Stop Using Dev Metrics!

You manage the company's best team: the fastest cycle time, the highest planning accuracy, and the least amount of re-work. Your team has the lowest review time, the most weekly deploys, and the best bugs / KLOC ratio. And then someone high up shuts down your project - what just happened?

In the software industry, we have created a set of KPIs to measure the efficiency of our development teams. While these KPIs measure efficiency well, they are usually not enough to measure success. The main reason is that they are completely disconnected from the business KPIs. This disconnection often leads to ineffective communication between organizations in the company, mainly product and engineering.
In this session, we will discuss overcoming these challenges by measuring development teams using business KPIs. We will understand what business metrics development teams can impact and how, and what frameworks and organizational structures can support that. We will also discuss when dev metrics are appropriate and when they are effective at helping us impact our business KPIs.

In this session, you will learn:
- Types of metrics you should use to measure the success of your team
- Using the OKR framework to:
- Align engineering and product organizations
- Empower teams to innovate and collaborate
- When should you use dev metrics

Platform Engineering is All About Product

"Platform Engineering" is the latest buzzword in modern software engineering. It is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Today's holy grail for platform engineering is to achieve the most effective "Internal Developer Platform" (IDP) that enables the rest of the developers in the company to be as effective as possible. Can this job be accomplished with engineering skills alone?

Platform intersects with product in two ways: first, the platform must be optimized for supporting the development of the company-specific product. Second, the platform must be built with a product mindset and practices for its users - the developers- to adopt. This session will discuss how to build an engineering platform your engineers want to use. We will go over standard product practices when creating the developer platform and the importance of ensuring your IDP helps developers build the company's products faster and better. We will define the role of the platform product manager (PPM) and his importance in ensuring our platform is not a glorified Rube Goldberg machine.

In this session, you will learn:

- What is platform engineering? Is it just a new name for DevOps?
- What makes an IDP and a platform team successful?
- Who is the PPM? Why is he important? How do I convince my head of product we need one?
- Practices you can use to build a successful platform and pitfalls to avoid.

How ChatGPT Got Me Drunk

Are you tired of the same old cocktails? In this talk, I'll show you how I used ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language processing model, to scrape the web & create a cocktail index that will help you mix up something new and exciting.

This talk will cover:
* Introduction of ChatGPT
* How ChatGPT wrote a web crawler for my use
* How I used ChatGPT to parse complex cocktail recipes into a simple ingredient list
* How you can use ChatGPT to accelerate your own development
* Lessons learned and best practices for pairing with ChatGPT

first part of the story: https://medium.com/@galbashan1/how-chatgpt-got-me-drunk-614d72d37f6f

From Individual Contributor to Modern Architect: Redefining the Staff Engineer's Career Growth

The common (mis)conception in today’s software market is there are two ways to grow as a developer: become a manager or become an “out-of-team-staff-engineer” (or any other made-up title for a senior Individual Contributor your company has chosen). While the manager’s path is challenging as well, the IC’s path is uncharted territory in our industry. This lack of knowledge has led to lots of failed promotions and frustrations from both staff engineers and the teams they collaborate with. What should a staff engineer be doing? What makes a good IC?

As agile continues to spread and autonomous cross-functional teams rise, the staff engineer role must adapt to remain valuable to the organization. No longer can they simply create an architecture plan for the teams to execute, or perform all the software optimization single-handedly. The good news is there is lots of room for growth in these new environments, as they pose many new challenges, such as aligning different teams on shared goals, maintaining shared platform quality, and collaborating on cross-domain projects. However, the job and skills required are very different from the traditional architect role.
In this session, we will discuss what “modern architects” should be doing, what skills they should possess, and how they can remain impactful in an environment that empowers team autonomy and ownership. We will also cover alternative ways to grow and be impactful as an IC while remaining a part of a team.

In this session you will learn:
- What makes a good individual contributor in an agile world
- Different types of individual contributors
- How can we increase our “blast radius” from within a team
- When & how to enable IC growth in your organization