Dev Leadership & Management
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
OPEN TALK: What is Cadence and How it Will Help Your Business
Join on HopinCadence (cadenceworkflow.io) is an open-source solution for workflow orchestration developed at Uber. It allows developers to focus on writing code for business logic, without worrying about the complexity of distributed systems. Cadence is widely adopted at Uber and in the open source community for a broad variety of use cases. In this session, you will hear from Cadence users at Uber and Instaclustr talk about how Cadence is used to solve various business problems. It will also cover some of the most interesting features and improvements that were shipped throughout the past year, as well as its future roadmap.
OPEN TALK: How Open Source Influenced Traditional Product Development
Join on HopinAndré explores the history of open-source development and its influence on traditional product development. In turn, he also discusses how COSS products benefit from the backing of a commercial enterprise; by employing full-time developers, keeping the product’s development on the right path, and how this feeds back into the open-source community.
He also talks about how iText uses its commercial side to drive development and benefit its wider community, and how open source can benefit from competition in the marketplace.
OPEN TALK: Case Study: Adapting A Monolithic Application to Support Hyper Growth
Join on HopinThis talk will focus on the architecture implications of a fast growing fully-remote organization and the use of a monolithic (versus micro services) application to facilitate scalability, onboarding, and manageability. This is a real-world case study.
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
KEYNOTE: CircleCI -- How to Take Your Engineering Team from Good to Great
Join on HopinAirlines have on-time arrival. Retail has sales per square foot. Marketing teams have cost per acquisition. Manufacturing has yield and safety scores. But how do we measure the performance of engineering teams, and why is understanding team performance so important?
If you’ve ever wondered how to solve that nagging feeling of wanting to “improve the team” but not being able to say exactly what that means, or if you know your team is world class and want a way to prove it, this is the talk for you.
In this session, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber will look at anonymized team data to share insights, behaviors, and metrics that lead teams to both high quality, and high velocity. He’ll share anonymized, aggregate data from millions of builds to show best practices on commits and pull requests, disaster recovery, frequency of deploy, and more.
Key takeaways
- Measuring team performance sounds scary, but it’s really helpful for everyone to see where the opportunities for improvement are, and to foster open discussions about what’s working and what’s not
While velocity is critical, velocity without quality is a recipe for disaster.
- Monitoring consistency metrics like net value score, time to recovery, and transition information can help your team get better at both speed and quality
OPEN TALK: 5 Things to Help Your Team Succeed at Kubernetes
Join on HopinAs you adopt cloud native technologies and Kubernetes, you will face a myriad of technology, process, policy and people decisions. What tools and patterns are needed to be successful? How can you ensure Kubernetes is a success across your DevOps team and organization?Rachel Sweeney, Product Advocate SRE at Fairwinds, discusses why Kubernetes plays an important role in your DevOps experience and the 5 things to help your team succeed at Kubernetes. Learn a few critical steps to achieving your Kubernetes Maturity around technology, security, visibility and consistency.
Getting Back to Sleep as Soon as Possible for the on-Call Developer
Join on HopinIt’s the middle of the night, and there’s much ado about nothing. Well, not quite about nothing - there’s definitely something happening: one of the services your team owns is crashing. And by crashing, I mean sometimes crashing. It’s not really that bad, but it’s bad enough for the floodgates to open and for the DevOps folks to lose their marbles and ping you relentlessly on Slack. Ping. Ping. Ping.
This talk is all about that feeling, and what we can do to make the whole situation suck less when it inevitably comes up again. We will walk through a close-to-real life incident from the perspective of the on-call developer, and discuss practical and technical steps developers can take to increase observability while on-call (even when a serious, hard to debug issue arises).
The Last Mile: Delivering the Last 10% Of a 4-Year Migration
Join on HopinIn complex projects, the last 10% of the project is often the most difficult part. In this talk, I will share a case study of Box's 4-year effort to get rid of our legacy mapping DB and move the last piece of our legacy monolith MySQL traffic to our data access layer. This talk will cover how to manage technical risk and optimize team execution in a technically complex and operationally distributed environment. This talk will share reflections on useful tactics that led to the successful completion of this 4 year migration project for others to learn from and leverage.As a relatively new Staff engineer, I learned and experimented with building and maintaining a long time-horizon project plan, identifying unknown unknowns, and continually finding ways to de-risk the project at every stage of development. As the project progressed, I found that successful execution depended not only on these technical strategies, but even moreso on how the team operated. In the spirit of Agile and mitigating the isolation of the pandemic, we experimented with almost every aspect of how we worked: how/when we worked together, how our sprints ran, how we evolved designs, and even the minutia of how we retrospected. In this session, we will have a candid discussion on the technical and organizational strategies that I believe were important to our success, or that were promising enough to warrant more experimentation in the future. Participants will leave with a few ideas that they should be able to try out within their own teams. Additionally, there are some deeper ideas about team leadership and effectiveness that I hope participants will be able to reflect on going forwards.
KEYNOTE: GoodData -- Reimagining Your Data Analytics Company through the Lens of Cloud Native
Join on HopinRoman Stanek, current founder and CEO of GoodData, has founded three SaaS companies over the past 22 years. His first two companies, NetBeans and Systinet, both ended in successful exits, including a sale to Sun Microsystems and one of the most successful acquisitions in the web services/SOA space. GoodData is currently experiencing rapid growth including a 33% expansion across the entire customer base in Q4 2020, a 9x increase in the number of self-service accounts in 2020, and the signing of our largest expansion deal yet, a $14 million contract –– all critical metrics as GoodData continues to surge and provide customers with high-quality data analytics and insights. Until now, there’s been little market pressure for BI to adapt to modern devops tooling and best practices like CI/CD, DataOps, GitOps and others. Popular BI tools often offer a “real time BI optimized” architecture that removes the analytical storage layer to reduce ETL latencies. Unfortunately, in most cases, the analytical capabilities are severely limited in the “real-time-optimized” mode. Roman and the GoodData team just released GoodData Cloud Native after two years of engineering work — the first solution to deliver enterprise-grade analytics as a microservices-based stack. Roman can speak to how to identify not just today’s market need but tomorrow’s — and how to turn those insights into the next phase of your roadmap. For GoodData, that looked like putting analytics on equal footing with core business operations like app dev, and committing to a headless BI structure that delivers scalable, real-time data to everyone who needs it.
Expedited Delivery: Rethink / Reimagine Your Business Value Flow
Join on HopinAs enterprises quickly adapt to a contactless, digital-first world, there is a crucial need to deliver customer-centric features in short iterations. This requires rethinking how teams innovate, develop, and deploy solutions and reimagining the flow of value within the organization. In this session, I share two phenomenal case studies that showcase how teams disrupted organizational culture and existing processes in a non-traditional way to achieve their business outcomes. Through these stories, I highlight how important it is to rethink and reimagine how we approach problems, develop solutions, and have fun while we are achieving our business outcomes.
Making Code Review a More Inclusive & Productive Collaboration
Join on HopinCode Review is a great collaboration tool and it is a socio-technical engineering practice that every software developer already uses (or should). While many view code review as a low-value formality in the code writing process, its promise is so much more -- from writing more robust code and learning from one another, to developing a deeper understanding of the systems we work on and even helping to build a sense of collective ownership among fellow engineers. I will talk about why we need to focus more on its social aspects, best practices, and concrete ways to promote more inclusive code reviews. Even if we each learn one way to participate in code review better, this would have a huge positive impact in the everyday lives of software developers around the globe.
OPEN TALK: The Evolution of Open Source into the Commercial Arena
Join on HopinRaf discusses how Open Source has evolved over the years to become a force in the commercial arena. As an example, he talks about how iText began as a hobby project which transitioned into a community project, and then into a dual-licensed one.
He explores the reasons why the core iText PDF library remains open source, the differences between dual licensing and the “Open Core” model, and the importance of meeting the expectations of our development community.
Finally, he looks at the importance of structure and processes, why the “benevolent dictator” approach works in open source, and the impact of transitioning from FOSS to COSS on engineering.
CLOSING KEYNOTE: Cleo -- The Missing Link In Product Development That Could Kill Your Product
Join on HopinWith just CI/CD/CR, technology and product leaders miss out on a critical step in delivering products to the market. "Continuous Exploration" is the foundational building block of product development lifecycles. Come and gather ideas on how you can avoid this pitfall.