Contrary to popular belief, software engineering culture is not about the free food, open office spaces, and ping pong tables.
You can sense a great team culture when you observe it, and unfortunately you've probably experienced (or are currently experiencing) elements of a bad team culture. Not to worry - it's never too late to grab the reins and make small changes to steer your team in the right direction!
In this talk, Kate will highlight 8 tactical tips that attendees can implement on their teams immediately to help shape their team's culture!
Delivering feedback is arguably the hardest part of being a leader. Eventually, the time will come when someone on your team isn’t meeting expectations, and you will be faced with a choice. You can choose to ignore the situation, hope it improves organically, and accept the toll it takes on the broader team, or you can choose to have the tough conversation.
In this interactive session, you will learn more about your communication style, a simple framework to provide actionable feedback, common red flags to watch out for, and advice on how to quickly course correct on a dev team. You’ll leave with a template for giving feedback that you can tie directly to a situation you’re currently facing as well as plenty of examples that you can leverage in the future.
Engineering Leaders across industries and timezones are struggling to retain technical talent even after offering the shiniest of benefits and perks. Why is that?
This one hour session will uncover key factors that lead to highly engaged teams followed by 5 common reasons Engineers choose to leave an organization and changes we can make to proactively avoid these departures.
There is pain inherent in development - monoliths, confusing deployment processes, conflict between dev/ops/business.
IT is hard and the pace of change now makes it even more difficult. Join Josh and Laine as they talk about how focusing on solving this pain can help in a lot of surprising ways - kickstarting DevOps, speeding up product delivery, and even enabling the business as a whole.
We work in IT – and while we WORK with computers, we do not always FUNCTION like computers where inputs consistently make the same outputs. Our jobs are mostly theory and design and strategy, with some good old fashioned implementation thrown in – and as skilled knowledge workers, we function best when we respect that our mental and emotional resources matter.
In this talk, we’ll explain some of the best practices we’ve stumbled across for personal (brain and heart) resource maintenance.
What exactly does it mean to be “not a cultural fit” for an organization? Is it a slightly more polite euphemism for “that person was terrible at their job”? Or maybe, “they had no social skills to speak of”? What happens when it means that it's the organization that's…kind of terrible at their job? What if no one is actually terrible at their job and “not a cultural fit” is a simple statement of fact?
In this talk, Laine and Josh will share the experiences they've collected over the years with multiple organizations, and how the relationship between person and organization can break down. They'll look at why that relationship fails, what it looks like when it's failing, how to salvage it when possible - and when to know it's time to choose something else. They'll also talk about how to find where you DO belong, either within an organization or outside of it.
This session is intended to be mostly discussion, but please also feel welcome if you just want to listen.
All companies are IT companies. Except…not. All companies SHOULD be IT companies, if they're trying to keep up with the weight of their customers' ever-increasing demands for speed and agility. Unfortunately…most companies don't know how to get there - or even what “there” looks like, or how they'd describe it.
Josh and Laine will talk about how to use a diagram (in this case, a map!) to build and discuss a strategy to navigate the high seas of being a business today in order to deliberately find the treasure. The treasure (continuous delivery) gives IT, and companies, the ability to embrace and empower existing resources, and eventually will give enough resources to thrive even at the lightning-fast pace of being a business today.
Software metrics can be used effectively to judge the maintainability and architectural quality of a code base. Even more importantly they can be used as “canaries in a coal mine” to warn early about dangerous accumulations of architectural and technical debt. Therefore using the right metrics can improve project governance and outcomes.
The session will introduce some key metrics that every tech leader should understand.
Software architecture can be defined as the internal structure of a software system. As such it influences many critical aspects of software systems like maintainability, comprehensibility, changeability and security. One would think that given the importance of a good architecture most systems would be well structured and not suffer from large amounts of structural or architectural erosion. Just the opposite is true. Most non-trivial systems with more than 100,000 lines of code are in bad shape and require enormous efforts to keep them alive. Developers spend most of their time with figuring out complex interdependencies in the code base.
After analyzing the reasons why so many systems end up in bad shape we will focus on strategies to improve the situation.(Spoiler: Micro Services are usually NOT the solution for this problem)
The hardest parts of technology are people and what they do - so, culture and process. In the center of that is how to determine the right amount of oversight when implementing technology or the processes around that technology. That “right amount of oversight” is typically referred to as “governance.”
In this talk, Josh and Laine will explain that there is no one right answer for the right amount of oversight, but there are some best practices to keep in mind. There are also some ways to make it easier to think and talk about governance as a whole, and to deliberately apply it. They'll also go over what the wrong amounts of governance look like and give some tips about how to try to correct it when you see it.
As a technical leader or software development manager, you're eager to remove impediments so your team can produce continuous results. Instilling a few technical practices can have significant impact on your teams ability to deliver continuous results.
In this presentation we will cover the what, why, and how of essential technical practices that take time and effort but they result in saving significant cost and time in the long run.
If only it were so easy! Leadership is a thing into which many find themselves thrown, and to which many others aspire—and it is a thing which every human system needs to thrive. Leading teams in technology organizations is not radically different from any other kind of organization, but does tend to present a common set of patterns and challenges. In this session, I’ll examine them, and provide a template for your own growth as a leader.
We’ll cover the following:
The relationship between leadership, management, and vision
Common decision-making pathologies and ways to avoid them
Strategies for communication with a diverse team
The basics of people management
How to conduct meetings
How to set and measure goals
How to tell whether this is a vocation to pursue
No, you will not master leadership in this short session, but we will cover some helpful material that will move you forward.
Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.
In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual, team, and organizational dimensions. We'll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We'll learn how a team can fall into decisionmaking dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to healthy functioning to an afflicted group. We'll also look at how organizational structure and culture can discourage quality decision making, and what leaders to swim against the tide.
Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well.
Our software engineering teams are facing new challenges every day that come with the rapidly changing industry and recent events.
People don't seem to be motivated by the same things that they previously found compelling. Organizations are giving up glamorous office spaces and pivoting to remote teams. These changes require us to quickly pivot as leaders to learn new skills, frameworks, and techniques to continue supporting our teams while maintaining our own sanity.
In this workshop, you will learn and practice key skills to help your team propel through today's modern challenges and setbacks. The topics will be relevant to all Software Engineering leaders who wish to find ways to motivate and inspire their teams - regardless of their organization's existing circumstances.
Specific topics will include:
Activities will require a handout - please download (and print if preferred) the course handout located in the Slides folder.
Our software engineering teams are facing new challenges every day that come with the rapidly changing industry and recent events.
People don't seem to be motivated by the same things that they previously found compelling. Organizations are giving up glamorous office spaces and pivoting to remote teams. These changes require us to quickly pivot as leaders to learn new skills, frameworks, and techniques to continue supporting our teams while maintaining our own sanity.
In this workshop, you will learn and practice key skills to help your team propel through today's modern challenges and setbacks. The topics will be relevant to all Software Engineering leaders who wish to find ways to motivate and inspire their teams - regardless of their organization's existing circumstances.
Specific topics will include:
Activities will require a handout - please download (and print if preferred) the course handout located in the Slides folder.
Congratulations! You've accepted a position as an Engineering Manager and are excited to embark on your adventure into the wonderful world of people leadership. As you start preparing for the transition into your role, an overwhelming panic starts to build. What should I be doing with my time? Who should I be meeting with? Does my team trust me? Will my email inbox ever stop growing?
This one hour session will provide helpful checklists, daily/weekly plans, and real life examples that will help ease your transition into management.
If companies truly want to go FAST, occasionally that requires changing something about the culture of the company. Processes get stale or overly complex, people don’t know why things are the way they are, and everyone wonders at the wisdom of asking too many questions.
Culture change is hard, and in this talk we’ll explain the most important piece of surviving and even finding JOY in it – having a strong, supportive community.
Join us for this thought provoking journey of discovery as we explore the real strategies that you can apply today as you architect your new or existing stack to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for 'real-time' applications and data services, fed by reactive data sources, regardless of your current technology choices.
Users are demanding applications which keep them informed of new events as soon as they happen. They are no longer willing to accept “Just hit the refresh button” or “It will update in a few minutes by itself” when demanding satisfaction of this new basic requirement. They are collaborating in real time, co-editing, co-authoring, 'co-labor-ating' with colleagues across the country and around the world, chatting over the phone or VOIP while working together via your app. They want their updates to travel from their laptop to their co-workers screens as fast as their voice reaches them through the phone. This is a tough requirement to meet, especially when trying to put a modern face on a legacy app or integrating a shiny, new, reactive app with a legacy, REST-based datasource.
And it is not just your end-users that are clamoring for reactive data sources. No, the requirements for server-to-server communication of changes to data or state have forever changed. REST no longer is King in the world of web services. REST just doesn't cut the mustard any longer. Users of your data services are also demanding more flexible, reactive options when consuming your endpoints. They want to be able to subscribe to specific data sets and be updated in near-real-time when changes occur without the need to poll your APIs for such changes.
Join us for this thought provoking journey of discovery as we explore the real strategies that you can apply today as you architect your new or existing stack to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for 'real-time' applications and data services, fed by reactive data sources, regardless of your current technology choices.
Everywhere you look, security breeches, phishing attacks and ransomware attacks are in the news and should be in the forefront of every technical leader's top 10 concerns. An effective strategy to combat such attacks and vulnerabilities begins with a zero-trust inspired authentication strategy, application architecture and deployment infrastructure.
Join us for an in depth analysis of the current options and best practices around implementing zero-trust compliant, modern authentication architectures and systems.
Everywhere you look, security breeches, phishing attacks and ransomware attacks are in the news and should be in the forefront of every technical leader's top 10 concerns. An effective strategy to combat such attacks and vulnerabilities begins with a zero-trust inspired authentication strategy.
Join us for an in depth analysis of the current options and best practices around implementing zero-trust compliant, modern authentication, architectures and systems.
Over the last decade, DevOps has emerged as an influential business philosophy and practice, helping businesses drive high quality software to market faster. DevOps focuses on the elimination of bottlenecks that occur when development and operational resources are too divorced from one another. But what about friction in the development and test process? What about the delayed feedback cycles that come from slow builds and test flakiness? How can we reduce friction in areas that are outside of the focus of DevOps? The presentation will include examples of DPE practices in action from Java projects using the Maven or Gradle build tool.
Attendees will walk away from this presentation with a better understanding of:
Please follow the workshop requirements here:
https://nfjs.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/static/pdf/DPE_Workshop_Prerequisites.pdf
A barrage of software philosophies have hit the industry over the last few years, all claiming to reduce friction in digital transformation. But what does that mean organizationally and where does open source play into all of this?
We'll talk about the roots of DevOps in the Theory of Constraints, how 12-Factor principles can guide your microservice and cloud migration refactor efforts, and how building an optimal strategy for the use of open source within your organization can tie all of these concepts together.
Albert Einstein once said — “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
As developers, architects, managers, tech-leads, our job entails solving big problems. However, our systems are composed of parts, and it is the interaction of those parts that ensure the system works, and tells us where to go looking when things fail. What does it mean to think in systems? What are the benefits, and what are tools are available to us? If any of this intrigues you (and it should) come join me as we explore a new way of thinking about problems, both big and small.
In this session we will take a page from Donella H. Meadows fantastic book “Thinking in Systems” and attempt to get an understanding of what makes up a system, how we can tease apart the moving parts of the system, and get into the mindset of a “systems thinker”.
A long time ago, in a land far far away, there were monoliths. These fabled artifacts brought consistency and stability to the land - but there was a cost in speed, agility, time, and development pain.
Whether Java EE, .NET, or something else, the big ol' integrated plexi-purpose binaries or yore (and also now…) have grown into problems that hurt developers, architects, and the execution of business goals.
In this talk, Josh and Laine will talk specifics about the pain points of monoliths, and the various strategies they've seen to alleviate that pain.
As leaders we want our teams to pursue great ideas and change directions to realize the goals. However, often we find it hard to implement changes. At times there seems to be resistance or at least reluctance to change. Why can't the team see the benefits of where we're headed and move fast to realize the goals?
Let's step back to look at the challenges of effecting change and how we can lead teams towards successful transition.
Time management + prioritization - everyone needs it! We all seem to face a never-ending list of demands coupled with a finite amount of time to get it all done.
You will leave this 60 minute session armed with new tips and tools to effectively balance your time between meetings, writing code, putting out fires, and clarifying your role to ensure you are spending time on the things that actually matter!
Two and a half days of insightful sessions, inspiring ideas, and meeting your peers. Learn the skills and methods that will take your organization to the next level.
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