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Swizec Teller

Swizec Teller

Swizec is a software engineer, author, and conference speaker. He's published books on modern web technologies, data visualization, and productivity, and has trained engineering teams at companies big and small. He’s on a mission to distill 20 years of tacit experience into actionable steps.
Tia, USAswizecswizec
Senior Mindset
C3 Dev Festival 2024C3 Dev Festival 2024
Recording pending
Senior Mindset
Workshop
Getting that senior title is easy. Just stick around. Being a true senior takes a new way of thinking.
You're a great engineer. You can code anything you need, solve every problem, google any solution. Your code is flying.
But somehow you're ... stuck. Interviewing feels rough, you pass the coding and fail the real stuff. Culture and system. At work they keep giving you stupid little problems with no growth. You crave challenge and keep tweaking CSS instead.
You want some responsibility, damn it! What's that coworker got that you don't?
Most of all you crave autonomy. The freedom to tackle big challenges and help the company with your brilliance.
They don't even see all the bad code you see! How can they live like this?? Instead of autonomy, you're getting babysat. Managers asking what you're up to, daily standups that feel like a drag, pushback and 'maybe someday' on every idea that you give.
I was like that a few years ago. A totally senior engineer who keeps running into walls and getting stuck.
Now even bigger companies trust me with designing systems and leading teams on projects that could make or break the company.
In this workshop you'll learn what changed and how to apply the Senior Mindset to your work and career:- How to gain autonomy- Inspire trust- Own large projects- Get freedom to experiment- Have your ideas heard- Think like an expert- Become a decision-making peer, not a pair of hands
You'll work on case studies, analyze anecdotes, discuss insightful books, and look at your work and career in a new light.
Scaling Fast – Engineering Lessons From ~15 Years of Tech Startups
React Advanced 2024React Advanced 2024
27 min
Scaling Fast – Engineering Lessons From ~15 Years of Tech Startups
Building a business is a slugfest to see who gets more customers first. You have to adopt that mindset when writing code. As an old boss told me once: Clean code won't matter if we're dead. You have to shift your mindset from best practices to getting shit done. But you can't go too wild or the tech debt will kill ya. 
code quality
Scaling Fast – Engineering Lessons From ~15 Years of Tech Startups
C3 Dev Festival 2024C3 Dev Festival 2024
27 min
Scaling Fast – Engineering Lessons From ~15 Years of Tech Startups
Building a business is a slugfest to see who gets more customers first. You have to adopt that mindset when writing code. As an old boss told me once: Clean code won't matter if we're dead. You have to shift your mindset from best practices to getting shit done. But you can't go too wild or the tech debt will kill ya. 
Scaling Fast – Engineering Lessons From ~15 Years of Tech Startups
TechLead Conference 2024TechLead Conference 2024
27 min
Scaling Fast – Engineering Lessons From ~15 Years of Tech Startups
Building a business is a slugfest to see who gets more customers first. You have to adopt that mindset when writing code. As an old boss told me once: Clean code won't matter if we're dead. You have to shift your mindset from best practices to getting shit done. But you can't go too wild or the tech debt will kill ya. 
Forget Bad Code, Focus on the System
React Summit US 2023React Summit US 2023
27 min
Forget Bad Code, Focus on the System
Top Content
Watch video: Forget Bad Code, Focus on the System
Prop drilling is fine. Duplication is great. Long functions are love.

We talk a lot about bad complicated code because it’s easy to see the problem. But research shows engineers can work around self-contained bad code just fine. What really trips them up is something else entirely – architectural complexity.

Architectural complexity makes your code hard to work with, causes 3x more bugs, halves productivity, and may even cause devs to ragequit. In this talk we explore what you can do.
productivity
On Becoming a Tech Lead
TechLead Conference 2023TechLead Conference 2023
25 min
On Becoming a Tech Lead
Top Content
Tech lead sounds like a lot of work. And not the fun coding kind either. Why would you ever want that? What does it feel like when you get it?In this talk Swizec explains why he took the step towards technical leadership, how his priorities changed, and why it means he’s doing more engineering than ever. A whole new world where writing code is the easy part.
careersoft skills
You Do Have Time to Build it Twice
React Summit 2022React Summit 2022
21 min
You Do Have Time to Build it Twice
Top Content
If you don’t have time to build it right, when will you have time to build it twice? In hyper growth startups the old adage breaks down. You get an expanding time horizon – IF you can get it shipped. An imperfect feature next week beats the perfect feature 2 months from now. Your code won’t matter if you’re dead. I didn’t believe this until I saw it myself. A startup on the cusp of hockeystick hired me to rewrite their jQuery app in React. Their tech proved the idea then became a burden. Over the next year we rewrote the whole app from scratch, grew a team of React experts, created a codebase that’s a joy to work with, and got the company to a $100,000,000 Series B. All because the early engineers knew that if the crappy version works out, there’s going to be time and resources to fix it later. This talk is about what I’ve learned while rewriting an app with users banging down the door.
careercase studyweb developmentsoft skills