October 26, 2023 — Presentation by Hanna Farah

A Scalable Approach for Addressing Technical Debt Across Teams

Technical debt is a difficult topic to address. Even though everyone recognizes paying it down is necessary, scheduling can be difficult for the engineering teams involved. As technical debt accumulates, it becomes even harder to bring dependencies up to date, requiring much more effort from the team, which could cause deadlines to be missed or vulnerabilities to be introduced. On top of technical debt, teams also struggle to understand the systems and processes that hinder their productivity. Core teams find it challenging to effectively communicate technical debt and developer productivity metrics. In turn, product teams struggle to come up with a prioritized plan to address these issues in a timely manner.

This talk will cover the processes and tools that we developed to help teams visualize their required migrations and health requirements, along with size estimation to help teams include those tasks in their planning. This talk will also address the strategies we've used to raise awareness and help organizations plan for migrations and health tasks in the areas of security, reliability, code quality, and developer velocity.

Speaker

Hanna's diverse career in the software industry ranges from small enterprises (one successful exit) to large corporations (IBM, Deloitte). He undertook a variety of roles including software development, consulting, executive, and engineering management positions. He is currently a Engineering Manager at Yelp, where he leads the Developer Insights and Automation team in the Engineering Effectiveness group. Hanna earned his Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa where he focused his research efforts on developing privacy-preserving protocols that enabled the useful sharing of information across competing systems.

Moderator

Emily is a Technical Recruiter at Yelp, having transitioned her career from the field of teaching to the realm of recruitment. With approximately seven years of experience in technical recruitment, she has gained valuable insights while working within the ecommerce and data security domains. Emily holds degrees in Psychology and Human Resources from Concordia and McGill University, respectively.

Her passion lies in the field of technical recruitment, where she strives to incorporate an inclusive and diverse mindset into every aspect of her work. Emily recognizes the profound importance of human connections and places great emphasis on creating exceptional candidate experiences. Her genuine intention is to make candidates feel comfortable and empowered to be their authentic selves throughout the recruitment process.

About Yelping From Home:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and two of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen are our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelp employees from engineering and product share their stories about career development, technical skills and workplace challenges in a well-distributed environment.