Wellsky Engineering recently hosted its third annual Dev Days at WellSky world headquarters in Overland Park, KS. There were over 500 attendees, with many participants and presenters travelling from around the country to attend 50+ breakout sessions over two days. It was a good mix of sessions led by internal speakers and presentations by our vendor partners. Although this was primarily a technology conference with the key sessions on AI, ML, and data science — all the recent technology buzzwords — there were several sessions on engineering process efficiencies, effective collaboration strategies, career building advice, and stress management as well. There were many new connections forged when colleagues met face-to-face during meet and greet sessions in the mornings and the happy hours in the evenings.
It was kicked off by a fireside chat with our CEO Bill Miller, COO Steve Morgan, and CTO Joel Dolisy. They reflected on past years’ growth and successes as well as challenges ahead of WellSky.
Overall, Dev Days 2023 was a resounding success, leaving attendees excited about the possibilities of technology in revolutionizing healthcare and inspiring them with an invigorated sense of purpose to drive innovation within our organization. The occasion supplied a unique opportunity for employees from various corners of the country to come together in person, fostering closer connections and collaboration among a geographically dispersed engineering team. This event underscored Wellsky's dedication to staying at the forefront of technology and fostering a vibrant developer community.
The events and sessions spanned 4 main tracks and are listed below.
AI & Machine Learning
Humanizing Healthcare with GenAI by Ravinder Singh and Sutapa Ghosh from Citius Tech - This session explored the transformative potential of GenAI in healthcare, with a few exciting short demos.
Generative AI and the future of Software Development by Christopher Harrison from GitHub - This keynote explored how best to incorporate AI into existing workflows and processes and getting the most out of this new tool to meet the demands we face.
Google Codey APIs by Thomas Abraham & Parashar Shah from Google - A deep dive into and demonstration of Google Codey APIs for code completion, code generation, and code chat.
Reinventing Healthcare with Data & Artificial Intelligence by Basia Coulter from Globant - This talk explored the exciting and fast-evolving intersection of healthcare, data science, and artificial intelligence.
Experimentation for Better Products by Roopa Krishnamurthy, Pat Kenny & Earlyn Reinhard - This talk discussed why experimentation is important, how to set up an experiment, what not to do, and how ML can help facilitate experimentation.
Expediting Care Process with AI by Dr. Justin Harris from 66degrees - The session showed leveraging AI capabilities to build models that improve the patient journey, their end-to-end pipeline and architecture approach.
Generative AI in Healthcare with Google Cloud Vertex AI by Will Rosenfeld & Subu Ramkumar - Google discussed the Generative AI healthcare landscape, use cases, and explored Vertex AI through multiple hands-on demos.
Unlocking the Future - Revolutionizing AI with DocuSign by Jeff Piper from DocuSign - DocuSign's overview of their AI product strategy - what their AI offering looks like today, what they are working on, and the future vision.
Building the future - a foundation of community + AI by Jody Bailey from Stack Overflow – This session focused on how Stack Overflow built and tested new GenAI concepts to remove developer friction, improve how communities connect and discover knowledge in a secure environment - all in a few months!
Architecture
Understanding Modern Trade-off Analysis in Software Architecture by Neal Ford from Thoughtworks - There are no best design practices in software architecture—everything is a trade-off. This keynote supplied a variety of techniques and tools to help architects and other team members understand and evaluate trade-offs.
Getting Majestic with Mermaid JS by Max Peckham - This session focused on how MermaidJS empowers users to effortlessly craft captivating diagrams, flowcharts, and sequence diagrams, enhancing communication and comprehension of complex concepts.
Micro Frontends - Using Web Components by Suryakant Devkar – This talk described the use of Angular Components in a React Application with an overview of the Micro Frontend concept.
Your Application Is a Function - How to Think Abstractly and Dodge Vendor Lock-In by Andrew Dunai - A deep dive into Hexagonal Architecture patterns and a look at best practices in building complex portable applications.
How to CEHRT - Things that will help in quick implementation by Ravi Agarwal - The session talked about why using FHIR makes sense for CEHRT and the simplest way to get FHIR resources ready for testing and certification.
Scale client onboarding and platform stickiness with a composable architecture by Ronnie Xie from MuleSoft/SalesForce - This session showed how to create a scalable approach to client onboarding through API-led connectivity while monetizing and evangelizing an ecosystem of partners and clients through an API program.
Google Cloud SQL workshop by Veena Popuri & Michael Coleman from Google - Cloud SQL Overview and Migration Process focused on Scalability & Replication, High Availability, Connectivity & Access Management & Security, Monitoring & Logging and Modernization.
Evolutionary and Iterative Architecture Workshop - This workshop showed how to perform iterative design in software architecture, towards the goal of building systems that can gracefully evolve over time.
Architecting FHIR solutions - Is there more to it than just exchanging FHIR documents? By Scott Carter - This talk explained how, when, and if FHIR can be used within a solution touching on practical applications of FHIR and design considerations.
The Health API Past, Present, Future by Shawn Carter - This show and tell gave an overview of the Health API architecture and engagement requirements and how to onboard a new API to the system.
Unlocking the Future of Software Deployments - Journey from Manual Chaos to Automated Magic with Google Cloud by Brian Jerome - The session showed actionable strategies to manage any project from one team’s experiences as they crafted the blueprint to streamline their workflows.
Maintainable GraphQL for scalable APIs by Martin Kuehnhausen - A walkthrough of approaches such as Apollo Federation, stitching, and fusion that are powerful for distributing the development, management, and maintenance of GraphQL APIs.
Azure DevOps - Zero to Hero by Isaac Johnson - This workshop covered an overview of Azure DevOps, including Dashboards, Wiki, Repos, Artifacts, Work Item configurations, webhooks, service connections, and connecting our instance to external infrastructure like Clouds, Kubernetes, and more.
Design documentation - what, why & how? By Balki Nakshatrala - This talk dove into the pivotal role of design documentation and explored its various forms and best practices to ensure clarity, consistency, and effective collaboration.
Event-Driven Microservices: Navigating Challenges and Unpacking Solutions by Daniel Elsner - This talk included topics ranged from tips for dealing with concurrency & idempotency, whether you should let your deployments scale up and down, advice for monitoring, automation testing, and more.
DDD ValueObjects - Why they're useful and how to use them (workshop) - The session showed how object-oriented based validation technique is superior to any other validation practices and how to use ValueObjects in your code along with a sample C# solution (with unit tests).
Processes and Best Practices
A Developer’s Guide to Achieving UI Consistency -Cultivating the WellSky UI Experience in Your Project by Lauren Reichert - This session shed light on the symbiotic relationship between developers and designers, highlighting how both parties influence the outcomes of consistency for our end users.
Performance Engineering as it relates to user experience by Jon Barton from TEKsystems - This presentation reviewed what performance engineering means and how it can tremendously affect end-user experience.
Connect with your inner innovator over a cup of coffee - Session to help refocus your mindset to bring innovation to everything we do at WellSky.
Tips and tricks to be more effective at Innersourcing by Chris Reddington from GitHub - This session explored what InnerSource is, core concepts, tips, and tricks to get started, and GitHub features such as GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Actions, and more which can help you along your journey.
Let Others Do Work for You (And Pay it Forward) - An introduction to InnerSource, how it is going at WellSky (data/summary as well as specific examples), and how you can get involved.
Driving Engineering Standards through {Standards as code}, the DevSecOps way by Madhu Madhanas from CitiusTech - A pragmatic practitioner session to apply GitOps style definition and version management for standards as code.
System Design Reviews done right! By Shashank Date - This session was an exploration of System Design Reviews and their place in the software development lifecycle.
Effective Strategies and Tactics for Wrangling Cloud Costs by Sean Griffin - Talk on the Enterprise Platform group's process to reduce its cloud costs by nearly 75%. It covered the operational process they put in place to monitor costs and the projects they completed to reduce costs.
New Relic - Lessons Learned. A collection of tips, tricks, and suggestions for working with New Relic by Danny Roessner - This session provided some tips and suggestions around the various functionality for beginners and teams looking to get further insights into their application monitoring with New Relic.
New Relic Super-Agent by Audie Moradi from New Relic - New Relic highlighted an open standards-based agent (using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and others) that will be designed to collect full observability with one agent. 
Data & Security
An Introduction to Generating and Utilizing Synthetic Healthcare Data by Adrian Sutherland from Endava - This session introduced the subject and its business benefits, discussed different techniques for generating synthetic data and explored potential use cases.
Sisense's Compose SDK as a tool for developers to put analytics anywhere by Stephen Puma and Steve Peterson - A session that delved into methods for embedding analytics, spotlighting Sisense's approaches and their use cases.
Unlocking Data using BigQuery and Datastream by Andrea Barto - Session to Improve the insights and accessibility of data with the serverless architecture of BigQuery.
Data Organization - From Application to Architecture by Scott Rosenthal - The session showed how data must be organized so that it can be absorbed by our applications and accessed by our clients in a secure, prompt, and useful fashion for most effectively usage.
Beyond Dashboards - A New Era of Data Integration with Sisense by Matt Lager & Midhun Kadavil - An engaging exploration of how Sisense is revolutionizing the field of data analytics, showed the dynamic functionalities of Sisense and inspire attendees to think beyond traditional dashboarding.
News Blitz - Security News in Rapid-fire! By Greg Lauer - Over 50 security news subjects in less than 10 minutes. A fun and fast-paced way to communicate security hacks, convictions, embarrassments, alarming services, and general cyber security news.
Strategic Initiatives in Wellsky Cybersecurity by Jami Albro-Fisher - This talk described two strategic initiatives and how they fit with WellSky's One Platform vision including an analysis of our current Disaster Recovery capabilities and how we should think about meeting the resiliency demands of our clients.
Cybersecurity Capture-the-Flag Competition – A fun session to test cyber security knowledge and hacking skills in this capture-the-flag event and a 2-hour workshop will go over solutions.
