The software industry is surrounded by complexity, with new solutions to old problems appearing daily. Creators of software constantly face questions about how to best navigate changing technology tides while still building their “ships”. Building these ships, or building software, requires picking challenges and making sensible technical choices to move fast without compromising stability.

In this talk, GitHub’s Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering, Sam Lambert, will explore how GitHub steers its ship—the world’s largest software host serving over 11M users—on top of stable, proven systems and services. He’ll speak specifically about how these practices can be translated to any type of software creation by focusing on:

The importance of pragmatism during building and maintaining software systems.
How a company like GitHub moves fast and breaks as little as possible by carefully choosing what problems to tackle.
The role new technologies can play in informing decisions and approaches around what problems to solve.