Welcome to the LeadDev track
Welcome to LeadDev Wrapped
Featuring:
Traps when spotting and growing new managers
In this talk, Javier discusses how the success of a manager depends on two things: spotting skillset fit and cultivating habitat fit.
Traps when spotting and growing new managers
The success of an engineer transitioning into management depends on two things: their skillset and the environment. Skillset refers to the engineer’s potential managerial abilities. The environment is their direct reports, the business domain, the tech stack, the stakeholders, and more importantly: you as their manager. As a manager of managers, you’re not just a tourist on a new manager’s journey. Early on, you must be their sherpa.
Later, you can retreat back to coordinate from the mountain’s basecamp. This talk goes alongside an engineer’s thrilling climb of the managerial mountain full of traps, rough edges and tall precipices.

Born and raised in Granada, Spain, Javier is a 2x entrepreneur and engineering leader. In his first job, he helped a startup grow 10x before hitting the 2008 Financial Crisis with a round of layoffs. In 2020, Javier was an engineering leader at ClassPass when it did a >50% layoff because of COVID.
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Scale up: How to grow your team without growing headcount
In this talk, CJ Cenizal uses colorful AI-generated images to illustrate three stories about how he approaches this challenge.
Scale up: How to grow your team without growing headcount
This year the tech industry has seen a shift in hiring, with many larger companies implementing freezes or layoffs. As engineering managers, how do we grow our teams’ ability to execute and succeed when we’re unable to hire more people?
Join CJ as he uses colorful AI-generated images to illustrate three stories about how he approaches this challenge.

CJ lives in Los Angeles, is part of the technical staff team at Chronosphere, and maintains a blog about engineering management. He likes singing karaoke and is very bad at it. If he's not on a hiking trail or playing with his kids, you'll find him sitting on his deck, listening to the birds with a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and a paperback in the other.
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Critical components of successful delegation
This talk presents techniques to help you be prepared to delegate, sponsor, and coach your team in a way that empowers them to grow their careers and makes your load manageable.
Critical components of successful delegation
Done right, delegation is an invaluable tool you can reach for again and again.
As you settle into your management role, work will inevitably pile up, and your team will become hungry for more opportunity. Attempting to do all of the work yourself is a recipe for burnout and will stifle the growth of your team.
Luckily for you, providing your team more opportunity and reducing your workload are both solved by effective delegation! But how should you decide what to delegate? What context is critical to provide? How much autonomy should you give and when? Can you coach on progress or direction without micromanaging?
Learning how to delegate not just tasks, but problems, ideas, and business needs, will enable you to take on larger and more critical challenges without burning out. Delegation gives your team the opportunity to take leadership roles and leads to growth, learning, and career advancement for your team. Growing your team and taking on critical business needs will enable you to take the next step in your career as a leader as well.
With the techniques I present in this talk, you’ll be prepared to delegate, sponsor, and coach your team in a way that empowers them to grow their careers and makes your load manageable. Done right, delegation will be an invaluable tool you reach for again and again.

Spencer is the VP Engineering at Privy, an ecommerce marketing platform for online brands that need to grow sales now. Spencer leads the distributed engineering teams at Privy. Prior to his role at Privy, he led the Commerce engineering team at at Mailchimp (acquired by Intuit), and led engineering at Reaction Commerce, a distributed-first company that created open source commerce software. Spencer lives in Colorado with his dog Sawyer.
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Harassers are nice to me
Sarah Milstein looks at techniques for surfacing and addressing bad behaviour in the workplace.
Harassers are nice to me
In any organization, there will be people who behave inappropriately, sometimes grievously so. Here’s the paradox: the more senior the role you’re in, and the more power you have to help coworkers who are facing awful behavior like harassment or bullying, the less likely you are to see those things.
Personally, when I was younger and in junior roles, I dealt with harassment all the time. Now? I rarely see it directly. That's not because it happens less now. Instead, it's because harassment and bullying are functions of power, and people who behave in those ways tend to perceive me as having relative power. So they're generally very, very nice to me. If you’re in a position of power--say, as a manager or tech lead--they’re probably very nice to you, too. So how can you become aware of harassment and bullying that happens when you’re not in the room? And what can you do about it? This talk will look at techniques for surfacing and addressing bad behavior.

Sarah Milstein is VP of Engineering at Daily. She previously held executive roles at Mailchimp,18F.gov, and indie.vc. She was also CEO and co-founder of Lean Startup Productions and co-author of The Twitter Book. Earlier, she was a freelance journalist writing regularly for The New York Times. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley. Bonus fact: She was the 21st user of Twitter.
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Stop! Strategy time!
In this talk, Lena Reinhard shares a practical, highly applicable framework that everyone can use to become a more strategic leader. Start these concrete daily, weekly, and quarterly actions to elevate your role and think, operate, and lead more strategically.
Stop! Strategy time!
You may have heard your boss say it: "You need to be more strategic!". Maybe it came up in your latest performance review. Or you just want to work more strategically in order to fill all parts of your role as a leader. Or maybe your team/organisation needs more strategic support to help them succeed.
But what does it mean to really think and act strategically? What actions can you take to lead more strategically every day? And what skills can you develop that help your ability to think and act strategically?
In this talk, we'll cover these questions to help you become more strategic. With the additional help of examples from engineering leaders, you'll walk away with practical tips that you can start implementing tomorrow to help you become a more strategic leader and, consequently, more effective and successful in your role.

Lena Reinhard has dedicated her career to building successful, high-performing globally distributed engineering organisations, and helping teams thrive in times of high change like hypergrowth. She now offers transformational leadership coaching and consulting for leaders. Previously, Lena served as VP Engineering with CircleCI and Travis CI, as well as a startup co-founder & CEO, and through her cross-functional background and experience, she brings a unique perspective on systems of technology, business, and people.
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Elevate engineering efficiency
LinearB demo Elevate engineering efficiency
Elevate engineering efficiency
LinearB is a developer productivity platform that offers DORA & VSM metrics, R&D investment analysis, and developer experience-related workflow automation. We’d love to learn more about you and your team!
Level up your code reviews
Denise Yu gets us thinking about code reviews in terms of different lenses to help engineers of all experience levels build a vocabulary for seeking and providing feedback in a healthy, thoughtful, and collaborative way.
Level up your code reviews
Many teams depend on code review as a way to maintain code quality, share context across the team, and ensure compliance with organizational priorities such as security standards. When a new engineer joins a project team, they often hesitate to review code, because they feel like they’re too new to any value. But that fresh perspective is often the most valuable asset to an established team!
This talk, borne out of many 1:1 conversations with new engineers, will present a number of different lenses for reviewing code, so that even the newest graduate developer can jump in and contribute from day one. For more senior engineers, I hope to provide a critical framework for thinking about different types of contributions. Thinking about code review in terms of different lenses will help engineers of all experience levels build a vocabulary for seeking and providing feedback in a healthy, thoughtful, and collaborative way.

Denise is a Senior Engineering Manager at GitHub, currently helping maintainers make open source work more sustainable via the GitHub Sponsors program. Before transitioning into management, she worked on a number of different tools to make GitHub a safer and more collaborative space for communities to interact. Before that, she worked on various open source and enterprise cloud tools at Pivotal. She lives in Toronto with her partner and two cats, and when she’s not at her computer you’ll find her hunting for the best late-night dim sum in town.
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Rubrics cubed: Attempting to quantify the qualitative in the interview process
Shawna Martell and Dan Fike discussed how they created their rubrics and introduced them to their organization, and what they discovered about how the process has affected their hiring outcomes.
Rubrics cubed: Attempting to quantify the qualitative in the interview process
Interviewing is often too subjective. Is it right to decide a candidate's suitability based on an interviewer’s opinion, from a general impression? Carta values data, and so we transformed our interviewers from decision makers into data gatherers. We wrote specific rubrics which objectively capture the attributes we value in a candidate profile, from technical architecture to organizational influence. Instead of simply giving their subjective opinion, interviewers consult the rubrics to measure a candidate's performance.
Our data-driven approach helps us reevaluate and continually improve our overall hiring process. Are candidates consistently scoring lower than expected on some attribute? We can improve that rubric to help us recognize their talent. Are some interviewers struggling to gather specific signals? We can offer training to sharpen their understanding of that topic. And we can now measure if interview outcomes actually correlate to performance outcomes and thereby improve both.
Our rubrics also help with leveling decisions, and the signals we gather help avoid particularly difficult and often arbitrary judgment calls when evaluating more senior engineers.
We would like to discuss how we created our rubrics and introduced them to our organization, and what we have discovered about how the process has affected our hiring outcomes.

Shawna Martell is a Senior Staff Engineer at Carta, Inc. Her previous roles include Director of Software Engineering for Yahoo's Big Data Platform and Manager of Web R&D at Wolfram Research. She holds an MS in Computer Science from Syracuse University and has an MBA at UIUC. Outside of work, she enjoys volunteering in local politics and listening to too many podcasts.
View Shawna's LeadDev articles and talks
Dan Fike is a Senior Staff Engineer and Deputy to the CTO at Carta, Inc. His experience ranges from game development to web app infrastructure, from Google to a 5-person tech startup, from programmer to architect, and from writing patents to conducting M&A diligence. He holds a BS in Computer Science from UIUC.
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Explaining distributed systems like I'm five
In this talk, Michele will look at many easy examples of how a distributed architecture could virtually scale infinitely, always explaining this... like he is five!
Explaining distributed systems like I'm five
When you really need to scale your application, adopting a distributed architecture can help you support high traffic levels. The problem is: how should you do that? When can we call a system as "distributed"?
In this talk, we will look at many easy examples of how a distributed architecture could virtually scale infinitely, always explaining this... like I'm five!

Michele is a passionate and experienced software architect, Google GDE, and Microsoft MVP from Milan, Italy. He worked as a software engineer and architect for almost ten years in product and consultancy companies, taking the best from both worlds. In 2022, he published my first book, "Real-World Next.js," where I talk about the web framework that changed forever the way we build web applications. He's currently working as a Senior Software Architect in NearForm while contributing to many open-source projects in different languages (TypeScript, Haskell, Golang), writing technical articles, and speaking to many international conferences.
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Use your influence to build inclusive products
Use your influence to build inclusive products
Use your influence to build inclusive products
Build a team that values an inclusive design approach, and your organization can excel at creating accessible, inclusive products for all. What key considerations will get your team to that unified place? Hear from Perry, Fable’s Director of Engineering, on how he has approached hiring, professional development, processes, and culture with a lens of accessibility. Regardless of seniority, every team member can contribute to a mindset shift of developing products that work better across users.

Joining the team as Lead Developer and the 4th employee, Perry is now the Director of Engineering at Fable. He finds great fulfillment in building systems to enable household-name enterprises to practice inclusive design while simultaneously making a real impact on the lives of people with disabilities. A self-taught tech team leader specializing in accessibility, Perry has previously worked at Canoe, Critical Mass, and Kijiji.
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Rise of the platform (Team)
In this talk, you're going to learn what a platform team is, what they do, and why your business needs one.
Rise of the platform (Team)
As technology evolves, so does the complexity. Where once we could throw some simple JavaScript and HTML together to build a web application, modern web development requires expertise in a multitude of areas. At Netflix we leverage our web platform team to remove this complexity for UI engineers so they can get back to building and shipping features. In this talk, we’re going learn what a platform team is, what they do, and why your business needs one.

Jem Young is an Engineering Manager at Netflix who loves cars, reading, and clean code. He really enjoys working across the stack but his true passion lies in JavaScript and building a clean user experience. He believes that empathy is the key to building an effective user experience and when he’s not at the gym or chasing his cat, you can find him hassling other engineers to write more tests.
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Navigating parental leave as a senior engineering leader
In this talk, Iccha covers what she did to prepare before her parental leave, from the perspective of business, and how to keep an org functioning healthy while you are out. She also covers how she eased back into my role upon return and what you can do as managers and peers to support your coworkers on parental leave.
Navigating parental leave as a senior engineering leader
Six months into my role as an Engineering Director, I embarked on my parental leave for my second child. I did not have many role models of senior women leaders who had taken extended period of time off to focus on family and come back. So I charted my plan with the help of my leaders, peers, friends and mentors. In this talk I will cover what I did to prepare before my parental leave, from the perspective of business and how to keep an org functioning healthy while you are out, and from a personal perspective so I can focus on the new phase in my life. And will cover how I eased back into my role upon return. The talk will also cover what you can do as managers and peers to support your coworkers on parental leave.

Iccha Sethi is an Engineering Director at Github, where she leads the Actions Compute Org which runs all GitHub Actions. She was previously a Principal Engineer before she switched into management and has worked at wide range of companies both big and small. No matter where she has worked, she is passionate about intentionally building culture on teams and operational excellence. When she is not working, you can find her spending time with her two kids and reading science fiction books when she finds the time!
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Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
CodeSignal is the leading technical interview and assessment solution, helping companies identify the right candidates with the right skills—even if they don’t have the “right” profile. For far too long, companies have spent too much time sifting through all the noise produced by traditional resumes, homegrown assessments, and inconsistent interviews when all they really want to know is how well candidates can do the job.
CodeSignal helps companies go beyond the noise with smarter assessment questions, a simpler process, and a stronger platform. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by leading companies like Netflix, Capital One, Meta, and Dropbox.
Developer productivity 2.0
In this session, Gergely will walk through a survey on how various engineering teams work, and what approaches they have found productive. You'll walk away with insights to what developer productivity means, and approaches and tools that you can experiment with.
Developer productivity 2.0
Scrum, Agile, JIRA, story points, velocity, git statistics, code reviews, DORA metrics... what if we just started over? What do some of the most productive engineering teams look like, and what tools do they use to know they are productive? Just as important, what are things that they don't use and why? In this session, we'll walk through a survey on how various engineering teams work, and what approaches they have found productive. You'll walk away with insights to what developer productivity means, and approaches and tools that you can experiment with.

Gergely is a long-time engineer turned engineering manager living in Amsterdam. Gergely frequently blogs about engineering, management and distributed systems on PragmaticEngineer.com. He is currently writing a book on growing as a software engineer, within tech companies. He formerly was headed up mobile, web and distributed systems teams at Uber, within the Uber Money team. As an engineer, he’s worked across the stack, doing mobile (Android, iOS, Windows Phone), web, backend and thick client development through his decade-long developer career. Before Uber, he built new apps at Skyscanner, shipped Skype for Xbox One and Skype for Web at Microsoft, and built trading software at JP Morgan.
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People building: Career planning for your direct reports
Daniel Burke shares his playbook on career planning for your direct reports.
People building: Career planning for your direct reports
A recent survey found that 7 of 10 people are considering quitting their job in 2022. 4 of 10 say they will likely quit due to the lack of career progression. Anecdotally, it’s clear to many of us, especially in Tech, that if you’re not getting the raise or promo you want, simply respond to one of the many LinkedIn messages you’re likely receiving and you can get that raise or promo somewhere else. What’s keeping you at your current job? What’s keeping your reports?
True enough, it’s the individual’s responsibility to advocate for their own career, but the people managers who learn how to play a successful and integral role in their reports’ growth will begin to stand out more and more. The people managers who learn how to guide their reports to new growth opportunities and see that those team mates are properly recognized are going to keep many more of them than those who don’t.
I’ve led and promoted engineers from intern through Senior+ levels at start-ups and Big Tech companies. In this talk I’m going to share with you my playbook on Career Planning for your Direct Reports. I’ll share steps, tips, and stories that’ll prepare you to be the type of people manager one wants to leave. During this talk we’ll cover Where They’re At which involves understanding your team charter,your report’s level, and performance. We’ll discuss Where They Want to Go which involves understanding their desired path, their performance delta, and what motivates them. Lastly we’ll discuss How to Get There which involves designing work, coaching and accountability, and the promo process.

Daniel Burke has more than 12 years of software development experience and has 6 years of engineering leadership working at companies on the east and west coasts including Yelp, Handshake, and currently Square. Burke, as he likes to be called, leads a team of backend and Android engineers building elegant ways for businesses to take payments with Square. Burke has also invested time in organizing and facilitating coding events for underestimated youth across the country, partnering with organizations like Boys & Girls Club, Mission Bit, and SFUSD. Burke also draws experience from his past time as a small business owner, a traveling preacher, and a father of a 8 year-old princess and a 13 year-prince. He currently leads his team remotely from sunny Virginia Beach, VA.
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Host outro
Taylor Poindexter closing statement
Close
End of event
Welcome to the StaffPlus track
Welcome to LeadDev Wrapped
Being a principal engineer. The world is your oyster.
When people ask “what does the senior IC title mean?”. The answer has always been “well it depends”.
Being a principal engineer. The world is your oyster.
Companies extending their individual contributor career tracks is a fairly new development in our field and when people ask “what does that title mean?”. The answer has always been “well it depends”. And it does.
In this opening talk, we will talk about all the things this role can be, the things it is definitely not. We will talk about how to navigate its many facets, how to know if you are being effective, and look ahead to the day of amazing talks on how to be successful.

Silvia Botros is an experienced software architect with a focus on datastore scaling. She has helped teams scale their data infrastructure in known names such as Box, Twilio and Sendgrid. She helped deploy and maintain various MySQL datastores that support sending trillions of emails, drive MySQL designs from inception to production, help team improve their resilience, improve their learning from incidents. Silvia is now a consulting architect helping companies assess their current data strategy and helping them make plans for scale
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Starting a new job as a Staff+
Amy Unger looks at how you can effectively start off a new job at Staff-level.
Starting a new job as a Staff+
You've spent the last couple of years building your skills as a Staff Engineer in one place: you know the codebase, you know what’s expected of you, and you know who to talk to in order to influence technical direction.
Now it's time to move on. How do you effectively start off a new job at Staff-level?
We’ll start by talking about building trust and clear expectations with your manager and management chain. You were hired externally for a reason - what is that? Of the many, many different meanings of “Staff+ engineer”, which is your manager’s expectation?
We'll talk about strategies for coming up to speed technically and building networks with other ICs. We'll discuss acclimating to a new environment: how to apply your expertise without over-indexing on the challenges of your past role and company.
You’ll leave this session with:
- Frameworks for defining success in those first few months.
- The tools to have productive conversations with your management chain about what your role will be.
- Tactics for maximizing your unique value as a new employee.
- Excitement and confidence in approaching your next role!

The granddaughter of a former MIT computer (yup, that was a job title), Amy was clearly supposed to be a programmer, but just did not get the message. Her wanderings have taken her through the land of libraries and archives and into software consulting. Now a software engineer at GitHub, she is deeply grateful for every scarce day she does not use vim commands in Google Docs.
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Elevate engineering efficiency
LinearB demo Elevate engineering efficiency
Elevate engineering efficiency
LinearB is a developer productivity platform that offers DORA & VSM metrics, R&D investment analysis, and developer experience-related workflow automation. We’d love to learn more about you and your team!
Becoming an influencer (no selfies required)
Leslie Chapman on how building and maintaining trust in order to be an influencer is one of the key roles of an individual contributor.
Becoming an influencer (no selfies required)
Influencing decisions at a Fortune 50 company is challenging for anyone, but it's even more challenging when the people you need to influence to support those decisions don't report to you. Building and maintaining trust in order to be an influencer is one of the key roles of an individual contributor. In this session, Leslie will talk about the ways she has built trust and gained influence over her 20+ year career in technology.

Leslie Chapman is an Engineering Fellow at Comcast. She was one of the technical leads for the X1 platform, which serves over 35 million customers. Currently, Leslie leads a team that is building backend systems that drive consistent user experiences across Comcast's suite of video streaming products. She is passionate about encouraging young women to enter the tech field and spends a lot of time volunteering with organizations that teach coding to young women.
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How a Year in engineering leadership has made me a better individual contributor
In this talk, Kristen discusses the specific ways in which leadership has accelerated by growth, impact and efficiency as an individual contributor. She provides specific examples of mindsets and behaviors connected to these growth areas both before and after leadership in order to best illustrate her professional development, with the dual goals of helping existing senior engineers understand their current or potential superpowers, as well as equipping engineering leaders with ideas around how to coach and develop their engineers.
How a Year in engineering leadership has made me a better individual contributor
In January of 2021, I was asked to step into a Director of Engineering role, and despite thinking I was solidly on the technical track, I decided to take on the challenge of leading an engineering team. There was so much that I loved about leading that team, but by the end of the year, I knew that leadership wasn’t for me. And so, I asked to move back into an individual contributor role, and I specifically requested to stay on the team that I had spent a year leading. What I’ve found since making the transition is that because of that year in leadership, I’m a stronger, more confident, and more efficient software engineer than I was before. In this talk, I’ll discuss the specific ways in which leadership has accelerated by growth, impact and efficiency as an individual contributor. Some of these include my strengthened bonds with my teammates; my newfound initiative to take ownership of and suggest change around team processes; my willingness to advocate for time to upskill; and the ditching of my long-time imposter syndrome. I’ll provide specific examples of mindsets and behaviors connected to these growth areas both before and after leadership in order to best illustrate my professional development, with the dual goals of helping existing senior engineers understand their current or potential superpowers, as well as equipping engineering leaders with ideas around how to coach and develop their engineers.

Kristen is a Technical Lead at Pluralsight's Technology Center of Excellence, where she enables engineering excellence across her company through the planning and execution of technical upskilling initiatives. She is a former ESL/EFL instructor who spent her early career teaching English as a Foreign Language in South Korea, as well as Academic English and Composition at Colorado State University. She transitioned into a career in software development in 2016, and through learning programming languages, has been delighted to observe the many similarities between learning human and computer languages.
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Use your influence to build inclusive products
Use your influence to build inclusive products
Use your influence to build inclusive products
Build a team that values an inclusive design approach, and your organization can excel at creating accessible, inclusive products for all. What key considerations will get your team to that unified place? Hear from Perry, Fable’s Director of Engineering, on how he has approached hiring, professional development, processes, and culture with a lens of accessibility. Regardless of seniority, every team member can contribute to a mindset shift of developing products that work better across users.

Joining the team as Lead Developer and the 4th employee, Perry is now the Director of Engineering at Fable. He finds great fulfillment in building systems to enable household-name enterprises to practice inclusive design while simultaneously making a real impact on the lives of people with disabilities. A self-taught tech team leader specializing in accessibility, Perry has previously worked at Canoe, Critical Mass, and Kijiji.
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Accessibility and why everything old is new again
Alice Li climbs into her Wayback Machine and delves into some foundational approaches and processes to facilitate and test for Accessibility compliance on the web.
Accessibility and why everything old is new again
What do Geocities webpages and green screen monochrome monitors have in common? Other than being ancient relics of technologies past, we can actually learn a lot from them when it comes to Accessibility. As organizations lean into creating more inclusive web experiences, we’re seeing more emphasis being placed on techniques that can now be considered retro.
Let’s climb into our Wayback Machines and delve into some foundational approaches and processes to facilitate and test for Accessibility compliance on the web.

Alice Li is an advocate for inclusive web design and creating delightful user experiences. After building, leading, and teaching emerging techniques for over a decade in the email industry, she transitioned to the product side and went on to bring these disparate experiences together in her current role as a Staff Engineer on Squarepace’s email marketing platform, Campaigns. She is honored to have spoken at Email Evolution Conference, Litmus Live, UNSPAM, MarketingProfs, Mailcon, EiQ, and PowerToFly as well as to have received the EEC Stefan Pollard Award for “Email Marketer of the Year” and the Validity Email Hero Award for “Most Innovative.”
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MMMRRRRR, or approaches to leadership and execution for staff+
“Climbing the career ladder” is about expanding leadership, influence, and scope. In this talk, Joshua aim's to answer the question “How should engineers think about the skills to sustain the expansion?”
MMMRRRRR, or approaches to leadership and execution for staff+
We hold these truths to be self-evident: “Climbing the career ladder” is about expanding leadership, influence, and scope. We aim to answer the question “How should engineers think about the skills to sustain the expansion?”
First, the distinction between “leadership” and “management” can be blurry. Even worse, it’s rarely explained explicitly, and engineers enter management on “You never know until you try 😉”.
We aim to clarify things by making things less clear and breaking “leadership” into three kinds of management, which has helped senior ICs at Two Sigma:
* Team management - Organizations function better when they are happy and socially coherent? Managers are accountable, but Staff+ contribute.
* Project management - Completing multi-quarter or multi-year projects requires a certain skillset. So does feedback.
* People management - How do you manage and direct individuals, especially those who are junior and need more hands-on attention. The “tech track” expects mentorship, and effective Staff+ engineers do not rely on managers “making people do things” to scale projects beyond their own capabilities.
Second, Staff+ involves more than leadership. For that, we present five abstract skills helpfully organized with an R theme: risk, reliability, reputation, relationships, and reducing complexity. In contrast to concrete skills, which explain the how tos (how to write a better document, how to balance meetings with coding, etc.), abstract skills explain the hows and should permeate planning, execution, and communication.
* Risk - Many Staff+ role descriptions include phrases like “sets own priorities.” You’re an expensive asset! How do you get the organization to trust you to invest your time?
* Reliability - What does delivery look like when objectives become more abstract?
* Reputation - How are you representing yourself and your team?
* Relationships - How are you building and maintaining trust?
* Reducing complexity - Are you able to effectively communicate complex information? Are you comfortable with summaries from others?

Joshua Leners is Vice President at Two Sigma, where he works on platform infrastructure. Recently, his work has focused on reducing tail latencies in large-scale computations, and improving scheduling outcomes in a 3.8+ petabyte distributed platform. Previously, he worked on building out a storage system to serve data to this compute platform, peaking at over 4 Tbps served and 100 PB stored. Prior to working at Two Sigma, Josh completed his Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin on failure detection and worked as a contract researcher at Microsoft Research on distributed databases.
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Moon to Mars: Planning and executing for the long term
Katie Sylor-Miller looks at how to ensure success when the end goal feels like it's millions of miles away.
Moon to Mars: Planning and executing for the long term
Tackling complex, long-term, cross-org projects can feel like you are planning a mission to Mars - how do you ensure success when the end goal feels like it's millions of miles away?
In this session, Katie will recount how she successfully led the planning and execution of a Mars-sized foundational rewrite to enable Progressive Web App (PWA) technology on Etsy.com - by taking a page from NASA's book, and first stopping at the Moon. She'll share what she learned about how to collaborate across teams and orgs, how to structure a project so you can measure success and set expectations at every step on the journey, and how to function as a "Consulting Architect" throughout every phase of execution and level up your team in the process.

Frontend Architect at Etsy, Katie has a passion for design systems, web performance, accessibility, and frontend infrastructure. She co-authored the Design Systems Handbook to spread her love of reusable components to engineers and designers. She’s spoken at conferences like Smashing Conf, PerfMatters Conf, JamStack Conf, JSConf US, and FrontendConf.ch (to name a few). Her website ohshitgit.com (and the swear-free version dangitgit.com) has helped millions of people worldwide get out of their Git messes, and has been translated into 28 different languages and counting. When she’s not architecting, you can find Katie spending time with her family, skiing, or travelling the country to visit the best tiki bars. Say hi to Katie on Twitter and check out her site at sylormiller.com.
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Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
CodeSignal is the leading technical interview and assessment solution, helping companies identify the right candidates with the right skills—even if they don’t have the “right” profile. For far too long, companies have spent too much time sifting through all the noise produced by traditional resumes, homegrown assessments, and inconsistent interviews when all they really want to know is how well candidates can do the job.
CodeSignal helps companies go beyond the noise with smarter assessment questions, a simpler process, and a stronger platform. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by leading companies like Netflix, Capital One, Meta, and Dropbox.
A Commune in the Ivory Tower? - A new approach to architecture decisions
Andrew Harmel-Law introduces a mindset and an associated set of practices which do away with the traditional idea of “Architects” while bringing the practice of “Architecture” to the fore.
A Commune in the Ivory Tower? - A new approach to architecture decisions
I’m an architect, and I think a lot about architecture. Mostly I think about how irrelevant architecture is if it doesn’t get shipped to production. I worry a lot too. I worry about how to help all the teams I’m supposed to be helping, without slowing them down, getting in their way, or making their lives harder rather than easier.
Traditional (i.e. hands-off, blessed-few) approaches to architecture rarely (if ever) work. But in the world of microservices, autonomous teams, and continuous delivery, architecture is more important that ever. Is there an alternative?
This session will introduce you to a mindset and an associated set of practices which do away with the traditional idea of “Architects” while bringing the practice of “Architecture” to the fore. I’ll explain how everyone can become an architect, without things reducing to chaos (though there might well be a healthy dose of anarchy).

A Tech Principal at Thoughtworks and author and online trainer for O'Reilly, Andrew specialises in Java / JVM technologies, agile delivery, build tools and automation, and domain driven design. Experienced across the software development lifecycle and in many sectors what motivates him is the efficient delivery of large-scale software solutions, fulfilling complex user needs. He understands that people, architecture, process and tooling all have key roles to play in achieving this. Andrew has a passion for open source software and its communities. He has been involved with OSS to a greater or lesser extent since his career began; as a user, contributor, expert group member, or paid advocate - most famously as one of the Jenkins JobDSL originators. Andrew enjoys sharing his experience as much as possible. This sharing is not only seen in his formal consulting engagements, but also informally through mentoring, books, online training, blog posts, conferences (speaking and organising), and open-sourcing his code. His next book "Facilitating Software Architecture" is making its way onto the internet, a chapter at a time. (Check it out at https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/facilitating-software-architecture/9781098151850/)
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Building a better bridge
Bryan Liles shares how he came to find out that he was a bridge builder and how that carried through his journey as a senior engineer to where he is today as a VP-level engineer in a public company.
Building a better bridge
When I was young, I knew I wanted to have a job where I was able to write software for a living. In retrospect, I was thinking too shallow. Today, I'm a professional bridge builder. I don't build bridges over water, but instead, constantly create structures that build paths over obstacles. In my session, I want to share how I came to find out that I was a bridge builder and how that carried through my journey as a senior engineer to where I sit today as a VP-level engineer in a public company.

Bryan Liles is a Senior Staff Engineer at VMware. He leads the Developer Experience group, which creates solutions to help developers be more productive in Kubernetes. When not working, Bryan builds and races cars and drones.
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Host outro
J. Bobby Dorlus closing remarks
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Welcome to the LeadingEng track
Welcome to LeadDev Wrapped
Featuring:
How managers can successfully lead their teams through change
In this session, Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Engineering at Slack, will share her perspective on why change is a must and the positive impacts that can come with it when you can gain buy-in and trust from the people on your team behind the change. She will walk through change objectives and best practices for communicating change, and how managers can be positive change agents for their organizations by approaching change management through a human lens.
How managers can successfully lead their teams through change
A global pandemic, fluctuating economic market, sudden changes to social policies. Historical moments like these used to happen once every few years, if not once a decade. In the past two years alone, we’ve been through a lot. Coupled with regular change that may happen to a business, like staffing challenges, layoffs, acquisitions, pivots in strategy, the workforce today is left grappling with how to manage lots of change in both their personal lives and at work. What’s more, many employees are now working remotely, they’re feeling more isolated and overwhelmed at work than ever before.
Change is inevitable – and it's important in pushing companies and people forward. Managers have a responsibility to lead their teams through all kinds of change, but it’s now more important than ever that they do so with a human approach. The best managers will be able to prepare teams for moments of uncertainty–from world events to internal organizational changes–and help them transition from panic and resistance to understanding and commitment.
In this session, Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Engineering at Slack, will share her perspective on why change is a must and the positive impacts that can come with it when you can gain buy-in and trust from the people on your team behind the change. She will walk through change objectives and best practices for communicating change, and how managers can be positive change agents for their organizations by approaching change management through a human lens.

Rukmini Reddy is a SVP of Engineering at Slack. She joined Slack in 2020 to re-architect and re-imagine the Slack Platform. Rukmini has held executive roles for the past decade at several other enterprise SaaS companies. She has been recognized for her work with several industry awards like 2021 Okta Tech Up-and-Comers list , Twilio Developer Searchlight award and Cloudverse 100 people building the next generation of the internet. Her experience as an immigrant, a woman, and an engineer with over 2 decades of technical experience, have prepared her to lead large and diverse engineering teams,innovate at scale and forge genuine human connections with her colleagues.
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Engineering leadership with a little help from my friends
Yvette Pasqua shares her thoughts on how to build and maintain a network of peers and mentors.
Engineering leadership with a little help from my friends
It's sometimes lonely as an engineering leader. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Building a network of other engineering leaders and managers can help you feel part of a real community, more inspired in your day to day job, and like you're growing your career in new ways. In this talk you'll hear ideas about how to build and maintain a network of peers and mentors that helps you with all three.
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Yvette is a consultant, advisor, and fractional CTO/CPTO (Chief Product & Technology Officer). She’s a fixer who helps executives and leaders solve technology, product, and people problems. Yvette has 25 years experience in technology and product development, leading multiple startups and international companies through scaling technology, products, and AI/data platforms that drove revenue, margin, and user growth. Yvette lives in Brooklyn and Rhinebeck, NY with her wife, daughter, and wheaten terrier.
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Creating the story of your culture
This talk will outline what are the essential facets of building your culture and how you ensure diversity, equity, and belonging go hand and hand.
Creating the story of your culture
What is important to you? What is important to your people? What is important to your company? What is your organizational direction? All of these influence the workplace culture and how you build your story.
Culture has become a big expression as part of each of our organizations and it encompasses a lot of things. No culture is the same. Every leader brings their own experiences and microinequities to their culture.
Studies have shown that having a distinct culture is important to a business' success. And having a clear business strategy helps to create a positive culture.
Simply stated, a positive culture is all about aligning values, belief systems, attitudes, and assumptions. This talk will outline what are the essential facets of building your culture and how you ensure diversity, equity, and belonging go hand and hand.

Tanisha Barnett is a Senior Director of Engineering at Intuit-Mailchimp, with over 25 years of experience, known for her leadership style that centers around mentoring, teaching, and sharing her extensive expertise and experience. A dedicated Black woman, she graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Management Information Systems, marking the beginning of her career journey and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tanisha’s engineering and leadership journey began at Macy’s Tech where she was dedicated for over 2 decades. Presently, she has contributed her expertise at Intuit for over four years. Tanisha's leadership style is defined by her adeptness at asking probing questions to understand situations deeply. This approach not only fuels innovative solutions but also cultivates an environment of collaboration and open communication. Her focus on mentoring and teaching stems from a genuine desire to help others grow in their careers. Drawing from her wealth of experience, Tanisha provides practical guidance and real-world insights, enriching the learning journeys of her mentees. Outside of her professional endeavors, Tanisha's passion for family and her love for Christmas shine through. As she collects Santas, she also collects moments and memories with her loved ones, valuing the importance of work-life balance. Tanisha Barnett's impact as a tech leader extends far beyond her years of experience, reflecting her dedication to fostering growth, inclusion, and meaningful connections.
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Better engineering through business understanding
This talk will focus on strategies and skills that can help you develop business understanding including key concepts related to finance and product strategy.
Better engineering through business understanding
Throughout your tech career you have used code as a tool to help your companies realize business value without truly understanding the company’s business. Understanding your company’s business can help you to apply your technical skills to deliver the best solutions and products that are aligned to business goals.
This talk will focus on strategies and skills that can help you develop business understanding including key concepts related to finance and product strategy. Learning these skills will allowyou to build better partnerships, products and solutions that are aligned with business goals.

Rodney J. Woodruff is a Vice President of Engineering at Shopify, an all-in-one commerce platform to start, run and grow a business. They are making commerce better for everyone. In his role at Shopify, he leads the Storefronts Engineering team that is responsible for building products that help merchants build a home on the internet that they can be product of. Rodney has spent his career in the eCommerce and retail industries where he has built eCommerce platforms as a software engineer as well as delivered solutions for top brands such as Gucci, Steve Madden and WW (formerly Weightwatchers) as a senior engineering leader. With his experience in eCommerce and retail software delivery, Rodney has established himself as a person that has a clear understanding of how to successfully deliver omni/multichannel solutions including how to build teams and work with all stakeholders for successful product delivery. He is passionate about helping members of underrepresented groups to find pathways into tech. At WW, he has worked with Girls Who Code and as a co-teacher in the Microsoft TEALS program to help teachers learn to teach computer science. When not working, he loves to spending time with his daughters at their volleyball, softball and basketball games and working on his side projects.
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Elevate engineering efficiency
LinearB demo Elevate engineering efficiency
Elevate engineering efficiency
LinearB is a developer productivity platform that offers DORA & VSM metrics, R&D investment analysis, and developer experience-related workflow automation. We’d love to learn more about you and your team!
How to keep learning in leadership
As an Engineering Leader you are expected to keep up-to-date with your company’s priorities, the latest technology trends and management/leadership best practices, all while successfully delivering on your team’s initiatives. Are you struggling with how to manage it all? You are not alone! Learn tangible strategies and tips on how successful leaders stay sane and make it look so easy.
How to keep learning in leadership
Keeping current is one of the biggest challenges of the role. As engineering leaders, you often worry about losing your technical sensibilities and you also want to maintain credibility in areas that they’re the most knowledgeable about. But in order to make informed decisions, you need to develop an array of other skills while staying current. So, how do you overcome the challenges of staying technical while being a manager? And most importantly how do you carve out time to learn?
This talk will dive into strategies you can use for staying technical while being a leader of the organization and as well give you tools to identify the areas that you need to be up to date on and what can you manage without knowledge.
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Christian McCarrick is currently an Engineering Leader at Facebook supporting Facebook Messenger. He has previously been the VP of engineering at many startups including most recently at Auth0. He is dedicated to improving the craft of software engineering leadership. He volunteers his time to mentor through the Everwise and Plato networks and teaches engineering workshops for new engineering managers. He also hosts a popular podcast called SimpleLeadership where he interviews top technology leaders in order to help other managers grow and be successful.
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Getting buy-in for your transformation strategy
Michael Winslow shares his thoughts on how to create awareness that a change is needed in your technical strategy.
Getting buy-in for your transformation strategy
The need for change is a constant, even in the most successful organizations. Internal and external forces will certainly require us to transform what and how we operate. Having a well thought out transformation strategy is key to being successful when that need for change is upon you. But how will you get people to buy-in to YOUR strategy?
- How do you create awareness that a change is needed?
- How do you communicate your understanding of the risks involved?
- How do you motivate stakeholders at all levels to act?
In this talk I will discuss techniques that have helped me get multiple transformation strategies noticed and approved.

Michael Winslow picked up his love for programming when he was 10 years old writing GW-Basic code on his Tandy-1000. With his passion for designing simple solutions to complex problems, Michael has played key roles at companies like Aramark, Ortho-McNeil, Oracle and Xfinity Mobile. He is a seasoned international public speaker who enjoys using his platform to uplift engineers and create powerfully diverse teams in technology. Michael is currently a DevOps advocate, Agile enthusiast, and transformational people-leader in the Technology industry.
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The practice of managing managers
Learn how to coach your managers to execute the company's shared vision, as your responsibilities - and distractions - continue to multiply.
The practice of managing managers
The more effective you are as a manager, the more likely it is that you’ll move from managing one team to managing many. When you do, the challenges you face will change. As a manager of managers, your distractions will multiply, and it will become crucial for you to cut through the noise and focus on the actions that drive the most impact in your organization.
As an enterprise leader, you have two significant responsibilities: articulating a shared vision and coaching your managers to execute on it. Unlike planning technical roadmaps, choosing the right technologies, and delivering at scale — all important topics you will undoubtedly contribute to — these responsibilities are the ones your teams rely on you to deliver on. In this talk, we’ll discuss how to get there.
I'll touch on socializing your vision for your teams and then focus on coaching your managers to make that vision a reality — by steering them away from common mistakes, building collaboration among them, and delegating ownership to them (instead of just responsibility).

A former developer who started coding when she was a kid, Kat's been leading engineering teams for eight years. Her passion is coaching managers to empower, mentor, and grow the people who rely on them — whether they’re working with teams of three or groups of twenty. She's now an engineering director at Adjust and has previously directed teams at Photobox and Wayfair.
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Use your influence to build inclusive products
Use your influence to build inclusive products
Use your influence to build inclusive products
Build a team that values an inclusive design approach, and your organization can excel at creating accessible, inclusive products for all. What key considerations will get your team to that unified place? Hear from Perry, Fable’s Director of Engineering, on how he has approached hiring, professional development, processes, and culture with a lens of accessibility. Regardless of seniority, every team member can contribute to a mindset shift of developing products that work better across users.

Joining the team as Lead Developer and the 4th employee, Perry is now the Director of Engineering at Fable. He finds great fulfillment in building systems to enable household-name enterprises to practice inclusive design while simultaneously making a real impact on the lives of people with disabilities. A self-taught tech team leader specializing in accessibility, Perry has previously worked at Canoe, Critical Mass, and Kijiji.
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The tools of culture change
In this talk Jason will cover what works and what doesn’t when it comes to culture change, and give you the tools you need to get the best out of your team.
The tools of culture change
Many companies spend a lot of time talking about how to preserve their culture. But winning teams embrace the notion that their culture is ever changing. So how do we ensure that our cultures change for the better?

Jason Wong is a proven engineering leader, diversity & inclusion consultant, and doughnut enthusiast. With over two decades of experience in building and scaling web applications, he has worked in a range of industries from academia to online media and e-commerce. He helped establish web development and administrative computing at Columbia College, led development of premium video streaming services at Yahoo! Sports, and spent seven years at Etsy leading their Infrastructure Engineering team. He currently works at ActBlue as VP of Engineering.
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Networking for leaders
Networking for leaders at LeadingEng London
Networking for leaders

Tramale is a highly experienced and motivated technical professional and is currently CTO at Taxbit. Prior to Stripe, Tramale has held engineering leadership roles at companies such as F5 Networks and Nintendo, and technical and marketing leadership roles at Critical Mass and Volkswagen. He has a passion for developing technology leaders at all levels, and is determined to hear underrepresented voices amplified in our industry.
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The difficult teenage years: setting your tech strategy after the launch
How to make sure that you don't lose sight of your original technical strategy when creating a new product
The difficult teenage years: setting your tech strategy after the launch
When launching a new product to replace an old one, it’s easy to rally behind the mission and make good technical decisions. But once it’s launched, the vision is not so clear, corners cut to get the site live come back to bite, and things can very easily lose focus.
Based on my experience with the launch of two major sites (FT.com and GOV.UK) this talk is about how to bring things back on track.
- Why is it so important to set a new vision after the launch
- What a good tech strategy looks like and how to set one
- Common challenges after the new product has launched
- Handling gnarly code that has grown unchecked
- Addressing new operational concerns
- Tending a system that will live on, rather than be replaced again a few years down the line
- Learnings a year on from setting the FT’s tech strategy

Anna Shipman is Technical Director for Customer Products at the Financial Times, leading on the award-winning FT.com website and the FT iPhone and Android apps. She has been a software developer for over 15 years. Before working at the FT, she was a technical architect and the UK government's Open Source Lead at the Government Digital Service. She speaks at conferences, blogs on her personal website, tweets, and is always up for a game of pool.
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Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
Going beyond the noise in technical hiring
CodeSignal is the leading technical interview and assessment solution, helping companies identify the right candidates with the right skills—even if they don’t have the “right” profile. For far too long, companies have spent too much time sifting through all the noise produced by traditional resumes, homegrown assessments, and inconsistent interviews when all they really want to know is how well candidates can do the job.
CodeSignal helps companies go beyond the noise with smarter assessment questions, a simpler process, and a stronger platform. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by leading companies like Netflix, Capital One, Meta, and Dropbox.
The places you'll go: how to keep learning in leadership
Laura Thomson demonstrates how to keep up with technology trends as a leader.
The places you'll go: how to keep learning in leadership
You write slide decks instead of code. Your life is run by your calendar, which could stand defragging. The last time you got into deep flow was the day before you went into leadership. Keeping up is hard, let alone keeping current.
In this talk I'll cover a different approach to keeping up to date with technology and industry trends, how to embrace being a generalist, and how to find the time and energy to keep learning.

Laura Thomson is Senior VP of Platform Engineering at Fastly. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. Previously, she spent more than a decade at Mozilla, leading engineering and operations teams. Laura has spoken at many conferences worldwide over the last 20 years and is the author of best-selling software development books.
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Shaping culture in the engineering organization
How to you ensure diversity, equity, and belonging are fundamental parts of your culture.
Shaping culture in the engineering organization
As a senior engineering leader, you'll have an impact on the culture of a group of teams - or maybe even your whole engineering org. And well-developed culture leads to positive changes in an organization.
So how do you define what culture facets are important to you - and how you do sow them throughout your engineering organisation? And how do you ensure diversity, equity, and belonging are fundamental parts of your culture.
In this talk, we’ll cover how you can positively impact your teams' performance, through culture change.

Dolapo is an engineering leader with almost two decades of experience building software. He's currently a Senior Engineering Director at Slack where he leads the virtual hq team. Prior to Slack he built engineering teams at Meta on Facebook's AR platform as well as the Instagram and Facebook Stories teams. Originally from Nigeria, he now resides in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.
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Effective engineering leadership growth
In this talk Bruno will share tactics on getting constructive feedback from peers, learning from new mentors and the strategies you can use use to keep growing your skills and expertise as an engineering leader.
Effective engineering leadership growth
Growing as an engineering leader was very challenging to me. The more senior I became, the more difficult it was to find the mentorship I needed to remain effective. In this talk I will share tactics on getting constructive feedback from peers, learning from new mentors and the strategies we can use to keep growing our skills and expertise as engineering leaders.
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Bruno has built software and helped technology teams thrive for a while now. The last two decades have been a pleasant mix of writing software, building, and leading large software engineering teams. He's currently serving as the SVP, Engineering at Doximity. An IBM XT computer enraptured him at the early age of 10. He's spent the rest of his life trying to recreate that feeling. Bruno has built several commercial software products with C++ and Ruby, ran a successful software agency for 5 years, and sold a small start-up. He's also a small investor and advisor to a couple of brilliant companies.
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