StaffPlus New York 2024
2024-09-04..2024-09-05
New York, United States
[StaffPlus New York 2022, StaffPlus New York 2024, StaffPlus New York 2025]
who it's for
staff engineers, engineering managers, senior engineers, technical leads, open source maintainers, platform engineers
topics
aligning projects to business strategy; technical proposal pitching; open source maintainer career progression; managing technical debt; multi-cloud decision making; aerospace reliability lessons for software; security as systemic engineering; psychological safety in reliability; streaming application simplification; leading large refactors; enterprise key management at scale; Substrate blockchain engineering
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Focus on project value using businesses strategy | Jeffery Sherman | 10m |
Staff+ engineers get a concrete decision recipe: identify one of three strategies: operational cost or unique, find evidence on the website town halls or the… | ||
| Nail the pitch and stick the landing | Ei Nyung Choi | 30m |
Concrete playbook and numbers: how a four‑person team turns an internationalization/localization effort at Slack into an infrastructure rearchitecture, with a… | ||
| Sometimes you need to be a cruise director | Oliver Meyn | 12m |
The claim is concrete: an AWS→GCP migration of multiple petabytes faces a two‑week deadline and stalls from analysis paralysis, not technical gaps. The choice… | ||
| The OSS maintainer to staff engineer pipeline | Nick Hehr | 21m |
Claim: open‑source maintainer practices map directly to staff+ work and are actionable. Specifics: use ADRs and RFCs as living decision records, build an… | ||
| With great power comes great responsibility | Yonatan Zunger | 28m |
Examines concrete failures and concrete fixes: a radiation therapy machine that leaves a beam active causing three dead and UX checks missing, a social network… | ||
| Doing the right thing vs doing things right | Eva Liou | 12m |
A legacy form block gets rewritten: introduced React and modern tooling, added unit and integration tests, and follows international specs yet discovers specs… | ||
| The (big) picture of debt | Tali Gutman | 27m |
Case study of splitting a shared Postgres instance into a Postgres as a service platform: claim is that you must first fix platform and developer ergonomics… | ||
| Should we multi-cloud? | Tanusree McCabe | 20m |
A concrete decision framework answers whether multicloud meets business goals rather than restating the topic: the P L A C E framework (Purpose, Landing zone… | ||
| Explosive overflow: Lessons from rocket science | Mark El Khoury | 27m |
A concrete failure narrative: the 1996 inaugural flight of the Ariane 5 self‑destructs Thirty nine seconds after launch because an integer overflow in a reused… | ||
| Software security as a force of nature | Kelly Shortridge | 32m |
Argues that software security becomes resilience not prevention and demonstrates concrete practices: CI/CD and IaC to enforce invariants, caching and backups… | ||
| Finding opportunities and maximizing Impact | Chris Lettieri | 10m |
Introduces the Listen-Act-Share loop and shows concrete outcomes: uses Apache Iceberg to move Datadog’s internal analytics from a slow warehouse to a data… | ||
| Psychologically safe reliability management | Lesley Cordero | 29m |
Case study of driving an observability platform across a multi‑product org during General Election Preparation shows the technical work landed but adoption… | ||
| Navigators | Dan Fike, Shwana Martell | 24m |
Claims a written engineering strategy plus empowered ICs actually speeds decisions and improves alignment. Carta wrote an explicit engineering strategy and… | ||
| Simplify streaming application development | Xiangmin Liang | 12m |
A GraphQL-based declarative interface models sources and joins with an extend type plus a join condition directive, and queries annotate material-view IDs… | ||
| Starting from nothing | Lawrence Jones | 25m |
Case study builds an on‑call product for incident.io from zero to GA in 10 months, starting with six people and scaling to fifteen, shipping a mobile app and… | ||
| Being a force for cultural change in your organization | Nicole Zuckerman | 10m |
Concrete actions and outcomes: builds a diversity dashboard (starts with Greenhouse API then customizes with anonymization rules), runs NLP on interviewer… | ||
| Leading your team through a major refactor | Dylan Pearce | 12m |
A ten year iOS app at Rent the Runway faces accumulated debt and 10 design patterns patched over time, so the team wins executive approval for a major… | ||
| Beyond generic goodstuff: Helping teams navigate context | Randall Koutnik | 09m |
Claims that universally touted practices become a trap when applied without context and that concrete navigation beats slogans. Example: adding unit tests with… | ||
| Reducing infrastructure cost during development and in production | Sally Wahba | 10m |
Concrete actions and numbers: implement a reservation system with auto-deletion and enforced tagging so orphaned dev resources disappear and costs are… | ||
| The joy of being staff+ | Leslie Champman | 25m |
Eighteen years at Comcast producing interactive TV (including X1 and a voice remote) leads to a concrete claim: senior ICs change how products are built, teach… | ||
| Creating technical leadership in context | Joy Zheng, Nathan Tindall | 26m |
Company scales from ~20 to ~300 engineers and experiments with three models since 2020: a backend Council doing monthly 5% side work (which produces many… | ||
| Substrate engineering | Chris Krycho | 24m |
Claims that prompt engineering alone hits a ceiling — languages and frameworks set hard limits — and that rising LLM velocity worsens unnoticed bugs because… | ||
| Using clinical science to tackle code review anxiety | Carol Lee | 22m |
Research shows a targeted intervention actually reduces code review anxiety: a randomized controlled trial with 59 developers uses path analysis to identify… | ||
| Slack enterprise key management: Senior to staff lessons | Audrei Drummond | 11m |
Built a working Slack Enterprise Key Management system that integrates with AWS KMS, prototypes the end-to-end flow, and actually ships. Concrete tradeoffs… | ||
| Self-defense for change agents | Amy Tobey | 23m |
Argues that change in long-lived enterprises requires tactics not pep talks: uses Aikido and nonviolent communication to deflect hostile energy, systems… | ||
| When to know you've outgrown your monolith | Ainsley Escorce-Jones | 23m |
Stripe’s Ruby monolith bappy serves about 500 million API requests per day and contains ~13 million lines of code which leads to rising CI CPU costs, huge… | ||
| Start with an exit in mind | Adam Berman | 10m |
Staff engineers start every new initiative with a concrete exit strategy: pick one of transfer ownership bootstrap a new team press pause or wind down and… | ||
| nothing matches | ||