Conference: Nov 5-7, 2018
Workshops: Nov 8–9, 2018
Track: Building Great Engineering Cultures
In today’s technology world, many companies recognize that their people are their biggest asset. But not everybody is thoughtful about what culture they want to create in order to attract and retain the best talent. For some companies, engineering culture is seemingly an afterthought - sometimes with dire consequences where questionable behavior is ignored for too long, until a scandal makes headlines.
In this track, we explore the meaning of culture in tech companies. We explore what startups and more established companies can do to create and maintain the kind of culture they want, and the impact this can have on their success. We also explore the interplay between a company’s product and their culture, recognizing that there is no one-size-fits all tech culture.
Katharina Probst is an Engineering Director at Netflix, where she is responsible for the availability and reliability of the streaming service used by more than 100 million people around the world. She previously led the API team at Netflix, one of the largest and most critical services for Netflix’s uptime. Prior to joining Netflix, she worked in the cloud platform team at Google. Her interests include reliable and scalable distributed systems, cloud computing, and building effective and successful teams. She also holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
by Sarah Novotny
Head of Open Source Strategy for GCP @Google
Kubernetes (kubernetes.io) project is becoming the de-facto standard for managing containerized applications. Kubernetes is a success in part because of Google's commitment to making it a community led project. Building strong teams is very challenging, all the more so for an open source community. In this talk, we will go behind the scenes to look at what what made kubernetes community operate as one. Learn how the members of the community applied practices of building organic teams...
by Linda Elkins
Leader Silicon Valley Innovation Center
W.L. Gore & Associates believes that a strong company culture is more than just a nice thing to have. They believe culture drives positive business results.
The company is well known for its distinctive culture, which has been detailed in numerous case studies and books, including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, The Future of Management by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen, and Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux....
by Marty Weiner
CTO @Reddit, formerly 2nd engineer @Pinterest
After building Pinterest from the beginning and rebuilding Reddit's engineering team as CTO, I can safely say building startups is hard. As a founder, engineer, lead, or manager, you not only have to build a great product and secure funding, but also build a great culture. If you don't build a great team, you will fail.
We're going to look at how companies evolve from very early stage startup growth to big companies and many of the management / cultural challenges faced at various...
by Bruce Johnson
Founder and COO @FullStory
You can’t impose culture on a team, but you can induce it.
Have you ever noticed that when you work with the same group of people for a while, everyone starts to use similar phrases, metaphors, and jokes? Those are legit memes: self-replicating concepts that form the building blocks of belief systems that drive people’s behavior.
By skillfully curating the memes that are introduced and...
by Valerie Aurora
Software Engineer & Diversity and Inclusion Consultant
Ally skills are ways people with more power and privilege can support people with less. Building and rewarding ally skills is crucial to building an inclusive engineering culture. Without them, the responsibility for fixing bias and discrimination in your culture falls to people with the least power and influence. This talk explains why allies should take action, describes some important ally skills, and recommends several concrete ways to embed ally skills in...
by Karen Catlin
Advocate for Women in Tech, Former VP OF Eng, Adobe
by Karen Casella
Engineering Leader @Netflix, previously @EBay & @Sun
by Randy Shoup
VP Engineering at StitchFix, Previously @Google & @Ebay
by Susan Nesbitt
Head of Business Development @ Make School
by Steve Johnson
Vice President of Product Design & Creative @Netflix
Moderated by Karen Casella, Engineering Leader @Netflix
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is an important topic in our industry, especially in light of changing demographics, globalization, and the competition for talent. Join industry leaders as they discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating and sustaining an inclusive culture and their experiences implementing diversity & inclusion strategies...
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Tracks
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Architectural practices from the world's most well-known properties, featuring startups, massive scale, evolving architectures, and software tools used by nearly all of us.
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Going Serverless
Learn about the state of Serverless & how to successfully leverage it! Lessons learned in the track hit on security, scalability, IoT, and offer warnings to watch out for.
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Microservices: Patterns and Practices
Stories of success and failure building modern Microservices, including event sourcing, reactive, decomposition, & more.
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DevOps: You Build It, You Run It
Pushing DevOps beyond adoption into cultural change. Hear about designing resilience, managing alerting, CI/CD lessons, & security. Features lessons from open source, Linkedin, Netflix, Financial Times, & more.
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The Art of Chaos Engineering
Failure is going to happen - Are you ready? Chaos engineering is an emerging discipline - What is the state of the art?
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The Whole Engineer
Success as an engineer is more than writing code. Hear inward looking thoughts on inclusion, attitude, leadership, remote working, and not becoming the brilliant jerk.
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Evolving Java
Java continues to evolve & change. Track covers Spring 5, async, Kotlin, serverless, the 6-month cadence plans, & AI/ML use cases.
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Security: Attacking and Defending
Offense and defensive security evolution that application developers should know about including SGX Enclaves, effects of AI, software exploitation techniques, & crowd defense
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The Practice & Frontiers of AI
Learn about machine learning in practice and on the horizon. Learn about ML at Quora, Uber's Michelangelo, ML workflow with Netflix Meson and topics on Bots, Conversational interfaces, automation, and deployment practices in the space.
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21st Century Languages
Compile to Native, Microservices, Machine learning... tailor-made languages solving modern challenges, featuring use cases around Go, Rust, C#, and Elm.
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Modern CS in the Real World
Applied trends in Computer Science that are likely to affect Software Engineers today. Topics include category theory, crypto, CRDT's, logic-based automated reasoning, and more.
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Stream Processing In The Modern Age
Compelling applications of stream processing using Flink, Beam, Spark, Strymon & recent advances in the field, including Custom Windowing, Stateful Streaming, SQL over Streams.
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Performance Mythbusting
Real world, applied performance proofs across stacks. Hear performance consideratiosn for .NET, Python, & Java. Learn performance use cases with OpenJ9, Instagram, and Netflix.
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Tools and Culture: What's Beyond a Stack of Containers?
Containers are not just a techology. It's a platform. Push your knowledge.
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Web as Platform
All things Browser, from JavaScript Frameworks for animation and AR / VR to Web Assembly and from protocol work to open standards evolution.
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Beyond Being an Individual Contributor
Beyond being an individual contributor. Building and Evolving managers and tech leadership.
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Building Great Engineering Cultures
Why engineering culture matters. Track features org scaling, memes as a culture tool, Ally skills, and panels on diversity / inclusion.
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Hardware Frontiers: Changes Affecting Software Developers Today
Topics around: Quantum computing, NVM, SMR, GPU, custom hardware, self-driving cars, and mobile hardware.
