Intercom Engineering

Over the last six years, Intercom’s Engineering organisation has grown from 2 founding engineers to over 80. We’ve learned many hard lessons about building software, scaling teams and collaborating with other disciplines. At this event we're looking at a subset of areas we believe are core to our work and our culture. We'll have 5 talks ranging from front-end technologies, backend scalability challenges, ubiquitous engineering design principles and the softer ingredients of building a high performance team.     

Solving the right problem

     The most powerful multiplier to an engineer’s productivity is solving the right problem again and again. The engineer who is constantly solving the right problem is naturally more productive than the engineer who rapidly produces lines of code with no clear benefit.

Through some simple examples and tips, Brian Long will get you to think about the problem you’re really trying to solve.     

Scaling features faster than expected

     12 months ago we launched our Smart Campaigns feature, a tool which allows our customers send automated messages based on unique behaviours. Smart Campaigns was popular, so popular that usage scaled way faster than expected. We were putting too much load on our Infrastructure and it started to break for customers. Paul Magrath will talk through these problems and how we tackled them.    

Spin me a Yarn

    Individual engineers often ship to production multiple times a day. As we scaled our javascript package manager couldn’t keep up and our workflow became inefficient. Fresh from speaking at EmberConf, Serena Fritsch looks at the challenges and gains of switching our Javascript package manager.     

Psychological safety in engineering teams

    John Looney will explore how teams that trust each other can achieve more.     

What makes a great product team tick?

     In the startup world you have precious little time to build a product that the market or investors want. High performing product teams are one of the keys to success in our industry. Eoin Nolan takes a look at the characteristics of great product teams and the common traits of the people they're made of.      

Panel discussion

Darragh Curran, our VP of Engineering will MC a Q&A session

We hope to have some great conversations with everyone that helps us all grow and be better.

Doors 6.30pm

Drinks and Pizza

Any questions? Mail pamela@intercom.com.