Talks
When I have lessons to share I enjoy speaking opportunities (at conferences and otherwise).
Clicking on a talk title below redirects to a page that includes video (if available), slides, and talk resources.
Abstract
In September 2023 Pat Kua interviewed me for the 16th episode of The Managing Managers Podcast.
We covered a variety of topics in the 45 minute episode, ranging from my career path to date, the growth of International at Squarespace, what I mean when I refer to management as a career calling (and why I suck at guitar), how I evaluate my performance as an Engineering Director, what my day-to-day management responsibilities look like, why I think parental leave is one of the most human-centered and generous employee benefits, how I think about growing ICs that want to explore management, and advice for moving to managing managers from managing ICs.
I wrote about my takeaways from recording this podcast: Management as a Career Calling.
Delivered
Abstract
I spoke with Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range.co, about my Pushing Through Friction conference talk.
We talked about the circumstances around how the talk was written, the Normalization of Deviance, why "is everyone an idiot?" is an unhealthy mindset to have, and the three bucket approach (Accept It, Change It, Move On) to triaging emotional investments.
Delivered
Abstract
Providing feedback is such a fundamental concept within management that it's surprisingly easy to overlook it as a skill. But delivering feedback is indeed a skill, and it can be done well or done poorly. Luckily it's something we can all improve in as long as we approach delivering feedback strategically.
Using Lara Hogan's Feedback Equation, I'll discuss how managers can deliver both redirecting and reinforcing feedback that is specific, objective, and actionable. I'll also discuss why the context in which you deliver feedback is critical for its reception, and reflect on why the opportunity to deliver feedback is a privilege rather than a burden.
Delivered
Abstract
Things are broken. The deployment pipeline is painfully slow. Your engineering team has doubled in the last year and there's a lack of sufficient process and management. You git blame a file that's used everywhere but nobody understands it; the person who wrote it left the company five years ago.
As a senior-level engineering leader, experience tells you things could be better. You see the gaps. If only the company adopted policy A or dumped technology B, everyone would benefit. But there's so much inertia. The company has always used B. You are frustrated. Can you actually make a difference?
Yes. You are encountering organizational friction, and learning to identify, accept and push through friction is a key skill of engineering leaders. In this talk, Dan will talk about why organizational friction occurs and how to mitigate it. The ability to push through friction will distinguish you throughout your career.
Delivered
Abstract
CSS preprocessors like Sass add a variety of functions that streamline CSS
development: variables, nesting, functions, mixins, etc. The documentation is
great, the tools are mature, and starting a new project using Sass has a clear
and straight-forward workflow. But transitioning a large legacy codebase from
CSS to Sass is a different story. CSS syntax errors that may be harmless in
production can completely prevent Sass from compiling. But fixing those errors
creates a far juicier problem: will we introduce visual bugs by fixing syntax bugs?
At Etsy we faced this exact question multiplied across over 400,000 lines of
CSS and 2100+ CSS files. During this talk I’ll discuss the tools we used and
built throughout our Sass workflow, from the initial transformation of CSS
files using Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to the libsass-powered Sass to CSS
render pipeline we have running on all development machines. I’ll cover some
of the tools we’ve built in-house to mitigate some of the biggest potential
pitfalls of Sass (Sass live lint), how we ramped up our development and
production services to gain confidence in our process and how this entire
effort led to a single 1.2M line push that didn’t break production and had
minimal impact to developer and designer workflows.
Delivered
- CSSConf Nordic 2016: Oslo, Norway. June 2016.
- SassConf 2015: Austin, Texas. November 2015.