IT Professionals Conference

Kuali Build: Power Your Forms. Streamline Your Workflow.
2026-05-28 12:30 - 13:00 (America/Chicago) | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Room B2250 & Virtual
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Don’t settle for Google Forms or emailing fillable PDFs around for approvals; Kuali Build empowers non-IT, business-centric staff to easily build fillable forms that can then be sent for approvals, emails, and tasks. In addition, Kuali Build applications can leverage integrations across multiple systems, including PersonAPI, FinanceAPI, and Data warehouses. This allows developers the ability to validate email addresses, look up current jobs, look up and validate Workday financial information to pull specific data into their forms and workflows. DoIT’s Low Code Solution team is here to assist and guide you in the process.

Presenter(s)

Joel Herron

Recording

What Good Leadership Actually Looks Like. A Story About Mental Health, Trust, and Teams.
2026-05-28 12:30 - 13:00 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Hello World (Room 1570) & Virtual
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A few years ago, I was standing on a bluff near my home. I had decided I was done. Two days later, I checked myself into the psych ward at the VA hospital.
I’m a DevOps engineer at UW-Madison and a US Army veteran with seven combat tours. The PTSD didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. But this talk isn’t really about that. It’s about what happened next.
My leadership team handled it right. Not from a playbook, but in the ways that actually mattered. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when a team has built something real, where people actually matter, and that doesn’t stop being true when things get hard.
Every team has someone carrying something heavy. Most of them are carrying it quietly. This talk is about what it looks like when a team gets it right, and what any of us can do to be that for someone else.

Presenter(s)

Dave Lyons

Recording

Normalizing Failure: How To Create Psychological Safety to Make Your Organization Successful
2026-05-28 13:15 - 14:15 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Room B2590 & Virtual
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In our day-to-day work lives, it is common to want to celebrate our successes. Social Media (e.g., LinkedIn) is rife with examples of people boosting themselves and others, describing the successes and accomplishments that they’ve achieved. Similarly, résumés and CVs are full of our achievements, and, as these tend to serve as our professional introductions to one another, it’s no wonder many are afraid to talk about those not-so-successful outcomes that are as much a part of workplace life as the successes we achieve.
This is where normalizing failure comes into play! Creating an environment where team members are comfortable trying new initiatives, developing creative, innovative ways of tackling challenges, and then determining what works, figuring out what doesn’t, and helping others learn from the lessons we experience, helps to build a psychologically safe environment that people crave working in and that often celebrates ever-better achievements.
Learn creative ways to make this happen in your environment… even if you have been afraid to fail before.

Presenter(s)

Sean Bossinger
Amanda Thornton

Recording

Raised on Anime, Working in IT: How Japanese Anime Inspired Careers in IT and Cybersecurity
2026-05-28 13:15 - 14:15 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Hello World (Room 1570) & Virtual
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This session dives into Japanese Anime (Manga) and its influence on people like us in IT who are motivated to pursue careers in STEM, networking, and cybersecurity. We will discuss how specific Anime genres (e.g., big robots, cyberpunk, isekai, etc.) foreshadowed new technologies. Presenters Tomomi Imamura, Didier Contis, and Ryan Leavitt, who grew up in Japan, France, and Wisconsin (respectively), and watched a wide range of anime, will discuss their perspectives and how the anime shaped their interests.

Presenter(s)

Tomomi Imamura
Didier Contis
Ryan Leavitt

Recording

Wardley Mapping: An Interactive Workshop to Map Strategic Planning
2026-05-28 13:15 - 14:15 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Room B2250 & Virtual
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Wardley Mapping is a powerful tool that allows for visually mapping strategic moves. We will go through a brief introduction, and then in the 2nd half, we’ll get our hands dirty by actually mapping an example problem space.

Presenter(s)

Phil Jochimsen

Recording

The Art of Adaptation: Real Stories of Navigating through Change
2026-05-28 13:15 - 14:15 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Room 1524 & Virtual
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We’re all experiencing change at a rapid pace, from leadership to major technical tools to campus structures. Being in and learning from the community can be both cathartic and helpful. This panel and conversation will explore how IT Professionals adapt, respond, and lead through uncertainty, organizational shifts, or personal transitions.

Panel

Stefan Wahe
Sabrina Messer
Phyllis Treige
Brian Lin
Dan Jacobsohn

Facilitators

Elizabeth Simcock
Chris Last
Laura Grady

Recording

AI Agents for IT Productivity
2026-05-28 14:30 - 15:00 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Room 1524 & Virtual
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We will exploring how ‘agentic’ IT tools, including ones available to everyone today, can be used in powerful ways for personal productivity: first with an ‘agent-as-expert’ pattern with M365 Copilot, then automating a complex (and time-consuming) code migration with agent integration in an IDE, and finally showing how agent orchestration can simplify complex tasks like document processing.

Presenter(s)

Lucas Gallagher

Recording

Get It Out Of Your Head: Your brain wasn't built for this (and neither was Excel)
2026-05-28 14:30 - 15:00 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Room B2250 & Virtual
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Your brain is great at solving problems; it’s terrible at storing them. Yet many of us are mentally tracking dozens of tasks, digging through reply-all chains, and marking everything as “high priority.” Your teammates don’t know where things stand, and on a bad week, neither do you. Externalizing your work isn’t about bureaucracy; it’s about protecting your thinking, making capacity visible, and building a shared system that’s easier than the chaos it replaces.

Presenter(s)

Ryan Horrisberger

Recording

Project Management for Messy People
2026-05-28 14:30 - 15:00 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Room B2590 & Virtual
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In IT, you may not always have a project manager, but almost all of us are asked to execute on projects as part of our work. This session will focus on how to make project management principles work for those of us with busy jobs and busy lives.

Presenter(s)

Rebekah Novak

Recording

2026 IT Recognition Awards Presentation
2026-05-28 15:15 - 16:15 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Hello World (Room 1570) & Virtual
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View on YouTube

Join us in honoring our outstanding colleagues who have made significant contributions to the UW–Madison IT community. The 2026 IT Recognition Awards celebrate the dedication, innovation, and achievements of our talented IT professionals in 7 award categories:

Ellen La Luzerne Community Builder Award
Janet E. Plato Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award
Lifetime Achievement Award
Rising Star Award
Team Achievement Award
Transformational Achievement Award
Unsung Hero Award

Take this opportunity to recognize and applaud your colleagues who go above and beyond in their roles, strengthening our IT community and shaping the future of technology at the university.
Reception to follow for in-person attendees.

Learn more about the awards and view past recipients: https://it.wisc.edu/uw-madison-it-recognition-awards/

Recording

IT Recognition Awards Reception
2026-05-28 16:15 - 16:45 | Morgridge Hall, 1205 University Ave, Madison, WI, 53706, United States
Garden Atrium (Lower Level)

Celebrate with our IT Recognition Award winners! Light refreshments will be provided.

This event is open to all attendees, regardless of whether they have registered for hybrid or virtual only attendance.

Procurement, Personal Liability, and Possibly a Perfect Solution
2026-05-29 09:00 - 09:15 | WI
Virtual
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As a state institution, Procurement is hard. There are just a few people on campus who can actually bind the UW to a contract, and unfortunately, all of those little click-through agreements can only be agreed to by those people. Come find out how to avoid your personal financial liability and how to best move with the system instead of against it.

Presenter(s)

Phil Jochimsen

Recording

How to build custom blocks for the new UW Theme 2.0
2026-05-29 09:00 - 09:30 | WI
Virtual
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Join Andrea Roenning and Nate Finch as they demonstrate how to build and maintain custom WordPress blocks for the Block Editor.
In this session, we’ll go over:

getting set up locally for block development
choosing a static or dynamic block
using WordPress Gutenberg components and libraries
building and maintaining small and large blocks
bundling and distributing the blocks for use on sites

Block-building setup and development can be tricky when you’re first starting. Join us to see how you can build custom experiences for your users.

Presenter(s)

Andrea Roenning
Nate Finch

Recording

Replacing Spreadsheets: A Consolidated View of Network Infrastructure Data
2026-05-29 09:00 - 09:30 | WI
Virtual
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Most network teams juggle spreadsheets and siloed tools to track subnets, VLANs, firewalls, and access. This session demos a single homegrown app that pulls everything together—including Infoblox—into a single, reliable view. See how it improves visibility, cuts down on manual work, and makes it easier to understand and manage your network.

Presenter(s)

Eric Dieckman

Recording

DNS and DHCP infrastructure at UW-Madison
2026-05-29 09:00 - 09:30 | WI
Virtual
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DNS is critical for almost all modern network services. This talk will describe how reliable and resilient DNS (and DHCP) service infrastructure is implemented at UW-Madison.

Presenter(s)

Tim Czerwonka

Recording

Building an AI Tutor With Google Tools
2026-05-29 09:40 - 10:40 | WI
Virtual
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An explanation and a technical demo of how to build an AI tutor for any skill with Google’s Gemini and the Obsidian text editor. By using Gemini in the filesystem, users are able to save prompts from the LLM as files and then edit those files directly. This allows anyone to use Gemini to create a local tutor that will quiz you, grade quizzes, have persistent storage in the filesystem, provide links to relevant documentation, and iteratively improve as the user uses the tutor system. Because it is saved in the filesystem, a user can come back to the folder days or weeks later, and the full AI context will still be there, by utilizing the GEMINI.md system instructions file as persistent state storage.
I will have some slides to explain the theory and setup with a live technical demo creating an AI tutor for a new skill in real time, showing how it can be designed, implemented, and used efficiently and safely.

Presenter(s)

Sean McConnell

Recording

Looking at how LLMs might help your work
2026-05-29 09:40 - 10:40 | WI
Virtual
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A lot of marketing out there is pitching “AI is for everything, no one will have jobs”. This session aims to demystify that notion, and give you a solid framework to evaluate what kinds of work might possibly be candidates for automation, for document drafting, and that which will never be for an AI to do.

Presenter(s)

Phil Jochimsen

Recording

AI and You
2026-05-29 10:50 - 11:20 | WI
Virtual
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Encourage people to make individual choices about AI in their jobs, within University guidelines and applicable standards. There will also be a brief discussion about applications outside work, including trip planning, writing, and searches.

Presenter(s)

Julie Johnson

Recording

What even is technical debt?
2026-05-29 10:50 - 11:20 | WI
Virtual
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A meditation on the nature of technical debt, adjacent concepts, and precision of language.
Where did this term come from?
What do we mean when we use this term?
Can we usefully distinguish “technical debt” from other categories of “things we don’t like”?
What can we learn from the “debt” metaphor?
What are the shortcomings of the “debt” metaphor? What other metaphors are available, and what might we learn from them?
What does all this mean? How can I responsibly navigate incurring and paying down technical debt in my IT work at the University? How does this affect the human beings who perform and are touched by this work?
This talk will examine the apparent origins of this concept from Ward Cunningham, trace some of how it has been expanded upon and applied since. We will appreciate the metaphor while also considering its shortcomings. We will examine other available metaphors.
The audience will leave the talk more ready to think critically about “technical debt.”

Presenter(s)

Andrew Petro

Recording

How Containers Work Under the Hood
2026-05-29 10:50 - 11:20 | WI
Virtual
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This session will cover details on how containers (such as Docker) are implemented in Linux. There will be code samples as well, so you can try implementing what’s presented yourself. At the end of the session, you will have a deeper understanding of how containers work that you can use for troubleshooting and debugging.

Presenter(s)

Nuwan Kumarasiri

Recording

Continuous Improvisation: Adapting Process, Governance, and Communication in ITSM
2026-05-29 10:50 - 11:20 | WI
Virtual
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When the recent large‑scale ITSM consolidation and implementation at the School of Medicine & Public Health launched, improvisation became a key strategy. This session explores how undocumented processes, unclear ownership, and late‑breaking dependencies drove an iterative approach to intake, scope, and governance. Along the way, inconsistent communication revealed the need for structured forums, shared accountability, and a shift from simple decision‑making to intentional alignment. Attendees will leave with practical lessons on process building, project communication, operations setup, and resilience in complex environments.

Presenter(s)

Lindsay Bolan

Recording

Appreciating jj-vcs
2026-05-29 12:20 - 12:35 | WI
Virtual
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jj-vcs (“Jujutsu”) is a free and open source distributed version control system interoperable with Git but offering different abstractions and arguably better ergonomics. This talk will describe jj-vcs both on its own terms and on how it relates to Git, which may be familiar to many. We will work on a few examples of using jj-vcs to demonstrate the different abstractions and ergonomics. Is jj-vcs the future? I don’t know. However, it is possible for it to be part of your immediate future, because it interoperates with Git today.
You might prefer its abstractions and ergonomics. This flash talk is intended to give current Git users just enough of a taste to make an informed choice to learn more.

Presenter(s)

Andrew Petro

Recording

Simple Accessibility Wins in the KnowledgeBase
2026-05-29 12:20 - 12:50 | WI
Virtual
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I have been the DoIT Help Desk KnowledgeBase (KB) Documentation Lead for 4 years, and over this time witnessed many of the same common digital accessibility mistakes. I have a presentation with simple fixes for these common mistakes to help make your documentation much more accessible, including correct heading numbering, alt text for screenshots, complex tables, and more. It’s meant for the busy technologist who wants to successfully and quickly publish accessible documentation.

Presenter(s)

Dana Gerber-Margie

Recording

What Could Go Wrong? Building a Long-Term Archive in the Real World
2026-05-29 12:20 - 12:50 | WI
Virtual
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When you build a system designed to preserve data for years, you quickly discover that everything eventually goes wrong; storage fills up, transfers fail, files corrupt, and assumptions break under real-world conditions. This talk tells the story of our Long Term Archive system: how it started, the unexpected challenges we encountered in production, and how we iterated toward robust, reliable solutions. We’ll cover concrete examples and share the lessons we learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

Presenter(s)

Patrick Meade
Steve Barnet

Recording

Utilizing AI Tools to Design and Develop Engaging Online Compliance Training for UW-Madison Staff, Faculty, and Students
2026-05-29 12:20 - 12:50 | WI
Virtual
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This session will demonstrate how expert instructional designers on the DoIT-Academic Technology Learn@UW Team utilize AI tools and instructional technologies, including LLMs, NotebookLM, and Articulate 360 AI Assistant, to design and develop engaging online training. While our work is centered around UW-Madison and compliance training, the same concepts can be applied across departments and institutions. We will discuss the steps we take to synthesize and organize content, as well as assessments to evaluate learning. Finally, we will end our talk with a review of best practice tips and tricks around using AI for instructional design purposes.

Presenter(s)

Cori Schmidtbauer
Lily Sullivan

Recording

DoH! How to implement DNS over HTTPS on Windows Server 2025
2026-05-29 13:00 - 13:15 | WI
Virtual
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DNS traffic is rarely encrypted on endpoints, with plain-text queries going back and forth over the network on port 53. On an enterprise network, this is usually not a concern, but as endpoints leave trusted networks, steps must be taken to ensure privacy and security to mask DNS requests as normal HTTPS traffic.
RFC 8484, DNS Queries over HTTPS (DoH), was adopted by the IETF in October 2018. Since then, Windows clients have been able to take advantage of DNS encryption: Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 both support DoH. However, Microsoft has not supported DNS over TLS (DoT) or DNS over HTTPS (DoH) in the past for its built-in DNS server. With the recent release of Windows Server 2025, Microsoft has begun testing the implementation of DoH on Windows Server. While not yet ready for production, this is an important step forward in providing end-to-end encryption for DNS queries on DNS servers that can be encrypted and managed centrally.
This presentation will go over the above, then go into DoH and Windows Server 2025’s implementation and the lessons learned along the way.

Presenter(s)

Jay Scholz

Recording

Faster, Better and Cheaper: Refactoring Course Search & Enroll
2026-05-29 13:00 - 13:30 | WI
Virtual
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In this presentation, we plan to share how we migrated the CS&E from a manually provisioned infrastructure into an environment provisioned with Infrastructure as Code. In the process, we reduced AWS infrastructure costs by 35% (nearly $3.5K/month) and improved performance and reliability. This included replacing Apache/Shibboleth with Cloudfront/OIDC and replacing several containerized applications with lambda functions.

Presenter(s)

Brian Hill
Lyle Hanson
Ben Nylund
Nuwan Kumarasiri

Recording

So, you need an Accessible web interface?
2026-05-29 13:00 - 13:30 | WI
Virtual
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A triptych through recent additions to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the last 10 years that are useful for improving a bespoke or legacy web application, which may not have been designed with accessibility in mind and predates some of the more advanced features that are now built into every modern web browser.
Examples:

Building a bespoke web app framework (like Django, Dancer, or Mojolicious) to separate server code from presentation while retaining as much of the legacy code base and structure as possible to avoid needing to rewrite the world
Use of the HTML5 elements such as and ;

, , and ; text fields with client-side regex validation using the pattern attribute, as well as accessibility using elements and title attributes.
Use of JavaScript document.querySelectorAll() to add interactivity efficiently using high-performance CSS selectors
Use of ARIA aria-live and role attributes to notify a sighted or non-sighted user of changes to the page caused by interactive elements

We’ve spent time learning how to improve our web UIs to be more usable and accessible, and we can get the most value out of our learnings by sharing them with the community.

Presenter(s)

Mark Tinberg

Recording

It’s not you, it’s… just time: How to break up well with Advanced Custom Fields
2026-05-29 13:00 - 13:30 | WI
Virtual
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Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) has been a mainstay for custom WordPress development since it arrived on the scene. It’s still a great plugin.
But, is it time to move away from ACF and start using what WordPress core gives you in custom block development?
In this talk, we’ll go over:

The ACF data model, and why it can slow down your site at scale
Dynamic vs. Static blocks and when to use each
Custom block development options in PHP and JS
How and when to use attributes or post meta for your custom block
Removing legacy ACF rows in your database

Come find out if you should break up with ACF, and thank it for its years of faithful support. You’ll always have the memories!

Presenter(s)

Nate Finch

Recording

The surprisingly simple tech behind digital cinema
2026-05-29 13:40 - 14:10 | WI
Virtual
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An extra nerdy dive into the presentation hardware, file formats, distribution systems, and other technologies that make modern cinematic presentations happen.

Presenter(s)

Pete Sengstock

Recording
