After helping build the initial foundations for Momento’s backend services and infrastructure, I transitioned over to lead our developer ecosystem. That means that my current day job is providing clean, simple libraries that allow users to interact with Momento’s serverless cache and pub-sub products, with as little friction as humanly possible, in whatever environment they are already building things in. Nowadays, instead of building out our infrastructure, I’m focused on helping users remove things from theirs :)

This talk is intended for software engineers, at any level, who are curious about trends in modern programming languages. If you’re interested in learning about some patterns that are starting to become popular across a variety of different languages, and how you can take advantage of them to reduce the risk of bugs surfacing in your code at runtime, then this talk will have something for you!

We’ll learn to recognize some common programming patterns that are likely to cause bugs that can only be discovered at run time. We will discuss alternate programming strategies that can be used to move those classes of bugs forward from run time to build time. My hope is that you will walk away from this talk armed with some actionable patterns that you can apply to your own codebase, the next time you spot some code that could cause an avoidable bug!

As evidenced by the fact that this year's QCon SF has an entire track about Rust, I must say that the growth in popularity in Rust feels like an important breakthrough. The Rust compiler is one of the most impressive pieces of software I've ever used, and the language idioms really help steer developers towards writing cleaner, more maintainable, bug-free code. Add in the fact that the performance is so impressive and that it's the first mainstream language I've seen that manages to avoid using a garbage collector while still managing memory on your behalf, and it feels like a pretty big paradigm shift compared to other language trends of the last 10 years.

At QCon SF 2023, one of the talks that made a big impression on me was Shweta Saraf's talk about Multiplying Engineering Productivity. She talked about the concept of engineering leaders being "Accidental Diminishers", which can happen when leaders don't give their teammates enough ownership and space to grow. It's had a big impact on how I relate to my teammates and try to empower them. I especially loved this observation because I came to QCon expecting to take away technical learnings (which I did, in spades!), and not necessarily to walk away having learned how to be a better teammate.