The Engineer, The Designer, and the Dictator

Synopsis

During the course of your career, it is likely you will have an undeniable urge to build a thing. It is equally likely that while you are well-intentioned, you are horrifically bad at a skill that is essential to successful thing building. In this talk, Michael Lopp will discuss ideal team construction and product design in a presentation called "The Engineer, The Designer, and the Dictator".

Bio

Michael Lopp is a Silicon Valley-based engineering manager who builds both people and software at companies such s Borland, Netscape, Apple and, most recently, Palantir. When he's not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose. Michael's second book "Being Geek" is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike. His first book "Managing Humans" is a popular guide to the art of engineering management and clearly explains that while you might be rewarded for what you produce, you will only be successful because of your people.

Michael is currently a Director of Engineering at Palantir.

Engineering Good Design and Usability

Synopsis

Blake Reary and Cai GoGwilt from Palantir will be giving an in-depth lecture on what "good design" is and how to build a website with good design and usability in mind. They'll go through a concrete example of a website they prototyped as well as giving an overview of various topics such as prototyping, typography, layout, color, and grid systems.

Visualizing and Experimenting with Data

Bio

Abhinav studied Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon. He currently works on the Entities team at Facebook New York. The Entities team maintains the quality of all non-people objects in the social graph. His present focus is on maintaining and improving the quality of Facebook's Places dataset. Prior to joining Facebook, Abhinav worked at Yelp and Mozilla.

Writing User Interfaces for 4 Platforms at Once

Bio

Dan Mascenik is Appian's Vice President of Engineering. Dan oversees the design and development of the Appian platform, and is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Technology department. He has over 12 years of experience with cloud-based enterprise software platforms. Dan holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

A severely opinionated overview of the Dropbox web stack

Synopsis

Dan Wheeler (MIT alum) will be giving a whirlwind tour of Dropbox's web infrastructure. Dropbox, one of the hottest startups of the past 10 years, has been able to scale their development team while maintaining incredible agility. Come learn about the technologies and processes they use to make this possible.