Building a Better Web
June 11–12, 2018: Training
June 12–14, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

Caring for your fellow developers

Trent Willis (Netflix)
3:35pm–4:15pm Wednesday, June 13, 2018
People and teams
 Location: 210 C/G
Secondary topics:  Beyond Code Track: The Business Side of the Web, Case study
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 4 ratings)
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Who is this presentation for?

  • Anyone who interacts with software developers or engineers

What you'll learn

  • Understand that caring for your fellow developers doesn't require radical changes to your behavior and results in more effective and sustainable teams

Description

Many developers experience “bad days” at work from time to time. Leaving these unaddressed can lead to lost productivity, burnout, and, at worst, loss of a talent team member.

Trent Willis explains how to proactively care for your teammates with the same passion you use when caring for your code. Trent begins with an example bad day that draws on real-life examples from tech employees to explore how the interactions that occurred could have been made better, turning a bad day into a positive one. The result is that potential burnout can be turned into more cohesive and collaborative teams.

Along the way, Trent focuses on practical areas such as code reviews, one-on-one meetings, and general day-to-day activities (like getting lunch or chatting about tech), pointing out how you may be negatively interacting with coworkers without knowing it and sharing simple techniques to more positively engage with them instead.

Photo of Trent Willis

Trent Willis

Netflix

Trent Willis is a senior UI engineer at Netflix, where he builds tools and applications to give others insight into their products. He’s also the project lead for the QUnit testing framework, a frequent contributor to various open source projects, and a self-professed music junkie.