#career

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.

Your communication skills affect your career prospects, the value you bring to your company, and the likelihood of your promotion. This session helps you communicate better in a variety of professional situations, including meetings, email messages, pitches, and presentations.

Typically I talk a lot about deeply technical concepts like TypeScript, type systems, (im)mutability, MobX, Immer etc. But this time it's going to be personal and I'll share lessons, good and bad, about growing as an engineer. I've been leading open source projects, short lived projects as a freelancer and I went through the transition of engineer to tech lead twice. Both at a young startup and at Meta. This talk will be about personal experiences, unpopular opinions and even actions, and anything else that might be counterintuitive. Join for some take-aways for anyone aiming at an engineering focused career. Probably I will be wrong about most things, so don’t miss the opportunity to follow up afterwards!

Becoming a web engineer is not easy, but there are tons of resources out there to help you on your journey. But where do you go from there? What do you do to keep growing, and to keep expanding the value you bring to your company? In this talk we’ll look at the different kinds of impact you can have as a web engineer. We’ll walk through what it means to take on bigger, more complex projects, and how to scale yourself, and grow the community around you. By driving our own development we can all grow our impact, and in this talk, we’ll discuss how to go about this.

Imagine being a knight preparing for a jousting tournament, but your horse is more interested in the fair's hay bales than your impending duel. That's what prepping your tech department for an investment round or exit can feel like sometimes. This talk provides an in-depth look into the role of a frontend engineer, especially working with React, in preparing a tech department for an investment round or an exit. Through a unique lens of tech due diligence, the presentation uncovers the importance of good practices, solid architecture, efficient documentation, and more.

When talking about contributing to open-source projects, it’s crucial to understand from a maintainer point of view what factors are stopping new contributors from contributing to your project. Whether your codebase is very overwhelming to the contributors for the first time or it  lacks good first issues and enough responsive response to their problems. 
In this talk, I will explain how I built a campaign at Amplication that scaled the contributors from 30 to 200 in just one year and how it solved every problem I mentioned above.

Finding mentorship when beginning your professional journey can be hard, yet it is so vital to have this support to build confidence, and grow at each stage of the process.  5+ years ago, Sidney reached out to me on LinkedIn with questions about bootcamps.  I was finishing my first year at Stitch Fix and from that first GoogleMeet call, we have now met nearly every month and followed and supported each other throughout our respective journeys in engineering.  We have never worked together, and we’ve never met!  Join us as we meet for the first time in person and talk about how vital our pairing has been! 

Talking in front of an audience = scary. Learning something new = scary.
Let’s talk about doing scary learning something new, WHILE being in front of an audience!
One year and 100+ videos streamed, learning TypeScript the way I learn, has helped it click in a snowball effect helping other topics ranging from Python to APIs make more sense.
In this talk, the audience will walk away with an understanding of figuring out how you learn as an individual is a lifelong gift you never knew you needed. 

Tech is tiring. Whether you’re trying to stay upskilled on the latest JavaScript framework or wading through toxic work swamps, it feels like burnout is constantly looming on the horizon. Sabbaticals and leaves of absence (LOAs) are two benefits you could take advantage of to catch a much-needed (and overdue) extended break. I’ve taken both, one time to live abroad in France for 6 months and the other time to take the summer off for 10 weeks, both at different Fortune 500 companies and each time they moved my career forward, not backward. I’ll walk through step-by-step how to figure out if you’re eligible for these benefits, break down the implications to insurance and job security in plain language, and illustrate some strategies on bridging the income gap so you can sleep at night. By the end you’ll walk away with the confidence to finally give yourself permission to reset and get excited about tech again.

We’ve all experienced the job application which required us to do an online coding test. You have to brush up on your algorithms, data structures, time complexity, and by the end of it you’re cramming as if it was a university exam! Now that we’re the ones usually interviewing candidates, a good question to ask is: “are online coding tests the best indicator of a candidate’s proficiency and competence?” In this talk, we’ll explore:- The pitfalls of Leetcode-like tests- What we should be looking for in candidates- How pair programming is the best way to see how a candidate would work with the team- Plus a little mini demo on a remote pair programming interview

You start as a junior developer, happily delivering lines of code. Life is easy, you love your job, you are learning a lot. And then someone approaches you saying: "We need a tech leader for a new team, and you are the most experienced person available". You either become miserable or find your new calling, but your job is not really what it was before. And then someone approaches you saying: "We are looking for a new engineering manager, and you are the most experienced person available".Is that really the most optimal career path? What could we do differently? Let's have a look at your talents and the talents needed for the job.There are many different jobs in tech: writing code, leading teams, managing people and projects, helping others use your technology, teaching, research, debugging.

I know developers feel doubts of choosing the IC role over a manager or vice versa. I'll tell about my own road how to find own purpose doing things I like.

Mentorship has a reputation of taking a lot of time and work. But what if it wasn't? Here are ways to get a mentor, be a mentor, and how to navigate it. I have always worked on getting mentors in every corner of my engineering career. I have mentors that do not even know they are my mentor. But I like it that way. I will go into how to get a mentor at any stage of your engineering career and how to be a good mentor/mentee.

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.

In this session, I am going to share my story on how I started coding, how I make time to work on side projects and how you can grow and advance in your career. After this talk, I hope you'll be inspired to work smarter, make new habits and continue pushing yourself even when things fall apart.
I will present some helpful tips about self-motivation, time management, setting priorities and goals, staying organized, believing in yourself and keeping a balance between your career and personal life. Additionally, in this session, we are going to talk about building the habit of coding and the benefits of it. We are going to explore ways of finding mentors in your job and outside of it and also expanding your social network.
This talk is not only about getting better at your 9 to 5 job but also about developing yourself.

When people ask me the most important skill I can learn to become better at my job and get promotions, I always tell them: The art of communication and human interaction. When working as engineers we are interacting with many people on daily basis. It is crucial for us to learn how to negotiate and persuade people. In this talk, we will cover 3 main techniques to become a better negotiator. these techniques can help us interact with others more effectively, get our projects approved, get promoted easier and even help us in our life.