KEYNOTES & FEATURED
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
KEYNOTE: ScyllaDB -- Embracing Chaos: 20% Individual Projects and Your Companies Success
Join on Hopin
Tale has it that Gmail, AdSense, Google News have all started as a 20% individual projects.
At ScyllaDB R&D over the last 2 years we have been allowing R&D members to spend up to 20% on their individual projects and consider it a huge success.
In this talk I'll share our story of launching the 20% individual project and what guidelines we provide. I'll also share the frameworks we have set to track it and what changes we have done to enable its full potential.
Walking away from this talk you should consider is this right for my team?
KEYNOTE: Lucid Software -- Fixing the DevOps Communication Problem
Join on Hopin
DevOps is often implemented by embedding Ops team members in engineering, with the hope of increasing speed of work, creating camaraderie between teams and eliminating the “us vs. them” mentality. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t scale well and can often exacerbate issues of miscommunication as Ops team members start to feel siloed. Lucid’s VP of Infrastructure and IT, David Torgerson, has instead taken the opposite approach with his department, embedding engineers from every team into his Ops team. In this session, David will discuss how he’s implemented this change over the last several years, the lessons he’s learned, and how he believes this practice of “Actual DevOps” fosters empowerment within engineering and enables them to execute faster, while also holding engineers more accountable during production.
KEYNOTE: LinearB -- Communicating Engineering Progress to Your CEO
Join on Hopin
When I was a VP of Engineering, I would show up to the CEO's staff meeting every week and get the same question, "how can we accelerate project XYZ?" Answering this question was one of the most important aspects of my job. And yet I failed to answer it accurately most of the time.
In order to answer the question, first, we need to know:
- What is the current status of XYZ? And I'm not talking about "in progress" :)
- Which developers/teams are working on XYZ?
- What else are those developers/teams working on that are competing?
- Do we have any bottlenecks slowing us down?
There's no place we can go to get the answers to these questions. Jira doesn't have it. Our dev leads don't have it. Without this data, we can't have rationale negotiations as priorities shift and we can align engineering to business.
Through trial and error, I found processes and technology that improved my communication with the business. In this presentation, I'm sharing:
- How I correlate real developer work from GitHub with our Jira projects to provide highly accurate project delivery updates.
- How I visualize what our teams are working on so everyone in the business can see which projects are getting attention.
- Which metrics I share with the business every month to demonstrate engineering performance and improvement.
- How to implement the same process and technology in your organization.
KEYNOTE: ActiveCampaign -- Managing Dev Teams through Trust
Join on Hopin
Building trust within your team is not only critical to employee engagement, happiness, and retention—it's what ultimately determines whether your company will succeed. Shay will discuss critical elements for new and experienced dev managers to begin implementing as they build, maintain, and scale high-performing teams. During his time at ActiveCampaign, Shay has been instrumental in leading teams across product, design, and engineering—helping the company grow sixfold in just three years and through its $240M Series C round earlier this year. From tackling difficult conversations to key decision-making, Shay will share best practices to identify and address employee struggles and drive improvements in performance. Attendees will learn strategies to foster growth, create alignment with organization goals, and build a culture of meaningful engagement—resulting in world-class product teams driven to optimize the product life cycle.
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
KEYNOTE: VMware - Advanced Development and Accelerated Enterprise Innovation with xLabs and VMware
Join on Hopin
xLabs is an advanced development program in VMware’s Office of the CTO that focuses on designing, launching, and exiting highly strategically aligned technology projects that are 1-3 years ahead of the business’s roadmap. We operate a little bit like an incubator, a little bit like a VC portfolio, and we run our teams like startups that need to build in an iterable, agile fashion, learning and failing and pivoting fast to drive the best outcome. Our goal is to be the best place in the world to launch your new idea into meaningful product, accelerating participants’ careers. This talk will go over how we run the program and teams to drive results, and our lessons learned along the way as we bootstrapped, found success, and began to scale.
KEYNOTE: Mattermost - How to Accelerate Hiring and Retention of Software Engineers through Developer-Friendly Workplace PR
Join on Hopin
How to accelerate hiring and retention of software engineers through developer-friendly workplace practices
Can’t hire developers? Losing the ones you have? Take a closer look at your collaboration tools--are they attracting or repelling your talent?
In a remote world, employee experience is digital experience.
Without offices, catered lunches, and fancy meeting rooms, the quality of a workplace comes down to online tools you use to communicate and get work done. HR and facilities can’t help. Nor can any other C-suite exec. It's up to CIOs and technology leaders to make the single most important decision affecting workplace satisfaction:
Will you centralize the selection of collaboration tools to save on cost--or will you give business units and departments the freedom to make their own choices, at the risk of sprawl?
Most importantly, do your IT and finance leaders understand the impact of these decisions on your organization’s ability to attract and retain software developers?
In this talk we'll discuss needs from an array of leading development organizations--from fast growing startups to tech giants to the world's largest banks--and what worked and didn't work in building a digital workplace that developers love.
KEYNOTE: Cortex - Eight Hours Ahead: How to Build a Successful Remote Engineering Team
Join on Hopin
Remote teams are here to stay and now is the time to figure out how to manage them effectively. The first hurdle is understanding that what normally works in the office is not going to be effective across time zones (and especially continents). Managing remote teams requires a focus on over communicating, over planning, and over empathizing. It requires a different type of management style and skill set that relies on our tools and our emotional intelligence more than ever. This talk will draw on years of experience building and managing a remotely distributed team that delivered great code reliably, and give you the tools you need to do the same.