The Main Thread Brian Ogilvie & Alex Gaiser

We’ve reached the end of Season 1! In this final episode, Alex and Brian take some time to reflect on what we’ve learned so far, what themes tend to keep coming up across episodes, areas we’re targeting for personal growth, and finally, what you can expect from Season 2. Thanks for being a part of our first season! We’ll be back in 2024 with all new guests, insights, and stories from the Staff Engineer’s Journey.

We’re joined by Amirali Shahinpour, Head of Security Data Platform at Twitch to discuss driving security priorities across your organization.

Part 2 of our discussion with Lee McKeeman, Staff Engineer at Google, on empathy and inclusion. Why do companies struggle to prioritize efforts around inclusion and accessibility? And what can we, as technical leaders, do about it?

Lee McKeeman is currently a staff engineer at Google, who’s also spent time at Amazon and Meta. Lee is passionate about how we as technical leaders can influence our work environments to be more empathetic and inclusive so that people of varying races, genders, creeds, ages, and neruodiversities, all feel empowered to contribute their best ideas to the work that we do. Part 1.

Think about the roles you play in your community. Social planner, Little League coach, Dungeon Master. Did anyone explicitly give you that authority? Or did you just gravitate towards your interests and put yourself out there? Can we do that at work, too? Are we defined by the title given to us by our companies, or can we put ourselves out there to take on broader roles that align with our strengths? David Cunningham, Sr Engineer with The New York Times, joins us to discuss how to do both.

How do you decide whether that shiny new frontend framework or that highly performant, memory-safe backend language is really going to solve your problems? Join our guest Eric Justusson, as we talk about about how to leverage quick experiments, tracer bullets, greenfield projects, and hackathons to responsibly evaluate the benefits and costs of onboarding new tech for your team.