TechLead Conference

TechLead Conference 2023

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.

On Becoming a Tech Lead

Swizec Teller

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.

Effective Communication for Engineers

Naz Delam

React Advanced

React Advanced Conference 2022

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!

A Career As Software Engineer

Michel Weststrate

React Summit

React Summit 2022

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.

Impact: Growing as an Engineer

Iris Schaffer

React Summit 2023

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.

Tired of Tech? Hit Reset with a Sabbatical or LOA

Kamran Ayub

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:<ul><li>- The pitfalls of Leetcode-like tests</li><li>- What we should be looking for in candidates</li><li>- How pair programming is the best way to see how a candidate would work with the team</li><li>- Plus a little mini demo on a remote pair programming interview</li></ul>

Why Leetcode is Dead and Pair Programming for Interviews is the Way Forward

Mo Khazali

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.

Do You Really Have to Become a Manager to Advance in Your Career?

Marek Kalnik

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.

Purpose: What I Learned from Stepping Down as Team Lead Twice

Alex Ptakhin

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.

How to Get a Mentor Without Telling Them

Erin Fox

Ready to kickstart your freelance career or just getting started on your freelance journey? You’re in the right spot. Learn from the world’s largest fully distributed workforce in the world. The independent talent movement is the future of work. If you’re considering leaving full-time employment for a career as a freelancer, now is the time to find your successful space in the independent talent workforce. <a href="https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/top-freelance-career-fields/">More people are working freelance</a> today than ever before, with the freelance marketplace now contributing $1.2 trillion to the US economy. Some of the most <a href="https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/top-freelance-career-fields/">in-demand roles</a> for freelancers right now are senior developers with professional experience in React, Python, Blockchain, QA, and Node.js. This workshop will help you design a sustainable and profitable full-time (or part-time) freelancing/contracting career. We will give you tools, tips, best practices, and help you avoid common pitfalls. At the end of the workshop there will be a Q&amp;A session with a Freelance Developer who can answer your questions and provide insights and tips into their own success. During the Workshop break, we will be running a speed-coding challenge! At the end of the workshop, we will award a prize for the winner and display the leaderboard. We will have you login to our portal and complete the challenge as fast as you can to earn points. Points are assigned based on difficulty and the speed at which you solve the tasks. In case you complete all tasks, you get extra points for the remaining time. You’ll see your score, ranking, and the leaderboard once you complete the challenge. We will be giving away three Amazon Gift Cards ($200, $100, $75) for the top three winners.

How To Design A Sustainable Freelance/Contracting Career + Speedcoding Challenge

Shane Ketterman

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.

You Do Have Time to Build it Twice

TestJS Summit

TestJS Summit 2021

Would you like to pursue your passions and have more control over your career? Would you like schedule and location flexibility and project variety? Would you like the stability of working full-time and getting paid consistently? Thousands of companies have embraced remote work and realize that they have access to a global talent pool. This is advantageous for anyone who has considered or is currently considering freelance work. Freelancing is no longer an unstable career choice. This workshop will help you design a sustainable and profitable full-time (or part-time) freelancing career. We will give you tools, tips, best practices, and help you avoid common pitfalls. &gt;&gt; <a href="https://bit.ly/gn-portal-toptal-form2">Submit your interest</a> on becoming a freelance engineer with Toptal and get a call with Talent Acquisition specialist &lt;&lt; Table of contents: Module 1: Dispelling common myths about freelancing Module 2: What does freelancing look like in 2021 and beyond Module 3: Freelancing choices and what to look for (and what to avoid) Module 4: Benefits of freelancing from a freelancer + case study BREAK - SPEED CODING CHALLENGE Module 6: How to get started freelancing (experience, resume, preparation) Module 7: Common paths to full-time freelancing Module 8: Essentials: setting your rate and getting work Module 9: Next steps: networking with peers, upskilling, changing the world Module 10: Freelancer AMA SPEED CODING WINNER ANNOUNCED <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Designing A Sustainable Freelance Career

Alexander Weekes

Rodrigo Donini

JSNation Live

JSNation Live 2020

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. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

When You Think There Is No Time for Learning or Coding

Eleftheria Batsou

React Summit Remote Edition

React Summit Remote Edition 2021

Renaud Bressant (Head of Product), Nathanael Lamellière (Head of Customer Success and Solution Engineer), Nouha Chhih (Developer Experience Manager) will be looking at the different developer jobs that you can accounter when looking for your next developer role. We'll be explaining the specifics of each role, to help you identify which one could be your next move. We'll also be sharing tips to help you navigate the recruitment process, based on the different roles we interviewed for as recruiters, but also as candidates. This will be more of an Ask Us Anything session, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts and questions during the session. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Landing Your Next Developer Job

Nouha Chhih

Francois Bohyn

Sadek Drobi

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. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Engineers Learn to Negotiate

There was a time before React, and there will be life after. If you tie yourself too closely to any technology, you might trap yourself and miss the next wave. Let's zoom out from the state management library du jour — what timeless lessons can we learn from React? In the talk I'll discuss lessons I've learned from studying React that I will take with me for the rest of my career.

#career