Abstract:
When asked “What’s your architecture?” most people immediately respond with how their software is laid out and what their plans are for improving parts of it. Rarely does anybody really think through their team and organizational architecture, and even more rarely do people understand how that may fundamentally impact how the software gets written and the product that comes out at the end.
How do you prevent your organization from killing your product, and how can each person contribute to make things better?
About Raffi:
I work at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center thinking about and building massive scale data and software platforms to change computing, transportation, and the world.
Until August 2014, I was Twitter’s VP of Engineering in charge of the Platform, the core infrastructure of Twitter. I managed 400 people who worked on, amongst other things, the business logic, the scalable services, APIs, storage, core libraries, and the internal development model of all of Twitter.
Before Twitter I used to create technologies to help people frame their personal energy consumption against global energy production (Wattzon – Business Week’s “Best Idea” 2008), fueled my television habit through writing “TiVo Hacks” (O’Reilly, August 2003), and also ran a consulting company building off-the-wall projects. At one point, I also used to teach at NYU’s ITP (created the class Every Bit You Make) and spent way too much time as a student at MIT and the MIT Media Lab (Internet 0 – Scientific American September 2004).