Fostering a 'Fix It' Attitude

Abstract:

When working in a development environment with engineering bandwidth constraints, it's easy to allow the 'fix it later' mentality to guide your engineering teams. The results of the technical debt accumulating over time can then affect the happiness of your team and ultimately your customers.

At PagerDuty, we empower our engineers to take ownership of the problems that cause them the most pain, and encourage them to fix those problems. By owning and fixing these problems it improves the quality of our product and the happiness of our engineers and customers alike.

Using examples from PagerDuty, we'll discuss ways you can foster this mentality with your engineers, while getting everyone in your organization to appreciate the importance of limiting technical debt.

Speaker:

Tim Heckman is an Operations Engineer who started his roots as a full-stack engineer. He's currently employed at PagerDuty in San Francisco and his daily responsibilities include infrastructure automation, firefighting, and the occasional Yak shaving. Prior to working at PagerDuty he was a developer / sysadmin with Linode in NJ. When not working you can either find him contributing to his personal open source projects, enjoying some type of video game, or consuming a famous San Francisco Mission Burrito."