Richard Goforth
Principal Solutions Engineer at GitHub
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
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Richard Goforth is a Principal Solutions Engineer for GitHub, but will always be a developer at heart. Starting off as a lab instructor in college for Fortran, he moved to a primarily Microsoft space, becoming experienced in .NET and other open source frameworks for front-end, mobile and back-end software. He eventually migrated to focus on DevOps and how companies can more effectively develop software.
As a Senior Solutions Engineer at GitHub, he loves solid and efficient solutions that are clean and maintainable. At home writing code, courses, or presentations he loves well-built software. He has several courses available on LinkedIn Learning, you should check them out.
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When Agile Isn't
Agile ate the world and is often implemented in extremely non-agile ways.
What can you do to fix it?
This is directly applicable advice for building and executing software projects with practical processes. You can own and manage your process like a program that you use to write software, and avoid the blind adherence to agile that plagues so many projects today.
Includes: Spicy takes, bad ideas, and ROI.
45-60 minute session for all those involved in software development.
You are Measuring Productivity Wrong
Based on published research, you will take home a new framework for understanding and implementing a more wholistic approach to productivity measurements.
Understanding how productive you and your organization are at writing software is often nebulous. When you measure productivity it is with metrics that can be gamed or don't necessarily improve the overall process. You don't know that you are busily not meeting your goals when you only measure activity. You also need to measure and improve in Satisfaction, Performance, Communication and Efficiency. You will categorize and choose your metrics to better understand and improve the productivity of your team.
This session can be modified for 30-60 minutes and targets a wide audience from developers to product managers. I came up through early Agile and Scrum as a developer, architect, DevOps practices consultant, and now a GitHub Solutions Engineer for the worlds largest consulting and advisory organizations. I have seen and worked on teams with a lot of types of measurements and the [SPACE framework](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3454122.3454124) is one of the most interesting advancements in understanding our productivity as development organizations.
Your Laptop is a Terrible Dev Machine
Builds and deployments became code, then the infrastructure became code, now Dev Machines can be defined as code as well.
Have you ever had problems setting up a new machine or machines for development? Missing some library? Have the wrong version of node/ruby/python/.net installed? Run into the ever-popular "works on my machine?"
Containerizing your development environment doesn't have to be scary, and can provide significant benefits for your application - consistency, restorability, and traceability. Even if your applications spans multiple layers or uses a microservice architecture you can develop with containers.
45-60 minute session, targeted primarily at senior devs and tech leads.
We use the features of Dev Containers (http://https://containers.dev/), which is a fully open source spec and project that supports developing in containers.
Design Patterns are Not Dead
Design patterns are a vital part of programming. Rather than programming solutions to every issue from scratch, developers can implement patterns that solve common problems and those patterns are quickly recognizable in new software. You will learn the purpose and effective use of key design patterns with C#.
Why do design patterns make sense in modern development?
How do C# and .NET use the Gang of Four patterns in their implementation?
You will dive deeper into a few patterns and how to apply them in realistic (not ducks or cars) application scenarios.
45-60 minute sessions focused on junior and mid level developers. Material is modified for the format from my published LinkedIn Learning Course https://www.linkedin.com/learning/c-sharp-design-patterns-part-1-14140825/object-oriented-design-patterns-in-c-sharp
How Far Left can we Push Software Security?
You will do dependency tracking, secret scanning, and static code analysis to prevent things like XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities from ever making it out of feature branches.
You have heard that security is everyone's job, but how does a developer ensure they are building secure software as new vulnerabilities are found every day? Waiting until the security team comes back with 1000 items to fix is too late.
You will use GitHub Advanced Security as an example to fix security red flags in an application making it more secure as early in your process as possible.
This is a 45-60 minute session for developers and engineering leadership. It focuses on how to think about integrating security within the developer lifecycle. It has real world examples for how GitHub Advanced Security makes that easier, and can be modified to be more or less product centric.
Accidentally Building a Culture of Defeat
As organizations grow they become less efficient, and that there are things that bog down the ability to "get things done."
Building a better culture at your company means understanding how the policies that you set are constructing or constricting the values that you want to promote. Your culture isn't what you say in recruitment marketing materials, and it is really hard to change. You can, however, choose to select policies that will incite and reward moving in the desired direction.
This can be a 15 minute short talk, or 45-60 minutes with more examples and ideas. Development leadership is the primary audience with this focused session based on real world experiences, with successes and failures of large software projects.
AI Dev Tools don't Understand Us
You can get better results in a new world of software AI assisted software development.
Generative AI has exploded over the last year as one of the most discussed world changing movements we have seen in recent history. It doesn't actually understand language, or people, but it can feel like it does.
Generative AI is geared toward language that feels right or looks right, but isn't necessarily accurate. We can still get real productivity benefits and we are obligated to make the most of these.
You will build better prompts and design how we work around the limitations of Generative AI.
15 minute and 45 minute versions for developers and development team owners
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Richard Goforth
Principal Solutions Engineer at GitHub
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
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