InfoQ Homepage QCon San Francisco 2024 Content on InfoQ
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Lessons Learned from Growing from Junior to Staff and beyond
Bruno Rey suggested thinking about career growth in circles: self, team, company, and customers. Success comes from understanding broader impacts, embracing compromise, and acting fast, especially in startups. He advised seeking mentors for honest feedback, being open to unexpected or crisis-driven opportunities, and thriving in change with an anti-fragile mindset.
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How Amazon Uses Guardrails in Software Development
Carlos Arguelles spoke about Amazon’s inflection points in engineering productivity at QCon San Francisco, where he explained that shift testing left can help catch issues early. He suggested using guardrails such as code reviews and coverage checks. Your repo strategy, monorepo or multirepo, will impact the guardrails that need to be in place.
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How to Build Secure Software without Sacrificing Productivity
Security can clash with development efficiency. Focusing on minimizing breach impact can be more effective than prevention. Dorota Parad argues for flexibility in compliance and collaborating with security teams to define practical protections. Limiting blast radius and using automation can boost security with minimal productivity loss.
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How Software Engineers Can Grow Their Career
To grow their career, Bruno Rey suggests that software engineers should develop ambition, increase their capacity, and seek opportunities. He advises being proactive, broadening your influence by learning from peers, and stepping outside your comfort zone. Software engineers can keep a brag doc to ensure that their work is visible and plan their growth with realistic long-term goals.
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Using Social Drivers to Improve Software Engineering Team Performance
According to Lizzie Matusov, technical drivers like velocity offer an incomplete view of team performance. Social drivers—trust, autonomy, purpose, and psychological safety—provide a fuller picture and reveal important areas of opportunity for improvement. She spoke about the social drivers behind high-performing engineering teams at QCon San Francisco.
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Cultivating a Culture of Resilience in Software Organizations
Resilience helps individuals and organizations respond to challenges. Personal resilience is built through adapting, technical resilience by mastering a variety of tools, and organizational resilience through flexibility and strong networks. In fast-changing software industries, recognizing tech shifts and fostering learning, flexibility, and collaboration, enhances resilience.
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Inflection Points in Engineering Productivity for Improving Productivity and Operational Excellence
As companies grow, investing in custom developer tools may become necessary. Initially, standard tools suffice, but as companies scale in engineers, maturity, and complexity, industry tools may no longer meet needs. Inflection points, such as a crisis, hyper-growth, or reaching a new market, often trigger investments, providing opportunities for improving productivity and operational excellence.
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How Software Developers Can Build Their Personal Brand to Elevate Their Influence
A strong public brand helps software engineers in job transitions and creates opportunities, while an internal brand builds credibility within your company. Pablo Fredrikson shared a story about how he helped a team struggling with a service issue to improve relationships. To build your brand, define your goals, take on visible projects, and be helpful. It benefits both you and the company.
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Ensuring Security without Harming Software Development Productivity
Security can be at odds with a fast and efficient development process. At QCon San Francisco Dorota Parad presented how to create a foundation for security without negatively impacting engineering productivity. She showed how you can make your security strategy almost invisible to the engineers while embedding it deep into the culture at the same time.
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Why Software Developers Need to Build Their Personal Brand
Growing your personal brand can improve your credibility, give you greater impact, and lead to better opportunities, Pablo Fredrikson said at QCon San Francisco. As a staff plus engineer, helping others solve problems creates value for the company. His advice is to find out what you are passionate about, learn more about it, get better at it, and share it, to build your personal brand over time.
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Learnings from Internal Tool Migrations to Support Software Engineering Efficiency
In her presentation at QCon San Francisco, Ying Dai shared two critical software engineering migration stories - one focused on production monitoring and the other on production deployments with automated validations. Both migrations were driven by the goal of enhancing engineering efficiency, but each came with its own challenges and lessons.
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Exploring Factors that Drive Software Engineering Productivity
Understanding what drives software development productivity is the key to making high-impact investments in engineering productivity, Emerson Murphy-Hill said at QCon San Francisco. He presented the results of their investigation into factors that predict developer productivity and shared what they learned from exploring inequities in software engineering.
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QCon SF 2024: Refactoring Large, Stubborn Codebases
Jake Zimmerman, technical lead of Sorbet at Stripe, and Getty Ritter, Ruby infrastructure engineer at Stripe, presented Refactoring Stubborn, Legacy Codebases at the 2024 QCon San Francisco conference. Zimmerman and Ritter demonstrated how to fix complaints on maintaining a large codebase with leverage and by ratcheting incremental progress.
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Micro Metrics for LLM System Evaluation at QCon SF 2024
Denys Linkov's QCon San Francisco 2024 talk dissected the complexities of evaluating large language models (LLMs). He advocated for nuanced micro-metrics, robust observability, and alignment with business objectives to enhance model performance. Linkov’s insights highlight the need for multidimensional evaluation and actionable metrics that drive meaningful decisions.
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How Slack Used an AI-Powered Hybrid Approach to Migrate from Enzyme to React Testing Library
Enzyme’s lack of support for React 18 made their existing unit tests unusable and jeopardized the foundational confidence they provided, Sergii Gorbachov said at QCon San Francisco. He showed how Slack migrated all Enzyme tests to React Testing Library (RTL) to ensure the continuity of their test coverage.