(2021) What Building Communities Taught Me About Building Inclusive Engineering Teams

I was once that engineer that thought she would never move into management. I loved coding my days, and often nights away. Why would I ever want to stop? My ideas about management began to change once I started the Atlanta network of Women Who Code. I've learned so much about the people challenges we face in tech, while also learning how to empower the people around me to get big things done. What I didn't realize until years later was how these experiences were preparing me to build inclusive teams and lead and motivate engineers from various backgrounds to work collaboratively. This session will share some of my lessons learned as a community leader and how I've applied them in my role as an engineering manager. We'll also discuss ways building communities can help companies grow their team and their engineering brand.

A Seat at the Table: Building an Inclusive Tech Ecosystem

Inclusion doesn't just happen. It has to be intentionally and continuously cultivated. In this session, we'll discuss the ways we can all be responsible for building communities with an inclusion-first mindset. I'll describe my lessons learned and walk through a framework for optimizing for inclusion.

Machine Learning for All

As we hear more and more about Machine Learning, few web developers have actually had the opportunity to use it in production. It seems like you have to have years of Data Science, Statistics or AI education to even understand how to start. While some prerequisite education is needed to get you started, it’s not as much as you might think and there are collections of libraries to help along the way. This session will give a brief introduction to Machine Learning, delve into the libraries that make it possible and discuss our lessons learned from evolving our machine learning efforts from prototype to production at SalesLoft.

Building Impact Through Essentialism

New and experienced engineering leaders can struggle with understanding how to drive impact on our teams. Whether we’re individual contributors or managers, the more we grow, the more responsibilities we collect. Inevitably, we find ourselves with more responsibilities than time or resources. We might fall into the trap of trying to get it all done—with our teams, personal productivity, and even our health possibly suffering in the process. Perhaps the way to build impact isn’t doing all the things, but doing the right things. This is essentialism in a nutshell. We’ll discuss ways essentialism can help us become better leaders and ensure our teams are working with clarity and purpose.

What Building Communities Taught Me About Building Inclusive Engineering Teams

I was once that engineer that thought she would never move into management. I loved coding my days, and often nights away. Why would I ever want to stop? My ideas about management began to change once I started the Atlanta network of Women Who Code. I've learned so much about the people challenges we face in tech, while also learning how to empower the people around me to get big things done. What I didn't realize until years later was how these experiences were preparing me to build inclusive teams and lead and motivate engineers from various backgrounds to work collaboratively. This session will share some of my lessons learned as a community leader and how I've applied them in my role as an engineering manager. We'll also discuss ways building communities can help companies grow their team and their engineering brand.

ATO2018 - Code Reviews, For the Culture

Our engineering workflow at SalesLoft revolves around our code review process. Code reviews are more than just a way to make sure we don’t introduce new bugs into the codebase. They have become pillars of our team’s engineering culture—ensuring code quality, encouraging collaboration and providing valuable teaching and learning opportunities. We’ll look at the ways your code review process can define, reflect and reinforce your community’s culture. These methods can be useful whether you’re building and managing open source communities or engineering teams at startups or large, established companies. We’ll then walk through the process with actual Pull Requests and identify best practices for more useful code reviews.

Refactoring for Progressive Web Apps

Prototyping for IoT

CONNECT 2016 by Women Who Code

Next Gen Web with Service Workers

Great Wide Open 2016

Getting Started with Open Source: Pull Requests

GitHub Patchwork 2016

AngularJS Best Practices

Angular & Ionic Workshop, 2015

Beyond the Screen

Wearables TechCon 2015

Developing for Wearables

In this session, we will discuss the tools, resources and best practices for developing for wearable devices. #ConnectJs2014

Open Source and The Internet of Things

All Things Open 2014 - In this session, we will review the state of open source technologies available in connected device development. We’ll then proceed with a discussion on the best practices for prototyping and developing connected devices, with live demonstrations to illustrate key concepts and possible avenues to move toward an Internet of Things.

WWC September Meetup: Think Like a Programmer

Have you been teaching yourself to code and aren't sure where to go next? This session is intended to provide an introduction to the things they don't teach you on CodeAcademy, including: problem solving, ways to structure your code and how to use algorithms, data structures, and design patterns to build applications, plus the soft skills you'll need to succeed as a developer.