#soft skills

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.

“Maybe I’m fooling everyone… I’m not good enough for this, and at this point, it is a question of time until everyone figures it out” these might be the words that cross your mind as your coworker compliments you for doing another fantastic job at delivering a new feature. As you grow in your career, so does your uncertainty. You put in the extra hours, learn all the new technologies, and join all the initiatives you can, but at the end of the day, it never feels enough. At this point, that feeling is leading your actions and decisions. It is the thing that is driving your career. Only one question persists: Are you really an imposter?

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.

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.

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! 

In this lightning talk, we will explore the significance of code reviews in open source projects, specifically within the React ecosystem. We'll discuss the benefits of code reviews for maintaining code quality, encouraging collaboration, and upholding project standards. By emphasizing effective feedback, respectful communication, and the use of relevant tools, participants will gain practical insights on conductingimpactful React code reviews. Join me to learn how code reviews can enhance the development process, encourage knowledge sharing, and contribute to the success of open source projects in the React community.

Gathering pieces of information for a task or a project is a wasteful act and could result in duplicated work done by different people.Onboarding, your ability to maintain code or infrastructure and systems handover - Documentation plays a crucial part in all these processes.So... how can we write technical docs in an easy way & why should we even do it?
In this talk, I’ll show you a structured way to write technical docs, without being a technical writer - So you will deliver highly valuable information to your audience, to your best ability.I’ll explain why should you care about these docs, how do they serve your best interests (Yes, there’s more than one!) and what a wide impact it could make on employees and even on your entire organization.

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.

A lot of us when changing jobs or accepting a promotion feel overwhelmed by the offer and either don't ask for more or ask a percentage more than the offer. Let's talk about why that's not enough and how we can change our attitudes towards negotiation.

If you’re a human being, chances are you’ve felt like an impostor at some point in your life. One of the biggest issues with this syndrome is that is easy to get stuck with this feeling. One does not simply overcome Impostor Syndrome. It requires offering yourself compassion and vulnerability instead of judgment and self-doubt. But... how exactly do you achieve that? We'll look at techniques for achieving this and overcoming the syndrome.

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.

Engineering team often face difficult challenges with constrained resources. If the job requires 1 engineer, we put one on the job. If it requires 2, we split topics into actionable chunks and assign them to individuals.
But there are several benefits to do things in pairs: It helps to catch errors and bugs, it allows for better communication and collaboration between team members and it can also lead to more efficient and higher-quality code, as engineers can challenge their peer's assumptions and suggest alternative approaches.

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.

Orders of magnitude matter. Things don't go up order of one every time. Organising people in a group requires disseminating information and its interpretation and, most importantly, its distribution. Remote working and asynchronous collaboration have become the norm, meaning that distributed teams have taken their silos of knowledge with them. The impact of this has compounded any organisations experiencing a skills gap with a skills distribution problem, increasing the importance of good documentation and transparent interaction processes. In this session, we'll go over the fundamentals of requirements engineering, looking at how orders of magnitude scale alongside the expansion of scope and additional requirements. Lastly, we'll discuss how you can apply elements of platform thinking to your everyday projects.

I focus on why inclusion is important in hiring and what are the inclusive hiring practices for any organization that could be taken into use. Inclusive hiring and evaluation process are the great window of opportunity that can truly support inclusion with practical actions. I offer practical tips and a way to implement small changes while working the way towards more inclusive hiring culture and strategy.

How our narrow understanding of racism (visible and interpersonal level) still stands in the way of racial equity and inclusion (in tech, too) and how racial bias can be seen in tech, products etc.

You can check the slides for Nasim's talk here.

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.