Speaker

James Samuel

James Samuel

Software Engineering Manager @ Reddit

James has spent the last 13 years building software across 2 continents. Early in his career, he focused on building backend systems across different industries, ranging from Fintech, Edtech, and Proptech. He then moved into management, leading engineering teams at TIER, where he was exposed to the challenges of building high-performing software teams in an organization in hyper-growth phase. Later, he moved on to Reddit to build the world’s largest community platform. He is also a co-organizer of the @AWS UserGroup Berlin Meetup. James is passionate about empowering engineers and tech leaders through his blog, talks, and monthly newsletter. He has spoken at different conferences, including Leaddev, StretchConf, World Developer Conference, and more.

Leading Engineering Teams with Visibility

Becoming an engineering manager is one of the hardest shifts in any individual contributor’s career. As IC, most of the time you write code: functions, classes, APIs that accept a set of inputs and return an output. As a result of the predictability that comes with writing code, you can write test cases with confidence that they will continue to work as planned.

But as an engineering manager, you deal more with people topics which are not that predictable. You can’t push a change and instantly go to look at logs to see the impact of the change and revert when necessary. Even worse! Managers of several teams don’t have the luxury of a short feedback loop.  Feedback from change may come in days, weeks, or months to managers– long enough to have a consequential impact on the team, delivery, culture, and more.

The further you go up from the software team, the more you’re removed from the team’s day-to-day challenges, activities, and flow. But to steer your teams in the right direction, guard culture, and improve team health and engagement, you need visibility (observability).  You need to be able to infer the state of your teams from the outside and be able to understand the state of things by looking at data.

The holy grail of leading with visibility is to be able to answer yes to all of the questions below:

1. Can you understand how stuff is being built?
2. Can you understand how stuff gets built on time and within budget?
3. Can you understand if the stuff built will continue to run?
4. Are the people building the stuff engaged and happy to take part in building the stuff being built?
5. Are your users getting value and satisfaction from what is being built?

In this talk, we’ll ground discussion on obtaining and measuring data that matters to give you visibility into your teams whilst drawing on my experience at TIER.

Building high-performing software teams

As a tech leader, your impact is not measured by what you can single-handedly deliver but rather by the impact of the people you collectively influence or lead. This is why building a team of goal-focused individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who collaborate, innovate and produce consistently superior results is important. We call this type of team a high-performing team. This is a team every engineer wants to be on. In this talk, you’ll learn what makes a high-performing team and how to build it.

Building API Products

When Salesforce first wrote their first internal web API on Feb 7th, 2000, to share data between internal applications, not even Salesforce engineers could have predicted the web API's future. Today, applications without APIs are like refineries without pipelines. The saying that if data is the new oil, APIs are the pipelines and API backends are the refineries couldn't have been a more true in this age. APIs are the window to revenue generation, allowing the birth of new ideas and driving growth. Most development teams understand this, but the process of designing and modeling API products to drive growth is not fully understood. The fact that there is no hand-written manual or specification for approaching API products has given rise to various API designs. Perhaps the reason why integrating with APIs is often dreaded. In this talk, you will learn how to approach API products. You'll start treating APIs as first-class citizens, revenue drivers as opposed to a code by-product. You will learn the secrets of building APIs that developers love to use.

Build a Powerful Recommendation Engine Using Image Recognition Technology

Images provide a richer set of information when building a search query for certain categories like fashion and furniture

According to Gartner's reports, brands with websites that support voice and visual search are expected to increase their digital commerce revenue by 30 percent by 2021.

In this session, I will show you how to build a visual search platform using AWS Rekognition, AWS Lambda, AWS API Gateway, and other managed AWS services in 72 hours for a ridiculous amount of $$$ per month.

This talk is rated level 200-300 with a target audience of engineers, architects, and developers and assumed you have some knowledge of Amazon web services.

AWS Community Day - Germany 2019 Sessionize Event

September 2019 Hamburg, Germany

James Samuel

Software Engineering Manager @ Reddit