Track: The Whole Engineer

Attitude Determines Altitude- Engineering Yourself

What makes a 10x engineer, or designer, or leader? It turns out that it is a surprisingly small part aptitude -- our skill at a particular task, and a surprisingly large part attitude -- how we go about it. It is far less the contributions of genetics, or education, or circumstance, than it is how we approach challenges, limitations, and opportunities in our work.

Weaving together diverse threads from Carol Dweck's growth mindset, to Daniel Pink's work on motivation, to modern DevOps culture, we will explore the outsized power of attitude. A wonderful consequence is that our ability to make an exceptional impact is more malleable than we often believe, and it is therefore more amenable to our own influence -- to being *engineered*! This talk will particularize these ideas in a software development context -- from focus and attention, to drive and motivation, to honesty and empathy, to trust and forgiveness.

You will take away a number of concrete suggestions to improve and optimize your approach to your own work -- to make yourself a more effective engineer, designer, or leader. You may be surprised at how quickly improvements in your teams, your products, and your systems will follow.

Engineering Inclusion

There has been much discussion about improving diversity in the tech industry. While admirable, focusing on diversity without accounting for inclusion can result in temporary gains. In this talk, we will examine the need for inclusive measures as part of building a strong engineering culture and its impact on the product development process. We will explore techniques for achieving balance in an industry that has historically skewed in a particular direction. Finally, we will look at these issues from an engineering and business point of view in addition to the usual social good standpoint.

The Effective Remote Developer

Being on a distributed team, working from your home or coffee shop isn't easy, but it can be incredibly rewarding. Making it work requires constant attention, as well as support from your team and organization. It's more than just setting up Slack and buying a webcam. We'll learn what you can do to be your best self as a remote team member, as well as what you need from your environment, team, and company. It's not about technical stuff—it's the human stuff. We'll learn how can you be present and effective when you aren't physically there.

Am I a Brilliant Jerk?

Netflix’s culture memo famously says, “On a dream team, there are no brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is just too high.” Well, what is a brilliant jerk? If the cost to teamwork is high, what are some examples of the cost?

This presentation will focus on the jerk part of “brilliant jerk” and leave the brilliant calculation for another talk. We will spend a majority of the time on Emotional Intelligence and why it matters in developing and operating software systems effectively. Opinions and perspective will be drawn from my experience as an engineer and then manager at Netflix. I’ll provide my answers for the first two questions: what is and why you can’t afford to have a brilliant jerk. I’ll also provide criteria I’ve used to self-assess and answer the most important question: “Am I a brilliant jerk?”

Leadership Lessons From the Agile Manifesto

Whether you’re a Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, or Project Manager for an engineering team, you probably weren’t handed a leadership instruction manual when you were given your first team to lead. Even experienced technical leaders usually operate from a set of instincts and the hard lessons learned from painful mistakes. However, leadership is a skill that you can learn and develop if you know where to look. You don't have to be a “born leader”, but you do need a set of principles to guide the leader within you. This session will teach you how to apply the principles in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development to become a leader equipped with a framework for making decisions.

The Whole Engineer Panel

An engineer does more than write code. An engineer must work with a diverse array of people, and be a leader, a mentor, a presenter, a marketer, and a whole person. By building yourself beyond just writing code, you'll become an effective engineer. Come ask our speakers about how to make that happen. Let us hear your challenges and offer some tips, techniques, and new ways of thinking that have worked for us. Improving yourself beyond coding skills isn't as daunting as it sounds, and it's worth it to do your best work.