Software Development Superstream: Becoming a Senior Software Engineer

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Sam Newman: Introduction (5 minutes) - 8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 4:00pm UTC/GMT

• Sam Newman welcomes you to the Software Development Superstream.

Lena Reinhard: How to Communicate a Decision You Disagree With (35 minutes) - 8:05am PT | 11:05am ET | 4:05pm UTC/GMT

• Junior members of your team rely on you to provide context for decisions your organization makes. You’ve built a trusting relationship with them that you want to preserve. But what if you have reservations about what you’ve been asked to communicate? How do you relay a business decision that you don’t agree with—one that your company expects you and your team to execute on? Navigating this tension can be challenging, but the more you understand your own reactions and impulses, the better your communication will be—for your team and for you. Lena Reinhard shows you ways to develop an approach that works for you.
• Lena Reinhard is an engineering leadership coach, mentor, and organizational developer supporting technology leaders in their personal growth and success within the complexity of engineering organizations. Previously, Lena served as VP of engineering with CircleCI and Travis CI, and was an SaaS startup cofounder and CEO. She has dedicated her career to helping leaders and their organizations excel in times of change and in challenging markets, working with companies at all stages, from startups, scale-ups, late-stage/pre-IPO and VC-funded ventures to corporations and NGOs. You can find her writing on leadership and read more about her work at lenareinhard.com.

Alex Canessa: How to Mentor Genius Engineers (35 minutes) - 8:40am PT | 11:40am ET | 4:40pm UTC/GMT

• Getting the best out of your team of engineers is an art and a science, and part of being a senior software engineer is learning to mentor "genius" members. All leaders have experienced a newly employed engineer with huge promise, someone who might even be better than you at coding, but who lacks experience and knowledge and can't yet be left on their own. Alex Canessa shows you how to help inexperienced engineers grow into independent contributors who can enhance your team’s performance and success.
• Alex Canessa is head of developer relations at Commerce Layer. He has worked in web development in the agency environment and as a freelancer since 2008. In 2014, he moved to London to join Digital Detox, where he worked for nine years, rising to head of engineering. When Digital Detox was acquired by EY, Alex led enterprise projects that often included digital transformation.
• Break (5 minutes)

Diana Montalion: From Software to Systems (35 minutes) - 9:20am PT | 12:20pm ET | 5:20pm UTC/GMT

• As a software engineer, you need to learn cloud native architectures, Kafka, Kubernetes, GoLang, Terraforming, and so on, but you also need to transform how you think or you’ll simply be using fancy new tools to build the same old things. Systems are nonlinear; they reorganize our mental models and communication structures. Diana Montalion explores the nonlinear skills (including some you might not think of as IT skills) and practices that’ll help you navigate from software to systems—essential for anyone in senior software engineering roles.
• Diana Montalion is the founder of Mentrix Group, a consultancy that provides technology architecture, systems leadership, and workshops on nonlinear approaches. She has more than 17 years of experience delivering transformative initiatives, independently or as part of a professional services group, to clients including Stanford, the Gates Foundation, and Teach For All. She also served as principal architect for The Economist and the Wikimedia Foundation. Writing, teaching, and thinking about thinking are her favorite hobbies.

Nicky Thompson: Making Work (and Life) Less Stressful by Making Better Decisions (35 minutes) - 9:55am PT | 12:55pm ET | 5:55pm UTC/GMT

• Making mistakes is one way to learn. But no matter how many times someone says that, it still feels bad when it happens. Engineers make decisions for a living: what code to write (or not write), what to learn next, whether to hire a candidate, which projects are viable, how to reorganize teams—and that’s saying nothing about decisions in your personal life. Nicky Thompson shares tools and frameworks that engineers, tech leads, managers, and humans can use to sense-check difficult choices for the best possible outcomes (or to better learn from mistakes).
• Nicky Thompson is a principal technologist at dxw, providing technical leadership and support to the technology team and dxw's clients. She has spent more than two decades as a freelance and in-house developer, delivering projects for clients ranging from global banks and major publishing houses to indie storytelling agencies. She’s worked with designers all over the world to make beautiful websites that work for everyone. Offline, Nicky enjoys watching bad TV and learning new stuff—this year, it's a serious sewing/dressmaking habit.
• Break (10 minutes)

Aditya Bansal: How to Effectively “Spike'' a Complex Technical Project (35 minutes) - 10:40am PT | 1:40pm ET | 6:40pm UTC/GMT

• Every software engineer across every organization has arrived at the halfway point of a project and realized that it’s much more complicated than they originally thought and will take twice as long as they originally planned and that it also requires collaboration from three different teams. So what’s the solution to this persistent thorn? Think “spike,” whereby the engineers leading a project dive deep into the possible unknowns of a project before it begins. Aditya Bansal explains how to successfully spike a project and shares lessons that he’s learned while leading several technically complex projects involving multiple teams across three different companies.
• Aditya Bansal is a founding engineer at Cortex (funded by Sequoia Capital and YCombinator), a developer portal for engineering teams to catalog their services and resources and build a culture of reliability through adoption of best practices. He started his career in software engineering at Poynt, where he helped scale a team from 15 engineers to more than 60, was responsible for building and maintaining a large part of the company’s infrastructure, and experienced firsthand the classic monolith to microservices journey. Aditya also worked with the founders of an early-stage startup (Curebase) to build the engineering organization from the ground up.

Jason Yip: Occupy the Space—A Grassroots Guide to Engineering (and Product) Strategy When None Exists (35 minutes) - 11:15am PT | 2:15pm ET | 7:15pm UTC/GMT

• The typical problem in product engineering is not bad strategy as much as “no strategy.” This leads to confusion, lack of motivation, and incoherent action. The next time you look for a strategy and find an empty space, instead of waiting for it to be filled, Jason Yip shows you how to fill it in yourself. If you’re wrong, it forces a correction. If you’re right, it helps create focus. Jason shares how he’s approached the strategy void in the past—and reveals what works and what didn’t work so well.
• Jason Yip is the principal at Reinvention Cycle LLC, consulting and coaching on Agile, Lean, org design, scale-ups, and leadership development. He’s been involved in Agile software development since 1999, when he first encountered Extreme Programming. Previously, he was a principal consultant on digital and Agile transformation at Thoughtworks and also served as a staff Agile coach at Spotify, helping the ad tech and marketing tech areas navigate hypergrowth.

Sam Newman: Closing Remarks (5 minutes) - 11:50am PT | 2:50pm ET | 7:50pm UTC/GMT

• Sam Newman closes out today’s event.