Swizec Teller
Swizec is a software engineer, author, educator, and conference speaker. He's published books on modern web technologies, data visualization, and productivity, and has trained engineering teams at Fortune500 companies. Now he's distilling 20 years of tacit experience into actionable steps.
On Becoming a Tech Lead
TechLead Conference 2023TechLead Conference 2023
25 min
On Becoming a Tech Lead
Tech lead sounds like a lot of work. And not the fun coding kind either. Why would you ever want that? What does it feel like when you get it?
In this talk Swizec explains why he took the step towards technical leadership, how his priorities changed, and why it means he’s doing more engineering than ever. A whole new world where writing code is the easy part.
You Do Have Time to Build it Twice
React Summit 2022React Summit 2022
21 min
You Do Have Time to Build it Twice
If you don’t have time to build it right, when will you have time to build it twice? In hyper growth startups the old adage breaks down. You get an expanding time horizon – IF you can get it shipped. An imperfect feature next week beats the perfect feature 2 months from now. Your code won’t matter if you’re dead. I didn’t believe this until I saw it myself. A startup on the cusp of hockeystick hired me to rewrite their jQuery app in React. Their tech proved the idea then became a burden. Over the next year we rewrote the whole app from scratch, grew a team of React experts, created a codebase that’s a joy to work with, and got the company to a $100,000,000 Series B. All because the early engineers knew that if the crappy version works out, there’s going to be time and resources to fix it later. This talk is about what I’ve learned while rewriting an app with users banging down the door.
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