Track: The Whole Engineer

Location: Ballroom BC

Day of week: Tuesday

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.

Track Host:
Dave Copeland
Director of Engineering & Senior Most Developer @Stitchfix

David Copeland is a programmer and author. He's the author of “Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap”, "The Senior Software Engineer" and "Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby". He has over 18 years of professional development experience from managing high-performance, high-traffic systems at LivingSocial or building the engineering team at Opower to working consulting gigs large and small. Currently, he's Director of Engineering at fashion start-up Stitch Fix.

10:35am - 11:25am

by Justin Becker
Engineering Manager @Netflix

Netflix’s culture memo famously says, “On a dream team, there are no brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is just too high.” Well, what is a brilliant jerk? If the cost to teamwork is high, what are some examples of the cost?

This presentation will focus on the jerk part of “brilliant jerk” and leave the brilliant calculation for another talk. We will spend a majority of the time on Emotional Intelligence and why it matters in...

11:50am - 12:40pm

by Anjuan Simmons
Technical Program Manager @Questback

Whether you’re a Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, or Project Manager for an engineering team, you probably weren’t handed a leadership instruction manual when you were given your first team to lead. Even experienced technical leaders usually operate from a set of instincts and the hard lessons learned from painful mistakes. However, leadership is a skill that you can learn and develop if you know where to look. You don't have to be a “born leader”, but you do need...

1:40pm - 2:30pm

by Kevin Stewart
VP of Engineering @Heptio

There has been much discussion about improving diversity in the tech industry. While admirable, focusing on diversity without accounting for inclusion can result in temporary gains. In this talk, we will examine the need for inclusive measures as part of building a strong engineering culture and its impact on the product development process. We will explore techniques for achieving balance in an industry that has historically skewed in a particular direction. Finally, we will look at these...

2:55pm - 3:45pm

by Dave Copeland
Director of Engineering & Senior Most Developer @Stitchfix

Being on a distributed team, working from your home or coffee shop isn't easy, but it can be incredibly rewarding. Making it work requires constant attention, as well as support from your team and organization. It's more than just setting up Slack and buying a webcam. We'll learn what you can do to be your best self as a remote team member, as well as what you need from your environment, team, and company. It's not about technical stuff—it's the human stuff. We'...

4:10pm - 5:00pm

by Justin Becker
Engineering Manager @Netflix

by Anjuan Simmons
Technical Program Manager @Questback

by Kevin Stewart
VP of Engineering @Heptio

by Dave Copeland
Director of Engineering & Senior Most Developer @Stitchfix

An engineer does more than write code. An engineer must work with a diverse array of people, and be a leader, a mentor, a presenter, a marketer, and a whole person. By building yourself beyond just writing code, you'll become an effective engineer. Come ask our speakers about how to make that happen. Let us hear your challenges and offer some tips, techniques, and new ways of thinking that have worked for us. Improving yourself beyond coding skills isn't as daunting as it sounds, and it's...

5:25pm - 6:15pm

by Randy Shoup
VP Engineering at StitchFix, Previously @Google & @Ebay

What makes a 10x engineer, or designer, or leader? It turns out that it is a surprisingly small part aptitude -- our skill at a particular task, and a surprisingly large part attitude -- how we go about it. It is far less the contributions of genetics, or education, or circumstance, than it is how we approach challenges, limitations, and opportunities in our work.

Weaving together diverse threads from Carol Dweck's growth mindset, to Daniel Pink's work on motivation, to modern DevOps...

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Tracks

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Microservices: Patterns and Practices

    Stories of success and failure building modern Microservices, including event sourcing, reactive, decomposition, & more.

  • 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. 

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Evolving Java

    Java continues to evolve & change. Track covers Spring 5, async, Kotlin, serverless, the 6-month cadence plans, & AI/ML use cases.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 21st Century Languages

    Compile to Native, Microservices, Machine learning... tailor-made languages solving modern challenges, featuring use cases around Go, Rust, C#, and Elm.

  • 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.

  • 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.