Writing well will make you stand out as a leader at work. Good writing can go viral within your company and change the way people think. Bad writing wastes everyone's time, including your own.
Writing well will make you stand out as a leader at work. Good writing can go viral within your company and change the way people think. Bad writing wastes everyone's time, including your own.
A good "manager README" can serve as a jumping point for people to understand your values; a bad README might look like it would fit in better on a MySpace profile. A good runbook helps you go back to sleep within minutes; a bad runbook will tell you the tale of its people while everything is burning down around you. The common thread among these examples is that bad writing makes the mistake of centering the writer's experience over that of the reader.
In this talk, I'll describe a framework for beginning from your own motivation for writing at work, deciding on the most important message, and specific ways your writing can fail in spite of your efforts. We'll evaluate examples of writing while asking ourselves if the writing puts the reader first. We'll come away with some specific tools for writing at work (including template questions to ask yourself when writing announcements, meeting notes, READMEs, and weekly snippets) and all of our writing from now on will be a joy for our coworkers to read.
About Amy Nguyen
Amy Nguyen is a senior software engineer at Stripe. She is a founding engineer on Stripe’s engineering team in Singapore and currently works on designing the next generation of payment APIs for the Asia Pacific region. Before moving to Singapore, Amy worked on observability at Stripe and Pinterest in San Francisco. Amy holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. At Stanford, she served on the board of Stanford Women in Computer Science for three years and was instrumental in making computer science the most popular major for undergraduate women at Stanford.
The Story of why we migrate to gRPC and how we go about it
Matthias Grüter
Engineering Manager, Core Infrastructure
Spotify
Migrating over 1000 services to gRPC poses interesting challenges, many of them are not only technical in nature: they boil down to questions of engineering culture and leadership at scale: How do you get 200 autonomous engineering teams to align on something as fundamental and cross-cutting as a new RPC framework? How do you roll-out gRPC at scale whit minimal disruption to both the organization and to the end-user?
Migrating over 1000 services to gRPC poses interesting challenges, many of them are not only technical in nature: they boil down to questions of engineering culture and leadership at scale: How do you get 200 autonomous engineering teams to align on something as fundamental and cross-cutting as a new RPC framework? How do you roll-out gRPC at scale whit minimal disruption to both the organization and to the end-user?
At Spotify, we have historically built services based on our own proprietary messaging protocol and framework. Last year we finally kicked off the daunting multi-year task of migrating everything to gRPC.
Migrating over 1000 services to gRPC poses interesting challenges, many of them are not only technical in nature: they boil down to questions of engineering culture and leadership at scale: How do you get 200 autonomous engineering teams to align on something as fundamental and cross-cutting as a new RPC framework? How do you roll-out gRPC at scale whit minimal disruption to both the organization and to the end-user?
This presentation will address these questions alongside more technical discussions of advanced gRPC concepts such as interceptors, deadlines, and effective schema management and how they are essential in large distributed systems.
About Matthias Grüter
Throughout his working life, Matthias has flip-flopped between leadership & engineering roles multiple times. Having worked along both tracks for many years gives Matthias a unique perspective on challenges that are either technical or organizational in nature. Matthias works as an engineering manager in Spotify's core infrastructure group. His team is driving the exciting process of transitioning Spotify's backend to cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and gRPC. As a manager by trade and engineer by heart, Matthias feels most comfortable in the intersection between leadership and technology.
