe vulnerabilities that developers miss. To date, fuzzing has found over 20 thousand bugs in Google Chrome, and has been used to detect 100s of bugs in Windows prior to release.
We’ll go hands-on and learn how fuzzing could have caught Heartbleed, the bug that cost the internet half a billion dollars to fix. Finally, we’ll apply what we learned to find a vulnerability in a web application, going through the four important steps of fuzzing: Attack Surface Analysis, Harness Building, Instrumentation, and Scaling.
Workshop Partner

BackboneAI – Linking the Dots
Andrei Petreanu, Head of AI @ Backbone AI

A talk on the process of automating supplier-distributor chains, while upholding and improving data-quality and creating a single, easy to use point of contact and governance for stakeholders.
Data can be quite noisy, every entity has its own standard/nomenclature/taxonomy, resulting in a need for extremely creative use of machine learning embeddings and correlation power.
Workshop Partner

Digital Health Automation Testing in a Nutshell
Raluca Vartic, Senior Software Developer & Victor Ulinici, Engineering Delivery Manager


Healthcare is known for being a heavily regulated domain when it comes to product development and software is no exception. Therefore, developing solutions implies paying special attention to quality. Teams spend quite some effort designing processes to meet market-specific standards and then they spend even more following them. Not so fun, you might think, right? Well, having an adequate tool belt for the job will surely spice up your engineering experience a bit. When it comes to managing your test base there are plenty of cool options on the market, both for manual and automation testing.
In this workshop, we’ll be discussing some of the testing tools we opt for when putting together the tech-stack for a project. To automate or not to automate? “Yes!” is our answer. Cypress and Postman are great buddies that make us so confident and quick to respond. Join us in trying them out! We’ll be using our Macadamian HealthQ screening solution to quickly set up a demo, all over the stack. It’s easy and you’ll like it!
Workshop Partner

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Workshop Hosts
Ashley Carroll
David Campbell
Mihail Subtirelu
Adrian Staniloiu
David Campbell
Senior Software Developer at Macadamian
Laszlo Kovacs
Vlad Trifa
Julia Krysztofiak-Szopa
Paul Dragan
Dan Mihaiescu
Cristi Lungu
Stefan Mathe
Senior Computer Engineer at Bosch Engineering Centre
Previous workshop topics