SPEAKERS

Session Name: How Fanfiction Made Me a Better Engineer

In 2018, I was introduced to the dazzling and diverse world of fanfiction –– a hidden-in-plain-sight world of alternative LGBTQ and feminine narratives to mainstream media. A year and a half later, with roughly 60,000 words written, I came out of the closet –– now aware of my true gender identity. It took me a while to notice it, but fanfiction itself –– and not just gender transition –– has found its way into my day-to-day engineering conduct:
It changed the way I appreciate and review code. It changed the way I use ticketing and bug reporting systems. It changed the way I write my documents with colleagues. It's a good idea to take a page, or at least a handful of paragraphs, from the diversity of that unique world that fanfiction has to offer.

Session Name: Fast, Not Furious - Keeping Developer Velocity and Efficiency in Challenging Environments

Sometimes you check in your new feature, it rolls smoothly into production and you’re as happy as a clam. But sometimes you just can’t get your feature into production, banging your head against the wall in frustration. Yet sometimes still, you wish that bug hadn’t made it into production, muttering as your colleague from support gets an earful on the phone. ALM, CI/CD, testing and operations are all part of what makes developers efficient and fast. And yet, developing an entertainment app will obviously be faster than developing software for a nuclear reactor - for good reasons. What makes the entertainment app fast to develop for? What makes the nuclear reactor software so hard and slow? We will analyze the differences and compare the challenges as they ramp up across the spectrum of projects between these two. Following this session, you should have an improved understanding of, and a toolbox to improve upon, developer velocity. You should have a better idea on what makes it easier or harder to achieve and what may work when facing a challenging environment.

Speaker Bio:

A Gil, of all trades. Speaker, Blogger, LGBTQ activist, Volunteer, and Community manager. I love a varied DevOps experience - from MLOps to FinOps to DevOps, from multimedia to healthcare to security. From source control to production monitoring. From large team interwork to a one-person show.