Delegate Toil to the Robots
Summary
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 engingeering 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.
Speakers
Dylan Etkin is CEO & Co-Founder of Sleuth, the leading engineering efficiency platform. As one of the first 20 employees at Atlassian, Dylan was a founding engineer and the first Architect of Jira. He has led engineering for products at scale in Bitbucket and Statuspage. He has a masters in computer science from ASU. He’s a bit of a space nut and has been seen climbing around inside of a life-size replica of the Mir space station in Star City Russia.
Jayson J. Phillips is the Senior Director of Product Engineering at Honeycomb, an observability platform that helps software engineers see what’s happening in their production environments in real time. Prior to Honeycomb, Jayson has led teams and built software at different companies, including Coursera, 2U, Pandora, and Apple. Adjacent to his professional career, he can be found engaging in his growing sneaker collection, teaching and mentoring in STEM communities, cooking, and nature photography. Jayson is originally from The Bronx (New York) and currently calls the Greater Miami area home.
Nathen Harvey, Developer Relations Engineer at Google, has built a career on helping teams realize their potential while aligning technology to business outcomes. Nathen has had the privilege of working with some of the best teams and open source communities, helping them apply the principles and practices of DevOps and SRE. He is part of the Google Cloud DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) research team and a co-author of the 2021 and 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Reports. Nathen was an editor for 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, published by O'Reilly in 2020.
Alamelu is a technology leader, operator, and advisor with experience at scale and in high-growth environments across eCommerce, energy, and professional services. She's excited to start her next chapter with Homebase as VP, Engineering leading Product Delivery, helping small and medium businesses maximize their potential. Previously, she was Chief of Staff to the CTO at Shopify, supporting the Engineering organization, leading the teams responsible for building the systems, technology, and technical programs that power Shopify. Prior to Shopify, Alamelu has worked with some of Canada’s most innovative product and consulting agencies, leading engineering and delivery teams and helping organizations leverage technology to create maximum impact.
Alamelu finds joy in solving business problems through technology, strives for organizational excellence, and is passionate about supporting and sponsoring underrepresented folks in the industry. Alamelu lives in Toronto, and loves food, travel, the outdoors, and horror movies.
