"Culture eats strategy for breakfast," and strategy isn't alone. Without good team dynamics, communication, and a healthy team culture, technical debt will flourish. I'll talk about the roles of individual contributors, team leads, and managers in fostering a good culture, and show how a positive culture has a positive impact on code health and project outcomes. This will hit on many of the teamwork and leadership themes of the Flamingo Book, along with some of my own experiences (good and bad), and the habits that I think have made some of my teams successful.
Titus is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he has worked since 2010. At Google, he is the library lead for Google’s C++ codebase: 250 million lines of code that will be edited by 12K distinct engineers in a month. He served several years as the chair of the subcommittee for the design of the C++ standard library. For the last 10 years, Titus and his teams have been organizing, maintaining, and evolving the foundational components of Google’s C++ codebase using modern automation and tooling. Along the way he has started several Google projects that are believed to be in the top 10 largest refactorings in human history. That unique scale and perspective has informed all of his thinking on the care and feeding of software systems. His most recent project is the book “Software Engineering at Google” (aka “The Flamingo Book”), published by O’Reilly in early 2020.
