Devcamp 2024 Schedule

🌮 Intro

Devcamp crew

Let’s kick things off with a brief introduction to conference day. For questions specific to speakers and the talks, reach out to Chris, Sam, or Georgie.

🧠 Engineering Productivity and the Shadow of Cognitive Load

Raf Gemmail, Engineering Manager (Sailthru)

Join Raf on an insightful journey into the realm of cognitive load and its profound impact on engineering productivity. How many tasks can one juggle in their mind at once, and how many services can a team effectively manage? Discover strategies to ensure your team achieves a state of flow, consistently delivering valuable products without overload, Raf delves into practical techniques for managing cognitive load and leveraging measurement tools to enhance both individual and team productivity. Unlock the secrets of optimising focus and boosting your team’s performance in this 20 minute adventure!

💬 Tech + Communication Skills = Unstoppable!

Russell Abedin, Tech Lead Engineer (Compose @ CM)

As a software engineer and tech lead, I’ve found that investing in building effective communication skills has been instrumental in getting things done. In this talk, I intend to share my experiences and pass on the things I’ve learnt around different facets around communication.

🔐 Engineering’s Overbearing Parent: Marigold Security

Joseph Hanna, Security Engineer

“What does the security team even do, and why do they keep giving me tickets?”

This would be a fair reaction from any engineer at Marigold. The security team has operated without much transparency over the last few years, and we’ve recently rolled out new tools and assigned work which can get in the way and feel counterproductive.

This talk will provide a “big picture” into what security does and what all of our tools do to keep us safe. It will—hopefully—justify our “overbearing” nature, and allow everyone to leave confidently, knowing all of their hard work is safe from potential threats.

🏡 My first share house taught me how not to do change management

Chris Wright, Tech Lead Manager (UI Services @ CM); Avocado enthusiast

Change is hard, we want to make things better for everyone but how do we navigate introducing change without pissing everybody off? In this talk, I will explore introducing effective change without causing unintended consequences.

🚌 Incident debugging tips n’ tricks

Jethro Carr, Senior Director of Engineering (Sailthru); “Bus Guy”

Back when he was still cool and doing hands on devops work, Jethro spent a lot of time doing operational incident response and debugging. In this talk, we will look at various examples of difficult to understand issues and how to go about debugging and understanding them, especially when there is an absence of information present. Suitable for any product engineering, infrastructure or SRE teams.

🧹 Quest for Clean Architecture

Dmitry Antonov, Software Engineer (Shared Services)

Clean Architecture is a popular software design approach that focuses on separating concerns and maintaining clean boundaries between the different layers of an application. Sounds great but there must be devil in the (implementation) details, right? I’m going to share our experience in Shared Services adopting Clean Architecture and some challenges we had on our journey.

📚 Reverse engineering Visual Novels for dummies

Brian Luc, Full Stack Software Engineer (Elevate @ CM); Climber of Rocks

When I was young and had more free time, rather than playing Call of Duty, I spent time reading 50hr long Japanese visual novels. Originally with the intent of assisting fan translations, I took a deep dive in reverse engineering file formats to extract assets such as text and images. For Devcamp, I attempted to reverse engineer the visual novel Symphonic Rain; here are the lessons and struggles I learnt on the way.

👯‍♀️ Mentoring isn’t about teaching someone how to be like you

Georgie Cooke, UI Engineer (UI Services @ CM); resident doughnut snob

Over time I’ve mentored people using different methods and depending on individual needs, but mostly believing I had to take on the role of a teacher and transfer coding skills. What I grew to learn is that helping other people shouldn’t involve bending over backwards. This talk is about finding my mentoring style and the mistakes I made along the way.

🎓 Adopting DynamoDB: Lessons Learned

Max Dietrich, Senior Software Engineer (Sailthru)

A deep dive into DynamoDB, how we adopted it, and the lessons we learned along the way

🙈 Campaign Monitor vs Mailchimp

Riz Hallowes, Senior Software Engineer (Compose @ CM); karaoke host

An in depth sign up and use of both. What are the differences? What do we do better or worse? What is the experience like for someone new to these platforms, and what is it like for someone experienced? Why would you choose one over the other?

📊 Life & Data: One Hoarder’s Journey Towards Insights & Balance

Zac Hartmann, Software Engineer (Compose @ CM); That cube nerd guy

This talk is going to be a narrative of my journey with data collection and analysis. Over the past few years I’ve been doing a lot of it, sometimes going too far, sometimes nearly losing all of it, and sometimes drawing some cool data out of it!

🌳 Strangling monoliths for fun and profit: how Lifecycle Optimizer evolved

Benoit Goudreault-Emond, Lead Engineer (Sailthru)

I will cover how Lifecycle Optimizer evolved from a pair of monolithic applications into a set of cooperating microservices. I will then breeze through each of the current services, with emphasis on how their principles (and maybe even their implementation!) are actually reusable for other applications. There will be an emphasis on our approach to the problem of breaking a monolith apart in general as well as the general abstraction each service represents, so it is applicable to event-driven applications in general and not just that particular former monolith. The whole discussion will be grounded on why we needed to do this, as opposed to “we wanted to do microservices because monoliths are baaad.”

🍐 The Art of Pair Programming

Tom Young, Senior UI Engineer (Sailthru) & Raf Gemmail, Engineering Manager (Sailthru)

Join Tom and Raf as they share insights from their many years of pairing together. Discover why pairing offers invaluable early feedback, safety, trust and increased quality. We’ll explore various patterns from rubber ducking to “driver-navigator” and “ensemble” programming.

🤝 PM & Engineering Working Together in FY25

Adam Weissmuller, SVP Product

We’ve had several different definitions of the role of Product Management over the years and across the products. I’d like to share the vision of how Product Management is expected to work as we continue to evolve as an organization.

🌯 Wrap up