Planting the Seeds of a Healthy Organization
Nurturing a strong, vibrant engineering culture takes work. There's no magic bean you can plant and then expect caring and collaboration to spring, fully-embodied, from the ground. What are the seeds that grow into a healthy organization? How do you plant them, care for them, and let them bloom into a self-sustaining culture that people love to work in - and that excels at getting things done? Melissa has been an engineering leader (and a gardener) for quite some time, and is excited to share her experiences in planting and tending to blossoming teams of software professionals that, together, exceed the sum of their parts and get done some TRULY epic things.
Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role—dev, test, DevOps, and program management—at companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She's created and run high availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One, and now for mParticle's enormous data platform. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing significant code churn. Now an engineering director with mParticle, she’s passionate not only about maximizing efficiency both in her product code and in her developer tools but also about sharing best practices among colleagues and the tech world at large.