SUMMARY

As a developer, you spend time thinking about the satisfaction of your end users, but how often do you think about the happiness of the next person who touches your code? Join us for a lively discussion on how to make life easier for your future self and your teammates. We'll talk about processes that will help your apps break less often and be fixed more quickly when they do, including documentation, unit testing, commenting code, and meaningful code reviews. You'll leave with insight into how other teams in Denver contribute to these processes and create good team dynamics while they do it.

BIOS

Katie Scruggs (moderator)

Katie Scruggs is a software engineer at Nordstrom, where she works in full stack JavaScript and dabbles in DevOps. She is interested in what makes good teams great and is excited to talk about common struggles and triumphs for software developer teams across Denver.

Maria St.Louis-Sanchez

Maria St. Louis-Sanchez is a front end developer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, working on software for the transportation and data analysis group. As a new developer to the group, Maria has had to rely on the kindness, and documentation, of others as she wades into several new codebases at once and has to figure them out and build upon them.
Maria has a master’s degree in web design and online communications from the University of Florida and has a certificate in front end engineering from the Turing School of Software and Design.

Mitch Goudy

Since graduating in 2013 with a CS degree, Mitch has worked at various startups as both a front-end and full-stack engineer, developing features and improvements to numerous products and services. He is passionate about improving the ways people and teams interact and build together, and believes that respectful and communicative groups build better software, faster.

Steve Kinney

Steve is a senior principal front-end engineer at Twilio SendGrid. He is the director emeritus and founder of the front-end engineering program at the Turing School for Software and Design in Denver, Colorado — a non-profit developer training program. In a previous life, Steve was a New York City public school teacher. He taught special education and web development in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. He currently lives in Denver with his rambunctious six-year-old.

Vishwam Sankar

Vishwam Sankar is an Engineering Manager at Nordstrom, working on technologies that revolve around outfit-based shopping. Coming out of college with a degree in Chemical Engineering and a lot of debt at the height of the recession, Vishwam tumbled into the world of Product Management in start up environments. A switch to Software Development provided a refreshing change of pace, and soon he was a remote engineer for Nordstrom. When Nordstrom decided to start up an engineering office in Denver, Vishwam helped build up one of the original teams, learning lessons along the way on how to help build developer teams that are cohesive, supportive and productive.