Developers are under increasing pressure to build and ship applications quickly and then add new features consistently to boost user engagement and grow competitive advantage. Moving fast always comes with risks but since moving slow isn’t a popular option, how can development teams ship code with speed whilst strategically managing the risks?  

Progressive delivery is a modern way of developing, testing, and deploying code, which allows development teams to make data-driven decisions throughout the software delivery lifecycle, from pre-production to production.  

Join Ivan Diaz, Manager of Solutions Engineering at Bugsnag, a SmartBear company, to discuss how development teams should be thinking about progressive delivery. 

Register for the session to learn more and ask questions! 

A healthy development team is critical to the success of any technology-led organization. Companies around the globe are not only dealing with a competitive talent landscape but also a technology skills gap that has worsened since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But once you find the right talent, how do you nurture, retain, and keep them successful? Lilac Mohr shares key learnings on what a healthy team looks like and teaches best practices to find opportunities and areas of improvements to keep your team healthy, productive, and successful. 

Design Sprints have become an increasingly common tool in Design, Technology, and Business in recent years – teams rely on them to make decisions that are core to their product. When covid appeared in 2020 and many teams went remote-first overnight, this meant that designers everywhere were taking a crash course in facilitating remote collaboration.

In this talk, Eugenia will speak about adapting the Google Sprint Process (and other processes / methods) to the new remote-first world, and will share unique insights gathered from online classroom studio collaborations, serving diverse learning needs. The material was developed in collaboration with Rachel Simpson, and they explain how to run a design sprint or collaborative workshop with remote participants (with suggested tools), unpack common challenges that facilitators may face, and discuss how to pick and choose methods to become a more flexible advanced facilitator. 

As companies migrate to more resilient cloud infrastructures, threat actors continue to turn their attention to the application landscape as the new entry point for compromising systems.

Despite cyberattacks happening at a pace of every 39 seconds, only 3% of U.S. bachelor's degree graduates have cybersecurity-related skills. While several factors play into this, the most glaring is that faculty just don't know about the security field, leading to gaps between academia and industry. Unfortunately the gap has gotten wider due to constant changes and growing toolchains in software development.

This is compounded by a consistent lack of employee training in secure coding principles and how it applies to the software development life cycle, causing new entrants into software development to be ill-prepared to build secure systems.

In order to continue to defend critical assets and infrastructure in rapidly evolving cloud-centric environments, secure coding principles need to be adopted not only within corporate environments but in the classroom, ensuring that the next generation of developers can build experiences that are not only engaging but also secure.

This session will delve into:

The growing security challenges developers face today
The current perceptions of “security” within the developer community
The need for secure coding education at the university level
Opportunities for learning secure coding in educational and corporate environments

High performing distributed/remote teams require a concerted effort to remain productive, healthy and happy while continuing to operate with excellence. In this talk, we will talk about how to set the right metrics to measure productivity and refactor team design, day-to-day work, onboarding process with a goal to stay nimble through constant changes to work environments, needs of the customer and a rapidly growing cloud native distributed software stack. 

The sad reality of our industry is that many sites and services are woefully inaccessible, and the teams behind them may not have the prior knowledge or motivation to become accessible. Making your product accessible is likely to be at least as much of a political battle as it is a technical. This talk will guide you through being firm but collaborative in both of those struggles.

We'll start with the common ways of speaking to your coworkers' motivations and positioning product accessibility to fit them. We'll then cover how to built it into your team practices. We'll end with an overview of the automations you can put in place to make sure your product and people become accessible and stay that way. 

The temptation to fix people problems (or product problems!) is usually to add something new. A new pizza party, a new feature, a new recurring well intended meeting…

But what if the answer lives in not adding but removing?

In this session we’ll confront our loss aversion and look for opportunities to improve culture, solve talent challenges and build systems around the truism that less is more.

As burnout and distractions rise for leaders and teams alike, the ability to remove and simplify has never been more important or more difficult.

Attendees of this session will walk away knowing how to:
Cut out the unnecessary and improve on the essential including fewer and better meetings
Map your values to your day to day patterns
Use anti-goals to clarify and remove distractions
Identify culture waste and avoid culture debt 

With the explosion of various developer tools and services in recent years, it's tempting to think that we've entered a golden age for software development productivity. However, contrary to popular belief, developer productivity is in fact declining, and this phenomenon risks bringing modern software development to a grinding halt in many organizations. In this talk, Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, reveals a framework for thinking about developer productivity and charts a path toward reversing this dire trend.

True developers would agree: solving complex problems and coming up with innovative software solutions is every developer’s holy grail. But often developers are faced with the impossible: 25% of their time is spent on debugging, 25% is lost on meetings and security, and 20% on code maintenance. Innovation is lost in a space of unoriginality. But as the software world is heading towards a what’s known as “bottom-up” approach, developers can have a true impact on the development process, and help companies reach better dev decisions. In this session we will talk about key insights and trends from our Dev Innovation report, addressing the developer impact, what is holding it back, and what can drive it for growth.