Staff engineers often get overwhelmed by long-term ownership of critical projects. This talk explores how to avoid burnout by starting every project with an exit strategy—whether transferring ownership, pausing or bootstrapping a team.

Thirty-nine seconds after launch, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded—caused by software design errors. In this talk, Mark analyzes these historical flaws to explore key lessons in resilience and product security. We’ll discuss testing, validation, legacy code, design assumptions, and the challenge of proving when things don’t go wrong.

Staff+ Engineers often fear working on the wrong projects. This talk explains how that fear stems from misalignment with your company’s business strategy. Learn to identify your company’s strategy, align your projects with it, and communicate value to stakeholders. Maximize your impact by refocusing efforts on work that truly matters.

In this keynote talk, Kelly explores principles, practices, and patterns that are actually effective at sustaining systems resilience, from the overlooked to the counterintuitive.

This talk discusses the growing importance of streaming applications in today’s tech landscape and the engineering challenges involved, such as handling multiple data sources and complex transformations.

What is the true cost of a choice to e.g. share a database, and what does it take to change it? When is the right time to tackle something like this, and how can we tell? Tali shares experiences with these questions that will set you up for success with your own enormous debt payment.

This talk will dive into the most ambitious tech debt paydown project that was ever undertaken at Stripe.

Sally shares lessons learned from her experience at different companies to reduce costs from the product development stage to running a service in production.