The Influential Software Engineer

Track: Practices and other tech

Abstract

Software engineers have a tendency to view projects in purely technical terms fixating on languages, datastores and frameworks. While it is tempting to focus solely on tech, it isn’t enough to get you that next promotion, raise or bonus, you can’t ignore the soft side of software. As you grow in your career, it becomes clear that projects are made up of people with the inevitable personalities, emotions and opinions on full display yet odds are your computer education omitted people skills as part of the curriculum. This talk will help you wield influence in you org be it to convince management to upgrade to the latest version of your tech stack or help you customer understand why you need to pay down some technical debt. We’ll also cover the impact culture has on our work as well as how to manage the many stakeholders in our orbit.

Nathaniel Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.