Empathy is a core engineering skill

Abstract:

I'll present the idea that operational empathy is essential to the software engineering practice. With examples from five years of helping to build and operate a large IaaS product, I'll show how empathy influences choices from logging libraries to high-level design for observability and debuggability. Touching on the role of code review, professional development, and the existential inevitability of production failures, we'll see how this approach acts as a #hugops force multiplier, improves operations, and creates positive feedback into engineering.

Speaker:

Matthew Smillie is a Software Engineer at Joyent.