Substrate engineering: Engineering foundations in a world of LLMs
We need to start investing much more in migrating to better programming languages, building better tooling, and authoring new frameworks where correctness is built in. What does that look like for your engineering organization today?
The OSS maintainer to staff engineer pipeline
In this presentation, I'll share the lessons learned by me and other open source maintainers that impact how we perform as staff+ engineers and leaders today.
Sometimes you need to be a cruise director
Oliver will show, using a recent AWS -> GCP migration as an example, that they're all on this ship together. They know where we're headed, but they just need to agree on what's happening on the Lido Deck and when and make it happen.
Creating technical leadership in context
It seems like every engineering team reaches a tipping point where bottoms-up technical steering where everyone "just knows who to talk to" no longer scales. It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain shared mental models for how systems operate and should evolve over time. As a result, technical debt accumulates that no one feels empowered to take on, and cross-cutting initiatives stall without centralized strategy, accountability, and clear decision makers, especially due to the historically flat nature of the org. Joy and Nathan will cover how they overcame these challenges at Plaid through the creation of a technical leadership structure parallel to management.
Focus on project value using businesses strategy
This talk will cover the three main types of business strategy, how to learn which strategy your company is pursuing, and how to discuss projects through the lens of strategy. Learn how to identify projects with clear value that do not align with strategy; and how to discuss the problem with stakeholders.
Slack enterprise key management: Senior to staff lessons
Sometimes making the jump from Senior to Staff+ is a mystery and its not always clear what skills will be helpful. In this talk, Audrei will take you through some of the most impactful lessons they learned and skills they strengthened while working on their first Staff+ project, Slack Enterprise Key Management. These aren’t just Senior to Staff lessons: many of the lessons shared can be applied to any team or projects as folks continue to grow in their Staff+ career.
Navigators: Connecting execs with staffPlus engineers to shape strategy
Shawna and Dan will compare and contrast Navigators with Directors, juxtaposing a team and execution focus with that of the long-term health and productivity of software and systems. They'll also dig into some specific scenarios where Navigators have increased velocity and driven organizational alignment.
When to know you've outgrown your monolith and what to do about it
This talk by Ainsley will cover when to know you've outgrown your monolith and what to do about it.
Starting from nothing
In this talk, Lawrence will share what he's learned from his experiences bootstrapping teams. He'll draw from his experience at GoCardless as a Principal Engineer when leading efforts to build a new Open-Banking payment scheme, and more recently as the engineer who helped go from zero-to-release of the [incident.io](http://incident.io) Status Pages and Catalog products.
The (big) picture of debt
Leaning into the analogy to "debt", how can we tell the difference between good and regrettable technical debt? What is the true cost of a choice to e.g. share a database, and what does it take to change it? When is the right time to tackle something like this, and how can we tell? Tali will share their experiences with these questions to set you up for success with your own enormous debt payment.
Nail the pitch and stick the landing: How to propose & deliver major technical projects
Come and learn from Choi's mistakes and successes, pitching a large refactor project when she was a Senior Staff at Slack.
Simplify streaming application development: A declarative approach at Airbnb
The growing importance of streaming applications in today's tech landscape is driven by the need for real-time data processing, scalability, enhanced user experiences, and competitive advantage. However, developing these applications is far from trivial because of the engineering challenges—ranging from subscribing to various data sources, and defining complex streaming transformations, to integrating with multiple data sinks.
Should we multi-cloud?
"Should we multi-cloud?" is a provocative question that is getting asked by many organizations in the face of newsworthy outages and increasing pressure to mitigate vendor lock-in. While there isn't a simple yes or no answer, in this session, Tanu will share a decision-making framework with examples that can help you figure out the right answer for your organization.
Finding opportunities and maximizing Impact: A staff engineer's framework
In this talk, Chris introduces the Listen-Act-Share framework, a powerful tool for evaluating and acting on high-impact projects. Through real examples-including the transformation of Datadog's internal analytics infrastructure to a data lakehouse architecture
Self-defense for change agents
As developer-leaders, we spend a lot of time learning how to influence and make friends, but not much talking about what to do when that's not working, or organizational immunity activates. In this session Amy will talk about her experiences as a change agent and what she learned about how to do it sustainably, even when the change ahead is drastic.
Leading your team through a major refactor - don't be a hero, be a leader
In this talk, Dylan will share their experiences with leading a team through uncharted waters and the lessons they learned along the way.
Software security as a force of nature
In this keynote, Kelly explores effective principles and practices for sustaining system resilience, drawing insights from nature, historical human adaptations, and modern engineering techniques. You'll gain a new perspective on software security and practical methods to implement it.
Beyond generic goodstuff: Helping teams navigate context
This talk delves into the pitfalls of advocating for Generic Goodstuff without consideration for the context we're working in.
With great power comes great responsibility
In this talk, Yonatan emphasizes the need for a fundamental shift in software engineering, where the focus expands from just ensuring systems succeed to also ensuring they fail safely. With systems impacting billions of lives, leaders must understand, communicate, and integrate this change into every aspect of their work. We'll cover practical ways for engineering and product leaders to drive this transformation in the industry.
Doing the right thing vs doing things right
This talk walks through the experience of uncovering surprising use cases and navigating that tension in a product release journey.
The joy of being staff+
In this session, Leslie Chapman will celebrate what it means to be a senior individual contributor. What better way to close out the conference than with a love letter to what brings us together?
Start with an exit in mind: How to be effective by being selfish as a staff engineer
By the end of this talk, you should feel better prepared to scope out new work with the intention of a limited engagement and without apprehension of knowing you might be forever responsible for keeping it afloat. And you'll see how being a *little* bit selfish is good for your organization.
Using clinical science to effectively tackle code review anxiety (StaffPlus)
In this talk, Carol will share the story of my empirical research conducted with software engineers and developers across industries experiencing code review anxiety.
Psychologically safe reliability management
After providing some context on the problem space (production readiness in the context of General Election Preparation), Lesley will walk through the blameless post-mortem analysis of where their technical vision and strategy fell short due to organizational issues they overlooked.
Being a force for cultural change in your organization
Your responsibility to work toward this change also increases dramatically with your privilege. Nicole will talk through some concrete ways to magnify the change you effect in your work while doing things you already do anyway.
Reducing infrastructure cost during development and in production
In this talk, Sally Wahba will share some best practices for reducing infrastructure cost, both technical and organizational
Explosive overflow: Lessons from rocket science
The 1996 inaugural flight of the Ariane 5 rocket was cut short due to a series of software design missteps. Mark will analyze these historical flaws to discuss resilience and product security.