“That’s not good enough”

That was Larene’s response to when Damian told her “you’re doing a great job, keep doing what you’re doing”.

This talk is about the journey of a grizzled industry veteran and a young ambitious engineer thrown together in a small startup environment.

Forced to establish fast feedback cycle, not just iterating on the product we were developing, but also how we worked on it together. We were both pushed out of our comfort zones to create a productive collaboration.

We’ve distilled some of our lessons from this process into a handful of tools you can apply straight away, whether you’re seeking mentoring, or are in a tech leadership/manager position.

We’ll share how we give and receive feedback, how mentors can grow the technical skills of more junior people, how men can mentor women more effectively, and how even the most hardened “seen it all” of us can grow individually.

By now most of us have heard of unconscious bias, the hidden assumptions and associations that hinder our best intentions when it comes to inclusion and diversity. But how do we even begin to manage mental processes which by their very definition, are outside of our awareness?

Our industry undeniably suffers from a lack of gender balance amongst hands-on technologists. Even fewer of those technologists are mothers. Sadly, many women believe that you can’t remain technical once you become a mother. But there are small changes that we as leaders can make to support our team members as they transition back into the workforce.

In this talk, Sarah will share with you her experience, including the challenges she faced, of returning to a senior technical role after starting a family. You will hear the changes she made within her company to make it easier for others to see how to return and stay technical, and the benefits to her company of having her and others like her able to return to work.

Sarah hopes her experience will provide some inspiration and practical advice to share with your software engineers and tech leads who are contemplating motherhood, and for leaders who are committed to supporting diversity in their workplace.

Distribution is hard. Building engineering teams is hard. And building distributed engineering teams presents unique challenges, especially under hyper growth.

Cash App is one of the fastest growing financial products in the US & UK. We have tens of millions of users & move hundreds of millions of dollars a day. We have product engineering teams in several cities in the US, Canada, Sweden and Australia. Our product velocity & commercial growth is constrained by the number of engineers on our teams, and utilising a distributed team is one way to sustain this growth.

In this talk, we’ll speak about the challenges growing a small engineering team in a single location into a large team spread across many locations & multiple timezones. We’ll outline some of the things we’ve learnt, and present some rules of thumb that we use when making decisions about distributed teams.

As a senior technical leader, it’s often viewed as a temping trap to get down into nitty-gritty details of software engineering or product development. As a CTO, Head of Engineering or equivalent, we’re supposed to play at the strategic level and leave the details to our engineering leads, aren’t we?

Well… yes. And no. Sometimes, creating a strategy and leaving it for our teams to figure out ignores the fact that our organisation constrains our teams in ways that we don’t expect. Sometimes it’s actually necessary to venture down into the weeds and see what the teams are doing - and what we’re doing that actively harms their efforts despite our intentions to the contrary.

In this talk we’ll look at some ways to map strategy to execution by setting “unreasonable” goals - and then working out how to get organisational constraints - and ourselves - out of the way.

High performing teams are at the core of every great organisation. Reaching that level of team performance is easier said than done.
How can companies unleash such teams by driving ambition, empowering decisions making and encouraging self-evolution so that such teams can continuously produce high value work?
In this Talk Minna and Vered will share their experience from software delivery and military background to inspire you to explore new ways of building high performing teams.

The variables that impact software quality go far beyond the variables that are defined in the codebase. Trish Khoo explains how shifting focus from testing to transparency can turn an ordinary software team into extraordinary software team.

This is a deep dive into the concepts of software testing and a presentation of a broader model with widespread application. Software testing is poorly understood and poorly implemented far too often in the software development industry. Poor software testing practices lead to inefficient teams, unpredictable timelines, and poor quality software.

Using the holistic transparency approach described in this talk, software development teams can achieve exceptional results in quality, productivity and predictability.