Lead Dev Meetup - San Francisco - September 2019

Welcome to the meetup for technical leaders! This edition takes place the evening before Calibrate conference. We welcome attendees who are currently (or soon to be) leading and managing technical teams.

⏰ Schedule

  • 6:00pm - Arrival, refreshments, networking
  • 7:00pm - Welcome
  • 7:05pm - Talk: Sebastian Duque
  • 7:35pm - Break
  • 7:50pm - Talk: Heidi Waterhouse
  • 8:05pm - Talk: Neha Batra
  • 8:25pm - Networking
  • 9:00pm - Close

🌟 Speakers

Host: Christian McCarrick (VP Engineering, Auth0)

Speaker: Sebastian Duque (Senior Engineer, Intercom) @sduquej

Talk: Democratizing evolution and change in growing organizations

It's expected for the structure of your teams and organization to change as you grow. This is also true for the processes and communication channels you need in place so that everyone remains highly effective. What works well for a team of ten engineers falls short once you have thirty. You adapt and then feel some friction again when you get to a hundred. Rinse and repeat. At Intercom, we’ve iterated and been through this process a few times having grown engineering from one team of four engineers sitting together in the same room to 160 engineers in 30 teams across three countries and two time-zones.

I’ll share how we’ve been successful at empowering engineers to drive organizational change. Their unique perspective being on the ground allows them to identify, solve and own solutions to the challenges they face.

We’ll go through the journey of how we identified and solved a problem with internal knowledge sharing in Engineering. In doing this we’ll shed some light into the following questions so that you’re better prepared to take on these sort of challenges: Why was it important to iterate? What was unique about it that didn’t apply company-wide? How do you identify when you've outgrown your current setup? How do you set yourself, and the org, up for success? You should be able to take some of the ideas and answers to these and apply them to existing or future problems your teams might face.

Speaker: Heidi Waterhouse (Senior Developer Advocate, LaunchDarkly)

Talk: The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers: Tautology and Business Value

You didn't get that cool programming job because you're a great programmer. You got it because the company you work for wants to make money and they think you can help. It's easy for us to feel like our worth/value/capitalist expression is tied to our employment, but it's also useful to flip that narrative and talk about how our companies need us, and how we can use that understanding to be more valuable employees and even better humans.

What is the value that you bring to your employer? Can you articulate it? Can you expand it? Can you take that value and use it for your own purposes?

Speaker: Neha Batra (Engineering Manager, GitHub)

Talk: Microallyship: Micro servicing your team’s culture

What can you do today to reinforce your dedication to support the marginalized? I’ll be sharing 10 tiny microallyship patches we can apply to our environment to support our folks, starting right now!


The Lead Developer is an international series of conferences and meetups for technical leaders in London, Berlin, Austin, New York and San Francisco. Find out more and check out 100+ talk videos on imposter syndrome, leading and scaling technical teams, and lots more at TheLeadDev.com.

Tickets

Schedule

September 26th, 2019

6:00pm – 9:00pm PDT
Free RSVP

Additional Information

🔹 Code of conduct

The Lead Developer is committed to providing a safe, harassment-free community. By attending, you agree to our Code of Conduct: conduct.theleaddev.com.

🔸 Accessibility & inclusion

We make sure to use venues that are accessible for wheelchair users and the talks will be delivered with a microphone and sound system. If you have any specific accessibility requirements, please let us know. To help make our meetup more inclusive, we provide non-alcoholic drinks and vegan and gluten-free food options.

◼️ About our speakers

Sebastian Duque is an Engineer at Intercom where he's worked with teams in Dublin, London and San Francisco helping build products and features that push the boundaries of business messaging. With a background in formal methods and banking he's found true satisfaction in building great products and teams that build great products.

Heidi Waterhouse is a developer advocate with LaunchDarkly. She delights in working at the intersection of usability, risk reduction, and cutting-edge technology. One of her favourite hobbies is talking to developers about things they already knew but had never thought of that way before. She sews all her conference dresses so that she's sure there is a pocket for the mic.

Neha Batra is an engineering manager at GitHub who, 6 years ago, was an energy consultant and quit to teach herself programming because “it was time". She holds a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and enjoys foodie adventures, planning trips (and has gdocs for most of her trip plans), and collecting national park magnets. If you want to hear her ramble on a topic, ask her about pair programming, how she likes managing, or how much she misses Miami.