From Blind Trust to Real Trust: Practical Steps for IT Teams

Trust is a vital factor in the success of any organization, affecting speed, cost, culture, and teamwork. Blindly trusting teams can lead to gullibility and waste. Even more challenging are the many counterfeits, behaviors we do in hopes to build trust, but bite the teams and the business in the long run. In this session we will review how many IT teams have begun to create a sense of forced or false trust, and work through simple proven strategies to flip it into real trust. Whether you are a leader or team member, you will walk away with actionable insights for building real trust in IT teams, improving culture, collaboration, and business performance. Let’s turn the phrase "Trust me, I'm an engineer" into a reality, not a punchline.

Docker Unleashed: Enhancing Local Environments with Ease

A high-quality local environment is critical for enabling developers for efficient feature delivery. Docker, when utilized correctly, can simplify the maintenance of the local environment and remove the "it works on my machine” symptom. Join me on an insightful journey as I share years of successes and hard-earned lessons from harnessing Docker for consistent, hassle-free environments. We will review what Docker is and when to use it, how it changes the development accountabilities between teams, the architecture behind an efficient local environment to enable smooth pipelines and production deployment and will unveil valuable tips and real-world examples to optimize Docker usage and boost your development productivity.

What is Your Working Genius?

The working genius model is a productivity model developed by Patrick Lencioni with the goal of accomplishing a simple concept: bringing more joy and fulfillment at work! When you and your team understand where your geniuses are and how to (and when not to) use them, it can improve meetings, reduce burnout, and dramatically reduce turbulence in getting projects done. In this session we will review the 6 types of working geniuses and how they bring projects from ideation to implementation. We will discover the hidden cause of burnout and how to keep meetings, including our agile ceremonies, more focused and more productive as a whole, all with the goal of improving your life and team culture, both in and outside of work. (that's right… ALL projects!)

What is Your Working Genius? (Workshop)

The working genius model is a productivity model developed by Patrick Lencioni with the goal of accomplishing a simple concept: bringing more joy and fulfillment at work! When you and your team understand where your geniuses are and how to (and when not to) use them, it can improve meetings, reduce burnout, and dramatically reduce turbulence in getting projects done. In this workshop we will review the 6 types of working geniuses and how they bring projects from ideation to implementation. We will discover the hidden cause of burnout and how to keep meetings, including our agile ceremonies, more focused and more productive as a whole, all with the goal of improving your life and team culture, both in and outside of work. (that's right… ALL projects!)

This workshop will allow everyone to take the assessment at no cost. We will create teams and go over mock scenarios and go into depth on how this affects teamwork and dramatically reduce turbulent culture.

NGINX with Lua? An OpenResty Story

While strategizing ways to incrementally migrate over a website into a new infrastructure, page by page, a requirement was introduced that we could do so without a deployment, only the need to flip a switch, enabling us to instantly turn it on and off and scan for errors or oddities in usage. When hundreds of thousands of dollars are on the line from even an hour of outage, every second counts. During this investigation, we discovered a way to integrate LaunchDarkly, a leader in feature switch capabilities, into a variant of NGINX known as OpenResty. OpenResty provides the ability to integrate Lua, a language which previously I’ve only ever seen when working with World of Warcraft addons, and utilize the LaunchDarkly SDK to instantly switch where the user is being proxied to. Join me for a journey of chaotic learning, successes and pitfalls, with two technologies we knew nothing about, working its way from ideation to reality. A true story using the right tool for the job, even if it’s not our expertise.

This presentation will give some very basic introductions to NGINX, Lua, and LaunchDarkly, no experience needed! We sure didn’t have it…

This session will start by reviewing our architecture requirements at a high level, including factors around the decisions to use the technologies at hand, and the technologies we chose against. Basic coding of at least psudo code level would probably best for understanding. Syntax sugar requirements will be minimal if any.

Personality Assessments at Work? The Dos and Don’ts to Overcome Fear

Measurements are scary. We instinctively abuse them or fight back. The moment I bring up the idea of taking an assessment to understand each other, there is fear of “being boxed in”, “forced into teams”, or worse, not being hired or even fired from not being the right fit. Many measurements when used properly can be a force for good and improve the lives of those around. These assessments when used can be the same to an ample degree. They can help you understand yourself, your teammates, how to improve your communication with them, or even how to rework roles so everyone can live and work with more energy and joy! Let’s review together what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to these assessments so we can find the win/win/win, for you, the team, and the business! We’ll also review a couple tactics of what to do when they can’t be used, such as during the interview process, to still reap a few benefits.

The presentation will also review some of the common assessments for personality, communication, and working proficiencies to utilize real examples of using them in the workplace.

Wrapping Trust in a < DIV >

Pro tip: Saying “Trust me, I’m an engineer” doesn’t actually build trust, it only fools the gullible. Real trust has the full potential of speeding up everything involved with tech, from coding to project management. It can break down communication barriers and shatter client expectations. There is of course a catch: trust is extremely complex, dissected by many people with many different models and strategies to build. To simplify things, I created a much more simplified model, and very memorable for engineers, just wrap it in a < div >. Join me as we focus on three high level concepts which I utilize every single day to build trust within myself, my team and the business: Delivery, Integrity, and Vulnerability. You will walk away with actionable steps to start building real, meaningful, trust.

Internally to work, we have a trust initiative, breaking things into 17 pieces, and there are still more out there. As good as it is to understand it at that detailed of a level, it takes a long time to learn each of those factors, and harder still to actually use them all. The focus on this presentation is to create a more memorable system targeted at the IT world and our regular agile practices.