ConfPad

Friction is a common, and necessary, part of team growth—but when left unchecked, team friction is unhealthy for you, your coworkers, your company, and ultimately your end users. In this presentation, I draw on my experiences at organizations large and small to illuminate the sources of team tension, how you can better understand and manage unexpected teamma…

Kotlin sure has been receiving a lot of buzz lately, is there something to it? Developed by JetBrains, Kotlin has been catching on lately because of its null safety guarantees, functional nature, type inference, full interoperability with Java, cross-platform support, and ease of use with Android and Spring. Is this something you and your team should conside…

Our engineering workflow revolves around our code review process. Code reviews are more than just a way to make sure we don’t introduce new bugs into the codebase. They have become pillars of our team’s engineering culture—ensuring code quality, encouraging collaboration and providing valuable teaching and learning opportunities. We’ll look at the ways your …

Slack is the leading global collaboration hub that makes people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. From global Fortune 100 companies to corner markets, businesses and teams of every kind use Slack to bring the right people together with all the right information. Whereas just two years ago the product had 2 million daily active users…

Remote work is the number one desired workplace setup for developers. As a lead dev, you’re able to hire from a global talent pool, and your team’s productivity, engagement and retention can soar as everyone works in the way that’s best for them. But done wrong, it’s a recipe for isolation, miscommunication and massive lost opportunity. This holds many of us…

Diversity and Inclusion are hot topics right now. But, year after year, our industry fails to move the numbers significantly. It seems everyone is talking about it, but how do you actually bring about change? In this presentation, I’ll share the concrete actions from my efforts to bring inclusive practices into an engineering organization. From conceptualiza…

In most forms of entertainment, it all comes down to the story. Whether it's a good vs evil dynamic or just overcoming adversity, many storytellers embed lessons from real life into their fictional worlds. It is in the most fictional of worlds, professional wrestling and superhero movies, that we find useful patterns to apply in our day-to-day as engineering…

If you don’t know much about GraphQL, you probably just identify it as the hip, shiny new thing companies are adopting to replace their RESTful APIs. Sure, sure – clients can ask for only what they need in a single request – but is that it? What really makes GraphQL so special? In this talk you’ll be introduced to GraphQL beyond just the usual explanations o…

"Your team needs data so they can make the right decisions. Unless they have the right data in the right place, they're left to act on intuition, opinions and hunches. With a modicum of data infrastructure, you can give them what they need. Join us and learn how to build the foundations of your analytical data systems. We'll discuss data collection: identify…

"What do Stairway to Heaven, air balloons, and the 3 Little Pigs have in common? They’re all fun formats for sprint retrospectives! For the last few months, my team tried different retrospective formats, ranging from the highly creative, to the exceedingly dull. This exercise helped our team determine: 1) what information the team finds valuable in retrospec…

Interactive workshops are the best way to engage teams and individuals and help everyone remember lessons learned. They may seem difficult to plan, hard to execute, and very time consuming to do both but any individual can create these compelling and interesting sessions by following a simple formula. Learn what this formula is and create a workshop that you…

Apache Pulsar is a distributed pub/sub system develop at Yahoo! This talk covers Apache Pulsar's underlying design and protocol level semantics. We'll cover some of the advantages and disadvantages over systems like Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ. The talk will end with a story of a real world experience with Pulsar.

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. We all say we want to do groundbre…