DeveloperWeek New York 2019

Have you ever found yourself struggling to build an engineering organization that is quality-driven with consistently great results? When we analyzed why we didn't feel our organization was performing at the level we had anticipated, we reverse engineered this to fundamental issues with our culture. Once we started working on this it had a ripple effect to our hiring process & then our onboarding process as well. This talk will dive into how we refactored our hiring process - and were able to build an interview machine, and rebuilt our onboarding from the ground up, to set up new hires for success from day one - enabling us to onboard successfully 10 new hires monthly, without organizational drag. This ultimately delivered a well-oiled high performing engineering organization through a practically applicable methodology that is easily replicable. This not only enabled us to improve the quality of our hires, but also retain excellent talent in the long-term.

Whether it's the small pet project at home, the open source project on GitHub or the large enterprise application at work: A big and important part of software engineering is good craftsmanship. Not without reason do we compare creating software solutions to building a house. Even the vocabulary sounds similar: We "build" applications, we "connect" systems and "do the plumbing", we "bolt" infrastructure together and "tinker" workarounds for existing problems. However a lot of things that are simply non-negotiable for a good craftsman are often ignored or interpreted in a creative way. But why? A lot of professions have been around a lot longer than software engineering and have developed "best practices" to handle typical problems and challenges. Especially aviation puts emphasis on precision and reliability - who wants to hear that his flight has been cancelled because of missing or bad quality maintenance? The same goes for doctors and nurses: Errors and carelessness can lead to life and death situations very quickly. So we as software engineers can definitely benefit from taking a closer look on aircraft maintenance or the medical sector to learn from them, optimize our processes and last but not least try to reduce the stress that we see over and over again.

Imagine you are leading a small startup engineering team, minding your own business, then BOOM! Suddenly you’ve been acquired by a company that is about 30 times your size. Their engineering team is much larger and uses a completely different tech stack. Oh, and it's located in another country, so you are now essentially their first remote engineering team. Your job is to make the integration an amazing success. Go!If you’re currently going through a post-merger integration and losing sleep over it, or if you simply want to be prepared, then this is just the session for you. You’ll learn about our story of going through the above scenario after getting acquired almost two years ago and then doubling our engineering team. You’ll see what worked and what didn’t so you can make your own acquisition a phenomenal success.

The hiring process often seems opaque and quixotic to developers. The bad news is that it's even worse than that. In this talk, I will explain what I've learned since becoming a recruiter... as well as some potentially jarring truths, including how a recruiter often can't put you up for a job that you aren't *already* doing and why recruiters almost never submit you if you have a lot of consulting stints or seem like a job hopper...and what you can do about that. I also share some strategies and tactics that candidates can leverage in the process, including etiquette for gracefully eluding domination during the negotiation process, best practices for maximizing compensation, and how leveraging word of mouth can short-circuit and circumvent undesirable aspects of the job search process.

What are the core ingredients in sustaining a thriving team of engineers, and how can effective teams be built and rebuilt? At Birchbox, we’ve been on a yearlong journey to improve our engineering organization at all levels — cultivating shared values, revamping our documentation and onboarding, rethinking process meetings and Jira use, migrating from Kanban to Scrum, moving from TechOps to DevOps, finding executive business owners to sponsor projects, capitalizing engineering effort, and switching from component to feature team organization.

In this talk, I’ll share some of our strategies and tactics, our reasons for adopting them, and why our team believes in them.

Every major technology shift for the last decade has been driven by persistent, consistent, realtime connections: drive-share has eclipsed taxis by instantly connecting riders and drivers; connected exercise machines like Peloton have brought community to home exercise; e-agriculture is boosting yields at rates unimaginable even ten years ago. There are two industries in the world today: those that have been transformed by realtime connections, and those that are about to be.

In this keynote we will examine how the always-on Internet is being replaced by the always-connected Internet; discover technologies that offered early promise and are now evolving into something new and different, with HTTP/2 ready to be the catalyst for the next growth spurt; and outline the new design patterns, combining globally-orchestrated realtime infrastructure with serverless and Edge computing, that will be fundamental to the emerging winners across industries.

Engineering teams at fast-growing startups face a unique challenge: As they welcome dozens and even hundreds of new faces a year, they must preserve the original ethos of what made them so successful in the first place. Without a set of clearly communicated and widely distributed core values, large engineering teams will have a fractured identity that prevents them from working in lockstep. In this talk, Brian will show how establishing guiding principles from the onset can help startups create more cohesive engineering teams as they scale. Sharing best practices from his experience at Lucidchart overseeing a team that has grown from a handful to hundreds of engineers, Brian will discuss how to clearly define your core values, communicate them to the organization, and enable a high-performance team. Attendees will discover how to put core values at the center of everything they do, including hiring, coaching, morale, promotions and even difficult conversations.

Will discuss high impact software product engineering. Weekly sprints. Experience and Perspective. Code Metrics on complexity, unit testing and refactoring && more.

That dreaded phrase in engineering... "can you provide me with an estimate?" Many engineers cringe at the thought of putting a set number of days on a story or ticket. We all know the downfalls of estimation when tied to a story - bloat of the story to include extraneous additions when it's overestimated and cutting of corners (think testing) when underestimated. That being said, for the product managers, business owners, and product owners, having a clear roadmap and sense of timeframe and budget is extremely helpful when trying to map out your strategy for product development. This talk will address some techniques your team can implement to provide estimates that don't get bog down your agile process. The process implements agile methodologies rather than the waterfall techniques that are often tied to estimation processes. The goal of this talk will be to provide you with practices you can bring back to your team that help with transparency in scope and streamlined development. 

As the COO of Def Method (a software consultancy based in NYC), I work closely with our clients and engineering teams to map out a process that offers flexibility and transparency. As such we've worked to develop a product discovery, estimation process, and re-estimation process that helps to guide each project we're on.