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Creating an effective process for on-call engineering teams
Uptime matters, but so do your people. At Intercom, keeping our product online and working well at all times is critical to the success of our business.
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Engage your engineers by giving them 10% time
Everywhere we look, developers are working on side or ‘passion’ projects. While these projects are incredible ways to expand your knowledge faster, accelerate your career, and gain recognition in the developer community, the truth is that not everyone can or wants to spend extra time outside of work on coding.
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Eiffel’s Tower
When Gustave Eiffel built his namesake tower, it was nearly twice as tall as the tallest structure on Earth. His crews built it in an astounding 22 months, pioneering new construction techniques to deliver it in time for the opening of the 1889 Exposition Universelle. It was amazing then, and it’s just as captivating today.
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Exploring the different types of technical leadership
Over the many years, Patrick has trained, coached and mentored many engineers into Technical Leadership roles. He is delighted by the way that everyone has their own style and "flavour" of being a Technical Leader.
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Inclusion starts with an I
Women, people of colour and other minorities are underrepresented and sometimes feel unwelcome in tech. We need to fix this.
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Business as usual vs. innovation: how to get the balance right
One of the challenges facing teams, particularly small ones, is having to balance the time spent on doing fun new things and having to support old (or antique!) systems and processes. These are the 'business as usual' (BAU) things which probably underpin the current revenue of your business.
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The ultimate candidate experience: the effect of an inclusive hiring process
In my role as a VP of Engineering at a fast-growing startup, I spent hundreds of hours interviewing and sourcing candidates in the last year alone. The bar we set ourselves was high: not just hire people with excellent skills and culture add, but also maintain and improve our current diversity (33% women, 9% people of color) across experience levels.
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Mobile development 10 years on: native vs. cross-platform
We’re 10 years into Android and iOS development and there are more ways to build an app than ever before.
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Building a culture of security for your infrastructure teams
Security is an increasingly important aspect of software development, especially for services that process and store sensitive data.
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Shor’s algorithm and how to avoid oncoming catastrophes
Quantum computers are real and are starting to be used for some interesting applications. As well as many applications in finance, organic chemistry and complex dynamical systems there is an ugly elephant in the room. That elephant is Shor's algorithm.