Sessions

• A Journey into your Lizard Brain

  • Duration: 45m
  • Format: Keynote
  • Level: Beginner

  Languages and syntax are the easy part of programming, the real challenge is in knowing how to solve a problem and how to find and understand which paths can take you to the solution, the moving parts. This talk will dive into this thought process, give you insights to train your lizard brain and expand your knowledge base.

  Note to organizers

  This talk is a conversation about cognitive processes and how they reflect in Development. Its put together from stories of my wife’s recovery from an accident with head trauma and drawing parallels to what we do as developers. The main goal is to help junior or beginner developers understand what changes as you become more experienced and helping them fast-track a few of these changes.

  There is a recording of the first time it was given as a keynote at #jab15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrzEfH6VjYY

  It has also been in other conferences, here are some ratings: https://joind.in/14231

• Application Metrics (with Prometheus examples)

  • Duration: 45m
  • Format: Seminar
  • Level: Beginner

  We all know not to poke at alien life forms in another planet, right? But what about metrics, do you know how to pick, measure and draw conclusions from them? In this talk we will cover various Site Reliability Engineering topics, such as SLIs and SLOs while we explore real life examples of defining and implementing metrics in a system with examples using Prometheus, an open-source system monitoring and alert platform, to demonstrate implementation. Let’s get back to some real science.

  Note to organizers

  This talk covers various topics from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering toolbox, for example SLIs, SLOs, SLAs.

  It is based on the work we have done at Usabilla re-building the core of our platform with a metrics-first ideology.

  It also offers a quick practical segment showing off Prometheus examples to achieve this goal.

  There is a DPC recording of it: https://youtu.be/W9NmNfCCPXg

• Communicate like a tourist

  • Duration: 45m
  • Format: Seminar
  • Level: Beginner

  Have you ever been a tourist in a foreign land where you did not speak the language or understand the culture? You still found your way, didn’t you? Let’s explore the topic of communication, learning strategies, and concrete tools we can use in everyday communication applied to Engineering and Product teams.

  How can ideas like Domain Design and architecture diagrams impact the information available and how it flows across our organization? Can we improve our decision-making and facilitate onboarding and sharing? In this talk, we will explore new concepts and understand why they can better help our brains assimilate data and why, ultimately, we crave communication.

  Note to organizers

  This talk focuses on inspiring engineers to communicate more outside their direct teams, creating stronger cross-team relationships that will help them become more senior Individual Contributors and impact the quality of work in companies overall. It also offers concrete options and techniques engineers can apply to make communication more effective.

• How'd we get here? A guide to Architectural Decision Records

  • Duration: 45m
  • Format: Seminar
  • Level: Beginner

  Every day developers will make an uncountable number of decisions while working or run into past decisions that we do not fully understand. How can we organize all this content and simplify the sharing of architectural knowledge? Let’s explore ADRs and how they can support decision making and sharing on various levels.

• The Individual Contributor Path

  • Duration: 45m
  • Format: Seminar
  • Level: Beginner

  For most of my early career, I was told the only path up was through management roles. Our market has since evolved, and Staff+ engineering roles are more common and offer us a different path. But what is a Staff/Principal engineer? What do they do? How do they work? Are they just managers who can’t admit it?

  Let’s explore all these topics, the skills you need, the role you may play, and the different flavors of Individual Contributors you will discover while we figure out how to hotwire your growth in this career path.

  Note to organizers

  This is a work in progress; some variation may happen. As a Principal Engineer focused on mentoring our Staff Engineers, I have seen how much lack of information there is on this path and how often people put themselves in boxes that limit their ability to impact the engineering organization. This talk will try to draw a clear path and help them see potential opportunities while we outline the overlaps with managers and directors.

• Writing code you won’t hate tomorrow

  • Duration: 45m
  • Format: Seminar
  • Level: Beginner

  As developers we write code everyday, only to frown at it a week after that. Why do we have such a hard time with code written by others and ourselves, this raging desire to rewrite everything we see? Writing code that survives the test of time and self judgment is a matter of clarity and simplicity. Let’s talk about growing, learning and improving our code with calisthenics, readability and good design.

  Note to organizers

  It can work as a regular session and it also can work as a closing keynote, as per the feedback i have gotten before.

  The TNPHP edition got really good feedback: https://joind.in/talk/view/12734

  This talk was listed by SlideShare as one of the Top 2 Best Decks for Engineers in 2014: http://www.slideshare.net/Slideshare/best-of-slideshare-2014/18