3 habits to supercharge your career growth

Professional skills are critical to career success, but they are rarely taught formally and often learned only if you are lucky enough to have great mentors. These 3 habits are the distillation of years of conversations that helped me build my professional skills. They have been critical to advancing my career from stuffing envelopes in a mailroom to working on beloved film and television projects as a senior software engineer. Through my mentorship work, I have watched numerous professionals, with varying levels of experience and industry knowledge, build more focused teams and fast-track their growth. I will walk through, step by step, how to give meaningful feedback, create an impressive brand identity, and develop a healthy industry network. Integrate these habits into your daily work and you will be a superstar with the tools to pursue not only your personal goals but also those of your team and your organization.

This is an interactive keynote

Project Management for Engineers

Senior technologists are often tasked with “dealing with ambiguity”. It can be daunting to get started with project management when you are used to getting tickets. This framework will walk through the entire project process, from ideation to presentation. This includes practical exercises like Impact Effort Matrix for planning and Success Statements for reporting as well as techniques for delighting stakeholders while keeping your teammates from burning out. Owning your project management means knowing you are doing the right work while having a broad impact.

Great Netflix Bake Off

In the Great Netflix Bake Off, creating machine images is the technical challenge. In the Great British Bake Off, that’s the round of the competition where the contestants receive a limited recipe missing key steps like temperature, timing, etc, to test their skills. In engineering terms, it’s when no one on the internet has solved your problem yet. This is a technical deep dive into how I used tools like Spinnaker, Springboot & Packer to create a platform service with cross-team appeal while having to figure out obscure errors with no search results. With this talk, you can rise to the challenge and be the star baker of your team.

Document Yourself: A framework for career advancement

The goal of this workshop is to document yourself the way you would document code. You wouldn’t expect someone who wants to use the program you built to read every line of code. Instead, they’re relying on the design documents and doc strings to know how it works. The same is true with your career. This workshop is about making it easy for you to provide overwhelming evidence of your value to the company. When you can show your ROI, it’s much easier to secure that promotion, raise or new job that you deserve.

This workshop consists of 3 parts. Writing your daily accomplishments in the form of success statements. Putting them together into a brag sheet. And finally using them to create your elevator pitch. Using this framework makes it easy to make a habit of documenting, the same way a style guide helps you document your code. Once you have documented yourself, you will be amazed at how much you have accomplished. You will walk out of the workshop with the confidence and plan to take your next step.

Tell me about yourself: How to perfect your elevator pitch

Almost every interview has a version of the request, “Tell Me About Yourself.” People often have trouble articulating their journey and how it has made them a great employee. After my recent experiences having to answer it myself innumerable times as well as mentoring others at all career levels, I have developed tips for turning vague stories into a polished pitch. As a software engineer who went to art school, it’s critical that I articulate my skills clearly before I am dismissed by technical recruiters. This workshop starts with a presentation, but then quickly becomes interactive. I start with a warm-up question, then ask for a volunteer to tell their story. I give direct feedback which helps everyone absorb the main points by connecting it with the live example.

Remote Workstations for Discerning Artists

Netflix is poised to become the world’s most prolific producer of visual effects and original animated content. To meet that demand, we need to attract the world’s best artistic talent wherever they are. That’s where Netflix Workstations comes in. They are remote workstations that make it easy for artists to work entirely in the cloud, from the first designs to final delivery.

Artists like to work at places where they can create groundbreaking entertainment instead of worrying about software configuration, fleet management, or where their files are. By providing cloud-based workstations, we can address the flexible needs of fast-paced productions while keeping our content secure. You can get a different operating system at the click of a button while also never downloading a single file locally.

Our team had to balance different personas, from the artist that wants a one-click experience to a developer who wants a platform to build on. We had to look at the vast array of technology options and say this is what we’ll bet the year on. I’ll be discussing where we chose right (and wrong) and what the future holds in the expanded universe of Netflix Workstations.