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*I think it's okay for things to end, so... Big trees in a forest sort of compete for their trunk to sky, and all that corresponding life energy... And the big trees protect some young trees under the canopy, and when that big tree falls, the sky opens up, and those young trees raise up to fill it. I hope that Strange ... |
*That is all we have for you. Now we enter the future, so please stick around and have a drink, and if you wanna get something signed, do that... And thank you so much.* |
• Rachel Potvin's experience as VP of Data at GitHub, focusing on collaboration and code development |
• Launching GitHub's Advanced Security product area and growing it to 100 million ARR in under three years |
• Leading the team that developed Copilot, CodeSpaces, and new GitHub code search and navigation experiences |
• Prioritizing healthy engineering practices and a strong engineering culture to sustain product launches and growth |
• Managing the integration of teams from Semmle, Microsoft, and GitHub, and creating a shared culture across the teams |
• Establishing clear career ladders and expectations for engineers, including a new technical career path for managers |
• Introducing a design review process to improve communication and feedback across teams |
• Establishing a Principle Council to facilitate cross-engineering technical decision-making |
• Implementing a developer satisfaction survey to identify pain points and areas for improvement |
• Creating operational reviews and an engineering-wise strategy to balance technical debt, developer experience work, and other priorities |
• Developing a promotion process for engineering, including the staff engineer promotion |
• Discussing the technical manager distinction and the importance of not pigeonholing managers as only people managers and coaches |
• Defining the differences between senior engineer, staff, and technical roles and the level of agency and accountability involved |
• Emphasizing the importance of not moving away from technical work as one progresses in a career, and instead finding ways to stay involved in hands-on technical activities. |
• Managing large teams and organizations |
• Finding happiness and fulfillment in work |
• Leadership and management responsibilities |
• Scaling teams and organizations |
• Understanding constraints and making informed decisions |
• Adapting to new environments and challenges |
• Building partnerships and collaborations between teams |
• The product teams' siloed approach hindered the transition to Azure due to a lack of higher-level thinking and prioritization. |
• The 100-person threshold marks a significant point in team scaling, where individual team members can no longer hold context for everything, and decision-making becomes more complex. |
• At this threshold, delegation of decision-making to teams becomes essential, but often fails to happen effectively, leading to stalled decisions and a lack of empowerment among team members. |
• Technical decisions that cross team boundaries become increasingly difficult to make, leading to inconsistency and stagnation. |
• The 100-person threshold also brings about process and implementation issues, such as manual deploy processes becoming problematic and leading to outages. |
• Industry leaders may struggle to maintain insight and decision-making authority as their teams grow, leading to a lack of prioritization of key issues like infrastructure tech debt and developer experience. |
• Recognizing the problem of scaling and change is half the battle |
• The importance of culture in valuing different types of work and investing in developer experience |
• The difference between launches and landings, with a focus on safety, intentionality, and sustainability |
• The need to balance immediate needs with long-term scalability and planning |
• The challenge of premature optimization and the difficulty of deciding what to build now and what to put off |
• The importance of setting clear goals and targets for success and sustainability |
• Trade-offs between technical debt and prioritizing customer needs |
• Importance of being intentional about technical decisions, such as when to accrue debt or over-engineer |
• Ship to learn philosophy and nuances, including knowing what to iterate quickly and what to deliberate on |
• Need for communication and design reviews for significant changes |
• Importance of tracking decisions and understanding potential future implications |
• Scaling and throttling limits to prevent unexpected use cases |
• Complexity of large monolithic codebases and need for deployment management |
• Value of decision logs and institutional knowledge retention, but emphasizing the need for cultural buy-in and usability. |
• Choosing the right tools for communication and decision-making |
• Establishing a culture of clarity and consistency in finding information |
• Balancing process and freedom to adapt to different teams and projects |
• Avoiding "one size fits all" approaches to process and decision-making |
• Finding the "adequate amount" of process and structure to support growth and innovation |
• Creating a mechanism for surfacing important problems and issues that aren't specific to any one team or person |
• Establishing a principal council or architects group to handle high-level decision-making and prioritization |
• Encouraging psychological safety and trust among team members to facilitate open communication and feedback |
• Using surveys (such as the DevSat survey) to gather data and identify areas for improvement in developer experience, culture, and process |
• Fostering a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement through regular check-ins and feedback mechanisms |
• Defining psychological safety and its importance in a team environment |
• Differences between kindness, pleasantness, and psychological safety |
• The role of empathy and accountability in creating a safe environment |
• The distinction between complaining and being toxic |
• Strategies for maintaining code health and preventing premature optimization |
• The importance of prioritizing code review and having code owners |
• Overcoming cultural barriers to making difficult decisions |
• The need for directly responsible people who can make unpopular decisions |
• Code review tools and processes |
• Deployment strategy and challenges at GitHub |
• Deployment pain points and friction points at GitHub |
• Developer experience and its impact on code health |
• GitHub's enterprise product and cloud SaaS offering |
• Challenges of managing multiple deploy targets and scaling deployment |
• Importance of having a thoughtful and coherent deployment strategy |
• GitHub's progress in solving deployment challenges and adopting new tools and processes |
• Challenges of developer experience and on-call expectations |
• Importance of culture in adopting new strategies and expectations |
• Role of platform teams and product engineering in solving deployment issues |
• Decoupling database changes from code changes at GitHub |
• Rachel Potvin's transition to advising and her new career path |
• Her passion for developer and data productivity and her experience with large-scale teams |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're here with Rachel Potvin, former VP of engineering at GitHub... But Rachel, you've done some amazing work at Google, engineering manager, engineering leader... Your previous current role at GitHub has been amazing. You've been the VP of data at GitHub, making sure that lots of people can col... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, this is a -- I guess it's kind of a good time to be just leaving GitHub, or being at GitHub, because you guys have just done so much amazing things; you've got Copilot out there, you've got all sorts of things happening... Actions is just amazing... But let's talk about some of your -- I guess... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Thanks, Adam. Yeah, it's just been just a real privilege, and it's so wonderful to get to work at GitHub. It's really an incredible company, doing some really, really great things for developers around the world... So it's easy to talk about so many great accomplishments... I had the great privilege ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Rachel Potvin:** So for instance, I got to form the team that created GitHub's Advanced Security product area; this came from nothing, and with a fantastic acquisition from a company called Semmle. We built up that product area to over 100 million ARR in under three years, which was a really exciting journey, and rea... |
Like you said, my team launched Copilot, we launched CodeSpaces... A personal favorite of mine, we launched the new GitHub code search and navigation experiences, which I think is just phenomenal for developer productivity... You know, I got to bring lots of renewed focus to the core productivity experiences, even arou... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[05:55\] Yeah. I'd love to examine the other 50%, to some degree, because I feel like there's a lot of personal details, I guess, the relationship that comes into business, or into leading teams that just sort of kind of goes somewhat by the wayside when describing accomplishments. Like, I'm so gla... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah, one thing I was really proud of was the level of nutrition within my team during the pandemic was quite a lot lower than a lot of other areas... And I think that's because of the focus on healthy engineering teams. And look, the size of my team grew a lot during my three and a half years at Git... |
So when I first joined GitHub, I mentioned this company Semmle that we had just acquired; it was a really, really great company that formed the basis of GitHub's Advanced Security. In my second month at GitHub - you know, Microsoft had already acquired GitHub, and Microsoft kind of realized that there was this Azure De... |
And then 1/3 of my team was the sort of original hubbers, who had been on the startup journey, many of them, with GitHub, and they sort of had this more scrappy, get it done, ship to learn type, open source-first culture... And then a third of my people were from Microsoft, which - they had much more big company experi... |
And so these were all fantastic people, with very different backgrounds, experience and expectations... And I remember realizing that the first thing I really needed to do was just to bring these folks together with a common culture, and a feeling that, "Hey, we're all hubbers. A rising tide lifts all boats. I mean, we... |
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