ELC Annual 2023

What’s it like to transition to a ‘Web3’ startup from the ‘Web2’ world? How do you ramp up and become proficient with the new technology? What parts of your engineering leadership experience translate across industries? What types of engineering verticals are in high demand? Join Li Fan (CTO @ Circle) and Sen Xu (VPE & CISO @ OKX) as they demystify the world of engineering leadership in Web3 companies! Li will share her experiences making the transition as an executive leader, how she quickly gained the right domain knowledge, the challenges she faced, and lessons learned about scaling Web3 engineering teams while maintaining agility and innovation!

Generative AI is the "it" productivity tool of the moment, but we're still at the very early stages of incorporating it into everyday workflows. In this session, Shailesh Kumar, SVP of Engineering at ClickUp, and Kelly Ehret, Latitude, will contemplate how engineering teams can take advantage of the "Era of AI" and use it to optimize and accelerate their work. Specifically, Shailesh can share his own experience as an engineering lead at ClickUp, offering anecdotes and advice on how generative AI has helped his team work more collaboratively across departments. He will also share his perspective on encouraging more AI adoption across teams and how to measure success. Listeners will walk away from this session with a tactical understanding of how to motivate engineers to use AI in their day-to-day to achieve meaningful productivity gains.

Why should you stay in startup companies your entire career? How do you identify, evaluate, and decide on the right startup opportunity? How do you navigate and endure the tumultuous operating environment? This fireside chat between serial startup engineering leader Claire Hough (CTO @ Getlabs) and Ali Irturk (VPE @ CommerceHub) covers why and how Claire stayed in startup companies for her long-standing career - we’re talking at 12+ startups! Learn how to keep the excitement, engagement, and resilience through the ups and downs of startups. Plus how to set the right goals for yourself, ask the right questions, and find the right role that enriches you throughout your career.

The generative AI moment is turning traditional software development on its head, and coding as we know it today may look as obsolete as punch cards in a few short years. This session is an invitation to wild speculation: what will the work of software engineering and software project management look like in 10 or 20 years? This panel brings together seasoned technology practitioners who’ve weathered past paradigm shifts in the industry. They’ll explore other questions like: How, and how long, will humans be in the coding / testing / debugging loop? What will be the core skills for building technology (and managing technologists? What should a college freshman study next year if they aspire to be a software engineer? Will there ever be a new programming language again?

This session explores how to use automations throughout the SDLC to reduce toil and improve the developer experience. We’ll discuss what are the different types of toil and how they show up across different types of engineering teams, how to prioritize different types of toil based on your context, what you can do to address toil, automation best practices to reduce toil, emerging tools addressing toil, and critical opportunities in the developer experience to automate / reduce toil.

Claus Moberg, VP of Engineering at Roblox, has scaled his engineering team from a group of eight to a team of 300+ in a short timespan -- all while hiring for roles and addressing technical challenges that have never been solved before. In this fireside chat, Claus will share engineering leadership lessons learned, tips for engineering leaders starting to scale their teams, and insights on how Roblox has implemented a unique, unbiased system and cognitive assessment for selecting the best technical talent.

From his early career at Disney Imagineering, Samir always tried to bring a 'full stack' mindset to solving problems. At Imagineering, the team thought about the ultimate 'story' they wanted to tell guests, and how to tell that story best via a combination of the senses: sight, sound, touch, and smell (usually not taste). Then, a small number of Imagineers -- often just 1 – would create an initial prototype. Thinking story-first and about the feeling you want to leave guests with has influenced the way Samir goes about solving problems, and forced him to think 'full stack'. In this talk, Samir will go over a few examples of full-stack problem-solving, and some frameworks you can apply to your work to help you break out of the engineering silo, and land the story with your customers.

Scaling beyond early market fit presents unique challenges - Where’s the highest leverage? How do you build things that scale & avoid getting stuck with 1000+ MVPs? How do you manage increasing orders of complexity in your teams and product? Where are the greatest opportunities for real vs. perceived velocity? In this session, Marck Robinson, VP of Engineering @ Brex, will unpack strategies for sustaining velocity and efficiency, offering a roadmap to fuel your organization's journey to enterprise scale. Marck shares actionable insights from his experiences operating at massive scale at places like Microsoft Azure, New Relic, and now, Brex.