TALK ABSTRACT

Like most Silicon Valley engineers, I know what it’s like to put in long hours working passionately on a technical project that you genuinely believe will change the world. However, unlike most software engineers, I decided (very) early in my career to trade the massive company campuses and busy commutes (and outrageous housing costs) of the Bay Area for the wide-open plains of Dallas, where I am over a thousand miles away from my nearest teammate in Orlando, the second remote member of our three-person team. While our situation has presented its fair share of challenges, they have been far from inhibitive: Late last year, we open sourced Panoptes, the world’s best* self-configuring, extensible, and horizontally-scalable network telemetry and monitoring platform, capable of monitoring tens of millions of time series with sub-minute resolution across hundreds of network sites.

In this talk, I cover the ups, downs, and in-betweens of remote technical work as a 26-year-old type one diabetic, and will touch on the tips, tricks, and strategies my team has used (and avoided) to maximize our success in bringing a truly remarkable technology to light. Whether you can count the number of conferences you have attended on one hand (like me), or you have lost count somewhere through the years, I hope to provide an example of what it looks like being a valued and valuable member of a high-impact, remote dev team in 2019.