StaffPlus London 2024
who it's for
staff engineers, engineering managers, tech leads, principal engineers, software architects, platform engineers, data engineers
topics
scientific debugging techniques; aesthetic computer vision models; visual communication for developers; scaling engineering leadership; tactical short-term tech strategies; fitness functions for consistency; staff engineering in small companies; AI and news media; data pipeline migration strategies; scalable genomic matching algorithms; IPv6 deployment and adoption; Deming's principles for engineers
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Debug like a scientist | Maciek Rząsa | 25m |
Claims a repeatable method: a loop of observation hypotheses and experiments applied to three cases. Reproduces a race by interleaving the business logic and… | ||
| Is efficiency a good thing? | Holly Cummins | 35m |
Claims that chasing efficiency backfires get specific evidence: an 84-step pre-approval turns a 10-minute provisioning into three months, LinkedIn ships… | ||
| Training machines to see scenic beauty | Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe | 11m |
Claims a machine can predict scenic beauty after training on 215,000 images labeled via 1.5 million ratings using a convolutional neural network with transfer… | ||
| Uncover the invisible ceiling | Oussama Hafferssas | 26m |
Claim: mobile engineering faces an invisible ceiling because peers assume apps are simpler. Evidence: modern mobile stacks (iPhone Android) only matured since… | ||
| Mastering visual communication for software development | Jacqui Read | 23m |
Shows concrete patterns and antipatterns: Meta style (style signals project stage), face in the crowd (tailor detail to audience), and explosion of unicorns… | ||
| Scaling leadership | Tom Koch | 24m |
A two‑year playbook for a lone transversal role at Back Market that turns ambiguous cross‑team problems into delivered programs: breaks work into five… | ||
| Tactical tech: Short-term solutions for long-term strategy | Amir Safavi | 19m |
Makes the concrete claim that intentional short-term debt buys real user data, with a railroad case and a product case showing the math and outcome. Waterloo… | ||
| Fitness functions: Scaling service consistency | Bijan Chokoufe Nejad | 11m |
Codifies engineering guidelines into automated checks run centrally against 214 services at Jimdo, with weekly infrastructure tests and enforced ownership… | ||
| Is Staff Engineering valuable at a small company? | Glen Mailer | 22m |
The answer is yes with a big asterisk: staff work matters at small companies when it produces concrete outcomes not titles. Impact comes from defining problems… | ||
| Have AI Got News for You | Katie Koschland | 20m |
Claims that LLMs can produce FT‑quality first drafts but not final copy; an internal AI playground is built and rolling out to Slack for journalists to test… | ||
| Filling the void | Guillaume Mazollier, Sami Farhat | 24m |
Back Market Staff Engineers step into a leaderless scope and run an eight‑month cloud migration that forces program practices: eight months to migrate, daily… | ||
| Modeling complex systems | Rita Sodt | 11m |
Proposes building interactive dashboards that map every component, with system overview diagram pages linking to logs, metrics and runbooks so changes show… | ||
| Influencing through getting your carrots in a row | Joy Ebertz | 20m |
Claims that aligning incentives beats persuasion alone and shows concrete effects: a max feature‑flag limit reduced flag count but causes hoarding and riskier… | ||
| Doing “the most important thing” is a trap | James Ford | 10m |
Claim: doing the most important thing is a trap when urgent noisy tasks crowd out core responsibilities. Uses the Eisenhower Matrix to separate urgent from… | ||
| Navigating the shop merchant eligibility data pipeline migration | Dianing Y | 24m |
Shopify moves merchant eligibility off a monolithic Legacy data pipeline into the Shopify Data Platform by dismantling the old system piece by piece, using the… | ||
| Letting the best ideas win | Tristan Heal | 10m |
Promotion makes feedback drop and idea quality fall unless processes change. The talk claims leaders unintentionally suppress better proposals and offers four… | ||
| Building a scalable genomic matching algorithm | Ben Below | 26m |
A case study of building Atlas reveals concrete claims and tradeoffs: a reproducible Atlas open-source cloud-hosted algorithm that compares patient and donor… | ||
| Tips on scaling your leadership outside of your comfort zone | Michael Tweed | 11m |
Leads a data migration from an Android-heavy background, rewrites a pipeline so client engineers can adopt it and customers avoid outages, and uses concrete… | ||
| Scaling yourself by helping your colleagues grow | Lukas Wilhelm | 12m |
Bold claim: elevating colleagues’ skill level is the single most impactful thing a staff engineer can do. The talk lays out four tools — leading by example… | ||
| Architecting for scale | Viktor Orekoya | 26m |
Argues for starting simple and proving correctness before adding scale infrastructure, with concrete outcomes: a legacy system that stored everything in the… | ||
| IPv6 - did we just win | Anna Wilson | 12m |
Claim: IPv6 does not replace IPv4; deployment settles into a long-term dual-stack reality where mobile clients often have IPv6 but many desktops and servers… | ||
| Effective delegation without authority | Ziad Al Moubayed | 10m |
Outlines a concrete method: rank tasks by a delegation threshold using four factors — clarity, engagement, recognition, complexity — then craft and write the… | ||
| Navigating complex projects: Finding the right mode of operation | Mahmut C. | 23m |
Groups of hard projects break into migrations shadowing and acceleration with AI as a fourth nondeterministic class where one prompt rarely transfers to… | ||
| Idea to Innovation | Christina Kayastha | 19m |
A concrete process appears: turn a spark into an idea package with a prototype a data set and documented learnings then classify work as disruptovations… | ||
| Deming's wisdom for Staff+ Engineers | Annie Vella | 23m |
Looks at Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge applied to Staff+ roles with concrete links to practice: shift‑left changes at Westpac NZ (automation, earlier… | ||
| nothing matches | ||