Be agile! Hold retrospectives at least once per month! Have a weekly 1:1 meeting! Shoot for 99% unit test coverage! Automate everything! Centralize your monitoring and logs! Containers everywhere!

It’s hard to read a tech blog or go to a tech conference without being inundated with advice about software engineering best practices. This guidance is usually great – in some circumstances. But, like everything else in software engineering, there are tradeoffs.

In this talk, Sam will share his experiences at Empower, a small political tech nonprofit, and how his team managed to have a great culture and a big impact even without following a lot of “best practices.”

Director of Engineering, Organizing Empowerment Project

Sam King is the Director of Engineering at the Organizing Empowerment Project. Before Empower, he worked on the healthcare.gov fix-it team, at