Culture
Showing 22 out of 22 results
Software Engineering at Google
What’s the difference between programming and software engineering? Join Titus Winters, co-curator of “Software Engineering at Google”, and Matt Kulukundis while they approach the lessons learned by software engineering teams at Google in establishing the right practices for writing sustainable code in a safe environment. Discover what Google is still trying to improve on and what software decisions are difficult to undo.
Software Architecture: The Hard Parts
There are no easy decisions in software architecture. Instead, there are many hard parts--difficult problems or issues with no best practices--that force you to choose among various compromises. With this book, you'll learn how to think critically about the trade-offs involved with distributed architectures.
Software-Defined Culture
Conway's Law tells us "organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." When organizations are healthy and dynamic, adaptability and high-quality software result. Unhealthy organizations “ship the org chart”, producing software that reflects dysfunctional practices. What if we turn Conway's law around and make technology choices that improve our culture? Can bad software choices create new rifts? Are we selecting tech that disempowers developers and keeps operations up at night? Is our software architecture secretly encoding new divisions between our teams? I've run containers in production, written microservices, and operated all manner of infrastructure from established favorites to the latest hipster trends. Let's talk about how all the usual technological suspects (and maybe a few surprising ones) can shape the organizational culture in startups and enterprises alike.
Scaling Engineering Teams
All teams go through several lifecycle phases, whether in a startup or an established enterprise. This talk should help you identify which phase of growth lifecycle your team is in and how being aware of it can help you build the right culture, make effective technology choices, hire people who will thrive in your current and next phases of growth so that you are setup to succeed well into the future. I will draw on my experience working in finance, startups, large tech, to highlight various phases going from a startup to an enterprise and chalking that path from a single application with a single datastore to a suite of applications and datastores. I will talk about culture, team structure, recruiting and present ways to hire, train, and retain the best talent and leadership required to build the best startups and modern enterprises with thoughtful software engineering principles. I will be answering any questions ranging from performance tuning for effective management practices at scale, making effective technology choices, balancing quality vs expedience, and managing team growth. *Book recommendations*: * The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen * High Output Management by Andrew Grove * The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Build Agility with Design Sprints
Preaching the benefits of agility when pressed for a twelve month release schedule makes for an awkward conversation. Business commitment and organisational change are needed to successfully adopt agility-building practices like agile, lean product management and continuous delivery. When their adoption is only tolerated by the wider organisation on the condition that legacy ways-of-working are respected, their effectiveness is critically constrained. So how can you shift the enterprise mindset away from legacy process, practise and behaviours with compelling examples of agility and responsiveness? You could run design sprints. Design sprints both answer critical business questions and challenge the traditional ways-of-working that can hamstring business agility. They accelerate customer feedback, break down organisational silos, de-risk experimentation, build shared understanding - ploughing the way to introduce other agility building practices. **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF3B2JC" target="_blank">Join the #teams channel on Slack to send your questions to Gary</a>
Common Retrospectives Traps and Solutions
Improve your retrospectives by awareness of antipatterns. Make your retrospectives enjoyable and effective. Retrospectives are indispensable for continuous learning and improvement in Lean, Agile, DevOps, and other contexts. But too many organizations run retrospectives “in name only,” and fail to generate the value they promise. In this talk, Aino introduces challenges that undermine the effectiveness of retrospectives, and shows exactly how to overcome each of them. Using the familiar “patterns” approach, Aino describes antipatterns related to team and meeting structure, inadequate or counterproductive planning, human interaction, and much more. From “blaming and naming” to too much smalltalk, negativity to cultural disconnects in distributed teams, Aino reveals traps she’s encountered in leading hundreds of retrospectives -- and presents proven solutions. We will look at body language, psychology behind retrospectives, online retrospectives, different types of retrospectives, etc. With her insights and guidance, you can run retrospectives that deliver actionable improvements and concrete value. Or at least acknowledge when you make the same mistakes as her. Target audience: Facilitators, project leaders, managers, coaches, team leaders, Scrum Masters Prerequisites: Have facilitated retrospectives or wants to facilitate them in the future **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF3B2JC" target="_blank">Join the #teams channel on Slack to send your questions to Aino</a>
Agility at Scale: A Meeting of Mindsets
The shift from industrial thinking to digital product thinking is profound. Tools and structures designed to support one often work directly against the other. Great industrial leadership does not transfer to great digital product leadership. So we tend to think of them as being in conflict. Agile-in-the-small - a single team with a single product - is all about digital product thinking. Agile-in-the-large is a very different thing. In this talk, Daniel and Anna show how combining industrial and digital thinking is the key to achieving autonomy with alignment, and they offer pragmatic advice and useful tools for achieving agility at scale. **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF3B2JC" target="_blank">Join the #teams channel on Slack to send your questions to Daniel and Anna</a>
Talking With Tech Leads
**As a software engineer, you will have learned that "naming things" will remain one of the most difficult tasks in our industry. This is even more confusing when it comes to roles and responsibilities for the tech lead role.**<br> After interviewing many people playing technical leadership roles, establishing a European-wide tech lead training program in his last company, and training hundreds of tech leads around the world, Patrick will share his lessons learned about what exactly a tech lead is, and what it takes to make the role successful. If you currently have or would like to take on a leadership role for an engineering team, come to this session to hear some practical tips that will make you a more successful Tech Lead. **In this talk, you'll learn:**<br> * You'll understand how a developer and a tech lead role are very different and what they can do to prepare **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF3B2JC" target="_blank">Join the #teams channel on Slack to send your questions to Patrick</a>
The Development Metrics You Should Use (but Don’t)
Have you ever had a gut feeling a project is about to go off course but no way to validate (or invalidate) that feeling? Has your team ever been burned by an inaccurate estimate or unreasonable expectation? Have you ever wished you could peer a bit into the future? Navigating the uncertainty of knowledge work is often difficult and uncomfortable. During this session, learn new ways to visualize your team’s reliability and variability of delivery using the data you already collect. Instead of relying entirely on your gut or laboring over estimates, learn to articulate trade offs, predict outcomes and describe their likelihood. While this session doesn’t teach you to eliminate uncertainty or allow you to see the future, it does provide you with tools to explore and chart a reasonable course through the inherent ambiguity of knowledge work. Angry optimist imagining more equitable futures through technology. **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF3B2JC" target="_blank">Join the #teams channel on Slack to send your questions to Catherine</a>
Stop Punching Yourself in the Face
Making choices is hard. As developers, we make choices all the time: architectures, frameworks, libraries, cloud providers, etc. So, if you have been around for a while, you probably ended up regretting at least some of those choices. In this talk, you will learn how to make choices responsibly and what to look out for if you want to minimize the chance of regretting them later. I dive into several situations where the choices we made as a team have gone horribly wrong. Luckily, I learned these lessons the hard way, so you don’t have to! Now, if only there was a way to prove your newly acquired skills to your peers and superiors. Well, there is: RAD Certification! I will conclude my talk by telling you about this. And as a bonus, if you get certified during the conference, you can score your RAD certificate and corresponding swag! **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF4NRQQ" target="_blank">Join the #architecture channel on Slack to send your questions to Hannes</a>
“Good Enough” Architecture part 2
In this session, we’ll take a look at some of the ways we can determine whether the development efforts we’re undertaking suffer from too much or too little focus on architecture. We’ll examine a number of real-world examples that are intended to inspire either admiration or terror, and try to find some recipes of how we can get more of the former and less of the latter in our own projects. What will the audience learn from this talk? How to find the right balance between agile/ iterative/ incremental development, diving right into coding, up-front planning, and continuous architecture focus. **Does it feature code examples and/or live coding?** No **Prerequisite attendee experience level:** Level 200 **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF4NRQQ" target="_blank">Join the #architecture channel on Slack to send your questions to Stefan</a>
“Good Enough” Architecture part 1
In this session, we’ll take a look at some of the ways we can determine whether the development efforts we’re undertaking suffer from too much or too little focus on architecture. We’ll examine a number of real-world examples that are intended to inspire either admiration or terror, and try to find some recipes of how we can get more of the former and less of the latter in our own projects. What will the audience learn from this talk? How to find the right balance between agile/ iterative/ incremental development, diving right into coding, up-front planning, and continuous architecture focus. **Does it feature code examples and/or live coding?** No **Prerequisite attendee experience level:** Level 200 **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF4NRQQ" target="_blank">Join the #architecture channel on Slack to send your questions to Stefan</a>
Five Things Every Developer Should Know about Software Architecture
The software development industry has made huge leaps in recent years, yet software development teams are often more chaotic than they are self-organizing, with the resulting code being more of a mess than was perhaps anticipated. Successful software projects aren't just about good code, and sometimes you need to step away from the IDE for a few moments to see the bigger picture. This video is aimed at software developers who want to learn more about software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility. **Attendees:** <a href="https://goto-m6l1171.slack.com/archives/C01ELF4NRQQ" target="_blank">Join the #architecture channel on Slack to send your questions to Simon</a>
Technologists Around the Campfire: Social Audio as a Vector For Engineering Wisdom
Before there were systems of writing, technical know-how was passed via oral tradition. Even with our modern amenities, this deep aspect of our humanity remains essential: engineers very much learn from listening to stories from one another, be they over the lunch table, at the local haunt, or in the hallway track. But how do we do this in an era of remote work? We believe that social audio has an essential role to play in this new world. This belief is borne of our own experience: during the pandemic, we started gathering weekly via social audio -- first via Twitter Spaces, and now via Discord. While this started as a lark, we have found this space to have outsized impact: we recorded these conversations, and have made them available as a podcast ("Oxide and Friends") and have been struck by how many young technologists in particular have found them deeply meaningful. In this talk, we will talk about our experiences with social audio, and why we have come to view our lark as tacking into some of the deepest and most important aspects of our engineering craft --and of our humanity.
The Sociotechnical Path to High-Performing Teams
There is a yawning gap opening up between the best and the rest — the top few percent of elite engineering teams are making incredible gains year over year in velocity, reliability and productivity, and more teams are achieving elite status every year. Yet meanwhile the bottom 75% of teams are actually losing ground each year. Contrary to common belief, this has almost nothing to do with engineering ability, and everything to do with the sociotechnical feedback loops that are the beating heart of every engineering org. Great teams make great engineers. So let’s talk about how great teams are forged.
The Long History of DevOps Failures
Sociotechnical system theory emerged in the 1950s studying the impact of rapid changes in technology and social organization on British coal mining. The theory considers the interdependence of social and technical factors in the work and proposes that optimal organizational performance can only be achieved by systems that account for both. The research showed that considerable investments in automation did not necessarily result in increased productivity and often decreased both safety and morale. The empirical results showed that cross functional teams integrated and aligned with technology investments were more productive, more safe and more happy. And then what happened? This presentation will present a whimsical chronicle of research and anecdotes from British coal in the 50s to Serverless platforms of today highlighting how generations relearn and forget the same basic lessons. The audience should gain an increased understanding of the impact of work design on organizational performance with a focus on the complex and dynamic challenges of delivering software in the modern workplace.
Zero Trust is For Networks, Not Your Teams
The whole idea of DevOps was about how we could work together better. But we broke down silos, and instead built new walls. The concept of zero trust has been widely applied to network security, however, it’s not a great way to think about our teams. This talk will explore how to foster a culture of trust in organizations, with a focus on outcomes. Leaders and individuals alike play a critical role in establishing and maintaining trust, which is crucial for the success of any team. One key aspect of building a culture of trust is facilitating and growing psychological safety within the team. This means creating an environment where individuals feel comfortable expressing their opinions, ideas, and concerns without fear of negative consequences. Moreover, trust is necessary for proper practices of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps, but often organizations lack the right setup to allow for it. This talk will feature practices inspired from the field of Resilience Engineering as well as proven DevOps approaches, with a focus on how leaders and individuals can create an environment where trust is valued, encouraged, and fostered. Attendees will take away insights and actionable tips to bring back to their teams to create a more resilient and effective organization.
Coaching Teams Through Team Change
Teams age and change. It's inevitable. People are going to join our teams and people are going to leave our teams. Sometimes we catalyze the changes. At other times, we need to adapt to the changes that happen which our out of our control. Part of the work in Dynamic Reteaming is in understanding and applying the 5 structural change patterns - one by one, grow and split, isolation, merging and switching. The other part is understanding and supporting the human impacts of reteaming. When we change our teams it can be really challenging for people and it takes some transition time to be ready to roll in our new team structure, especially if we were surprised by the reteaming or if we didn't want it to happen. This talk introduces the basics of dynamic reteaming and some techniques to apply when dealing with unexpected changes.
More Buzzwords Won't Help: The Long History of DevOps Failures
Sociotechnical system theory emerged in the 1950s studying the impact of rapid changes in technology and social organization on British coal mining. The theory considers the interdependence of social and technical factors in the work and proposes that optimal organizational performance can only be achieved by systems that account for both. The research showed that considerable investments in automation did not necessarily result in increased productivity and often decreased both safety and morale. The empirical results showed that cross functional teams integrated and aligned with technology investments were more productive, more safe and more happy. And then what happened? This presentation will present a whimsical chronicle of research and anecdotes from British coal in the 50s to Serverless platforms of today highlighting how generations relearn and forget the same basic lessons. The audience should gain an increased understanding of the impact of work design on organizational performance with a focus on the complex and dynamic challenges of delivering software in the modern workplace.
Lunch & Roundtable Discussions
Don't miss your chance to share, learn, and network with speakers and attendees! Grab your lunch and join us at one of the roundtables. **Programming with AI** Dive into the future of software development with Alex Castrounis. Explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we code and solve problems. Join the discussion to gain insights and share your thoughts on AI-driven programming. **Technical debt** Address the challenges of technical debt and head-on with Saleem Siddiqui. Explore strategies for managing, reducing, and avoiding the pitfalls of accumulated software decay. Exchange tips and tricks with your peers in an informative discussion. **Culture & Productivity** Boost your team's productivity with Heidi Helfand and Charity Majors. Discuss the importance of cultivating a healthy work culture and the impact it has on your team's output. Learn from others and share your own experiences in this vital roundtable on workplace dynamics.
Accelerating Junior Developers in Remote Teams
Unleash the potential of tomorrow's tech innovators! Join our panel of industry experts as they delve into cutting-edge strategies for accelerating junior developers in remote teams. Discover how to optimize onboarding processes, foster a culture of collaboration, and leverage the power of modern workspaces to unlock creativity and success for the next generation of software developers. Don't miss this dynamic discussion – learn how to empower and nurture your junior talent in the ever-evolving landscape of remote work!