SANDI METZ

Bio

Sandi Metz, author of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and 99 Bottles of OOP, believes in simple code and straightforward explanations. She prefers working software, practical solutions and lengthy bicycle trips (not necessarily in that order) and writes, consults, and teaches about object-oriented design.

• Her site: sandimetz.com
• Twitter: @sandimetz

JOHN DUFF

Bio

John is an independent software developer and consultant from Canada, focusing on Rails, iOS development and engineering leadership. Before venturing out on his own in 2017 John spent six years at Shopify as a developer, team lead and director of engineering. While at Shopify he worked on and lead teams responsible for APIs, Payments, Product Development, Site Reliability and Data Engineering. When he isn't hacking on a project John is usually spending time with his wife and two kids out in the snow, hiking or playing at the park.

• Twitter: @johnduff

JENNIFER MARSTON

Payments: An Integrator’s Perspective

Payments projects run the gamut in terms of complexity, and if you’ve done one before, you know they can quickly get out of hand. Doing the right up-front research can be the difference between a reasonably smooth project and a total disaster zone. This will be a fun, practical talk about setting payments projects up for success from day one, covering everything from researching the legacy systems that have to be integrated with, to wrangling partner API’s, to building internal alliances with departments like accounting.

Jennifer Marston, Senior Software Engineer at Paylock, Inc

Software professional with years of experience and a focus on Web application design and development. I enjoy the challenges associated with creating systems that utilize both proven and emerging technologies and frameworks. From a developers perspective, I think the Web is evolving quickly, with more communication being handled asynchronously and basic functionality delegated to high level frameworks, APIs and RESTful web services. An ever increasing emphasis is being put on privacy and security, and fast passed innovation is addressing these needs with news technological products and processes. I am excited about these technologies, and I enjoy the challenge of keeping up to date and creating useful products and services that are full stack optimized.

NATHAN ADAMSON

Card Not Present, meet Card Present

The hospitality industry, with its high-volume of consumer-driven transactions, has been under immense pressure to change to accommodate new standards such as EMV into their flow. Because Radtab builds solutions for hospitality businesses to navigate all the change, we get a front row seat to see how EMV, POS integration, tokenization, ApplePay, etc., are all affecting not just hospitality, but all businesses with a physical presence. This talk will give you a map that’ll help you navigate the dynamic region where card-present and card-not-present transactions collide.

Nathan Adamson, Co-Founder & CMO at Radtab

Nathan is CO-Founder & CMO of Radtab. Radtab the ultimate payment solution for bars and restaurant. Radtab is a api that bridges the gap from a customer's phone to the venue’s POS machine, which in turn brings greater convenience to the users and adds more volume potential to the bar staff as well as a secure PCI compliant tokenization payment platform that can be added to any restaurant setting in less than a hour with no hardware, or change in billing or normal restaurant operations thanks to spreedly's api.

• Twitter: @nathanadamson

STEPHANIE SLATTERY

Why Won’t You Take My Money?

Roughly 1 in 5 people around the world live with a disability, and in the United States alone people with disabilities control $175 billion in discretionary income. Unfortunately, many sites and apps on the web can be near-impossible to use, even with assistive technology. Payment flows are generally designed to be usable, with minimal steps and clear directions, because it's known that that increases conversion and purchases. At the same time, though, many of the same flows neglect accessibility concerns and make it difficult for a significant portion of the population to buy.

In this talk, I'll discuss the basics of web accessibility, reveal accessibility mistakes that are common on payment forms and in payment flows, and give you some practical tips on how to improve the payment experience for your own users.

Stephanie Slattery, Front End Engineer at Clique Studios

Stephanie Slattery is a web developer who specializes in front end and accessibility. Stephanie is a Front End Engineer at Clique Studios and is a co-organizer of the Chicago Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design meetup. They come to the world of programming from a psychology and physics background at the Illinois Institute of Technology and is a graduate of Dev Bootcamp Chicago.

• Twitter: @sublimemarch

ALEX HENDERSON

No payments left behind!

Payments in the generosity sector and people who makes those payments follow very different rules to traditional transactions for goods and services. When people are unable to give "in the moment" they may not give at all!

Even if you don't work in the Generosity sector, the lessons learned from trying to ensure payments continue to be handled and processed in spite of failing gateways, network outages & misconfiguration (and how you can turn this into a competitive advantage) is applicable to anyone processing payments from end-users.

Alex Henderson, Principal Engineer at Pushpay

Alex is an engineer who has been working in the Industry for 20 years. Alex has been a Principal Engineer for Pushpay - a Leader in the Generosity payments & engagement sector - for the last 4, where he helps work on payment systems, platform architecture and design. He is based in Auckland, New Zealand.

• Twitter: @bittercoder

CAMILLE ACEY

Making Them Pay: Tales from the Immutable Stack

In 2015, the small team at Clubhouse (https://clubhouse.io) decided they were ready to launch their SaaS project management system. The only big thing left to do was set up a payments system. They settled on Stripe, and set about connecting it to their backend system (built in Clojure and Datomic). What looked simple and straightforward on the surface, proved to be one of the company's most formidable challenges.

In this talk, I’ll share my team's experience in setting up and managing this integration. During the talk, we’ll cover:

• Balancing customer support vs. engineering concerns;
• Managing complexity vs. accepting third-party logic;
• The unique challenges of user management with Datomic; and
• The importance of payment systems in pulling down the SaaS metrics your company's leadership will inevitably want.

Camille Acey, VP of Customer Success at Clubhouse

Camille E. Acey is a wife, a mother, and currently works as the Vice President of Customer Success at Clubhouse Software (http://clubhouse.io). Over the past two decades and across two continents, Camille has committed herself to projects that draw in new people, promote unique ideas, and foster cooperation. You can find her talking software, tech support, and social justice on her blog at http://camilleacey.com.

• Mastadon: @kavbojka

BRAD POWERS

Tackling complexities in government payments

In less than 5 years Passport has built a payment infrastructure that services over 500 municipalities, facilitating 240k transactions per day, holding 50MM in wallet reserves for its users. Explore the business and technical challenges that come with running a payments company. We'll look at compliance (PCI, SOC I, SOC II), and government regulations related to wallets and abandoned property.

Brad Powers, CTO at Passport

Brad brings over a decade of experience in designing, building, and deploying highly scalable enterprise applications. He spearheads the company’s technology initiatives and oversees the development process. Prior to Passport, Brad was the Solution Architect at Verian where he was instrumental in building the Operations and Development groups within the company. He also led the largest P2P implementation to date for the United States Postal Service. Brad received his B.S. from Arizona State University. When Brad’s not at the office, he’s trying to figure out how to blend his hobbies of working out, antiquing, and technology.

• Twitter: @bdubp

JACQUES FUSTEVE KARP

There's More To a Partner Than the API

Building a product is hard. Partners can make that experience easier or more challenging depending on what they bring to the table. Our experience in building a payment platform has taught us that choosing partners and service providers is just as important if not more so than choosing your stack. We want to share our learnings and war stories from the frontline.

​​A great partner adds strategic value, works with you to align roadmaps and provide visibility into the changing landscape (from their perspective), and shares their deep technical experience with you to improve collaboration and mutual benefit. A partner is more than just a SaaS API.

​​These are some of our experiences with what works and doesn't work, and some red flags that you should look out for.

Jacques Fu, CTO at Fattmerchant

​​Jacques is the current CTO and technical co-founder at Fattmerchant where he and his team have built a payment platform processing over $1.5B annually from the ground up. His previous background is in building multiple SaaS tech startups. Jacques supports and speaks at many tech events as well as being a co-founder of Orlando Devs, Inc, a 3000 developer strong community.

​​Steve Karp, VP, Strategy at Fattmerchant

Steve Karp has 20+ years of experience across the Financial Technology industry, ranging from strategic consulting to operating roles in start-up, growth-stage PE and Fortune 500 environments. He is currently the head of strategy at Fattmerchant and recently, he was President of Small Business at Worldpay, a leading global merchant processor which Vantiv agreed to acquire for $10B.

VAIBHAV KAULNICOLE GRAZIOSO

Scaling Payments With Your Growing Business

Eight years ago SeatGeek processed exactly zero payments, instead sending customers to checkout across various other ticketing partners. Today SeatGeek helps millions of fans attend live events each year, and every one of them seamlessly purchases from the thousands of sellers on the site. SeatGeek now works with some of the marquee teams, venues and leagues around the world, including teams from the NFL, NBA, MLS and English Premier League.

​​Scaling payment solutions to keep up with the needs of a rapidly growing company is challenging. In this session the payment team at SeatGeek will talk about the evolution of the company as a marketplace, and how Spreedly has helped it scale and plan for the future.

​​Vaibhav Kaul, Senior Engineer at SeatGeek

​​Vaibhav leads the eCommerce engineering team at SeatGeek, which is responsible for payments and risk, ticket inventory and the general money flow through the SeatGeek platform. He started working at SeatGeek more than three years ago and has helped build the payment processes at SeatGeek from the ground up.

​​Nicole Grazioso, Payments and Risk Manager at SeatGeek

Nicole leads the team that is responsible for making sure the money processing through SeatGeek stays safe, and has a great time while doing it! She also dabbles in payments strategy, amateur data analysis, and occasionally day-trading cryptocurrencies. When not doing these things, Nicole enjoys being outside with her family and looking at jokes on the internet, sometimes at the same time!

JIM CARTER III

Cashing Out with Cash Back

Mostly we think of the payment network as being a system that lets money flow from consumers to businesses, but in reality it facilitates a lot of money moving the other direction, too: from businesses to consumers via refunds, rebates, loyalty programs, and more. At Giving Assistant we've leveraged this to build an international loyalty program for our members that gives them real cash back while doing good for nonprofits at the same time. You'll get to hear the details of this "upstream" usage of the payment networks, the challenges we've run into as we've scaled to sending weekly worldwide payments to our members (including why my face is most likely on the wall somewhere at Stripe), and the "golden ticket" we've built on top of Spreedly that lets us use the credit/debit networks to put money on any Visa or Mastercard, anywhere in the world.

​​​​Jim Carter III, CoFounder & Dir. of Engineering at Giving Assistant

​​Programmer for over two decades, coder, speaker, scalability & growth nut, startup and venture junkie, Eagle Scout, a leader at heart & father of two.