Technologist | Community Organizer | Investor

Our engineering workflow revolves around our code review process, increasingly so in today’s remote and hybrid teams. Code reviews are more than just a way to ensure 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 our code review process can define, reflect, and reinforce our teams' culture. These methods can be useful whether we're building and managing engineering teams at startups, large companies or open source communities--co-located or across the globe.

We’ll walk through the process with actual pull requests and identify best practices for more productive code reviews.

A strong, well-communicated technical strategy can empower your leaders and teams, help increase velocity and set a stage for quality. A resilient, forward-looking strategy can act as a North Star, guiding your organization in times of change. But how can we tap into these superpowers? How can we build a resilient technical strategy? And if there are superpowers, is there also strategy Kryotonite? We'll discuss these topics and more, while walking through examples where strong tech strategy gave teams the power to leap tall OKRs in a single bound.

Major changes to how our organizations work, from reorgs to strategy shifts to new teams, often expose growth areas in our organizational culture.

This session explores how leaders can examine proposed changes and prepare their teams to move from a culture that impedes progress to one that enables strategic change.

Key takeaways:

• Helping our teams acknowledge and navigate necessary culture shifts will take time initially, but long-term, can help us move faster, with greater clarity and predictability

• Clear examples where culture change supported our strategic change

• How to map to the culture and values you need to support a proposed change

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.

While LLMs offer exciting new capabilities, their immense computational demands, high costs, and data privacy risks are becoming increasingly apparent. In this session, we’ll challenge the singular focus on massive Large Language Models (LLMs), in favor of open source Small Language Models (SLMs) and supporting techniques. 

SLMs can boost performance for specialized tasks, often outperforming larger models with faster inference. For privacy, SLMs allow local deployment and data control, meeting critical compliance needs. Their efficiency can translate to much lower computational requirements and reduced operational costs. Crucially, SLMs support sustainability by consuming a fraction of energy, significantly cutting AI's environmental footprint. 

This session illuminates how a sophisticated, multi-tool approach to AI is vital for building a more responsible, efficient, and inclusive AI future.