Bonnie Why
Software Engineer @ Burns & McDonnell
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
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Bonnie Why loves to ask "why." I actively want you to review my PR, pretty please. Despite not having a formal degree, the one-two punch of asking excellent questions and always searching for the tough stuff has led me to work with a wide variety of tech stacks. I've touched every layer of the stack -- from iOS mobile applications to microservices in Python and Java, even all the way to data engineering with Airflow and Databricks. I seek to not only find patterns but also create them. Unit tests are king, change my mind.
In my free time, I enjoy coming up with endless nicknames for my dog, playing way too much Deep Rock Galactic, and perpetually refactoring my Notion setup.
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Refactoring Your Career Growth Using Systems Thinking
Hello, I'm lost. Well, sort of. If spending years of your life setting "SMART" goals has yielded lackluster results, maybe there is a better way to think about them. Achieving goals and growing in your career is difficult when you don't take the time to understand the fuzzy boundaries between all the different "systems" that make up your life.
By thinking from the top down instead of the bottom up, you can start to uncover the secrets behind why you are holding yourself back and what is actually contributing to everything you have been able to accomplish so far. This will enable you to strategically position yourself for future opportunities.
Everything connects, and everything is a factor in how fulfilled you are in your life. Adopting systems thinking has helped me uncover important strategies and thought patterns to help manage the chaos of growing as a developer — and a human being.
On Becoming an "Individual Architect"
So, you wanna be an architect. You may be asking yourself, what does that even mean? As an individual contributor, it can be hard to tell what it takes to cross the bridge from implementing concrete decisions to making them yourself. How do you ensure that what you're building today doesn't become tomorrow's technical debt? Are you even qualified to make these decisions?
Well, someone thought I was. In this talk, we anticipate some challenges we might run into when taking on these types of tasks by analyzing the traits and behaviors of software architects and how they can influence a team's ability to implement a solution. The strategies of good architects — such as balancing their level of control over a team, explaining and negotiating the trade-offs of a particular path, and being able to see just enough into the future to avoid overengineering — are likely already present in the thought patterns you possess from being an individual contributor.
Whether you aim to grow into an architect role or want to make better choices as you develop code, this talk will give you the tools to bridge the gap between writing software and shaping systems. Are you up to the task? Join me, and you'll find out.
You Kill Bugs Good
Bugs are sneaky. You never know where you might find one -- your data pipelines, deep within your infrastructure, code that you actually wrote. They'll attack when you least expect it, and when that time comes, you had better be prepared. Some engineers freeze when they see an error message. Others fire blindly, hoping something works. But a true bug exterminator? They know exactly where to look, what to check, and how to take those bugs out — fast.
To fight the bug, we must understand the bug. You'll learn exactly where bugs live, how they think, and how to search and destroy instead of spraying and praying. We'll cover how to recognize common traps, spot patterns in failures, and set up better defenses for the next attack. The best exterminators don't just kill bugs; they make sure they don't come back.
By the end, you'll be equipped with a debugging strategy that will seamlessly work across any codebase, whether you're tackling rogue ETL jobs, failing services, or mystery crashes. You'll leave with practical techniques to debug faster, smarter, and with way less frustration.
Bonnie Why
Software Engineer @ Burns & McDonnell
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
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