May 26, 2020 by Surashree Kulkarni, Banafsheh Derayat, and Vanessa Gutierrez (Guest)

About this event:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and one of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen is 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 Yelpers from engineering and product and will focus on themes such as career development, technical skills, workplace challenges and Yelp’s response to COVID-19.

Speakers:

Surashree Kulkarni

Talk: Code Review Etiquette — Code review is the act of consciously scrutinizing a peer’s code for errors. While code reviews can offer a veritable teaching moment, the etiquette around it is not explained to engineers just starting out on a job, and can be fraught with inaccurate assumptions, biases, or worse, the engineer’s temperament. This talk is on why code reviews should be treated as the skill of giving good feedback.

Bio: Surashree is on the Semantic Business Information team and has been with Yelp for three years. On her second day here, she watched a Pycon video with her team about code review etiquette and has tried to emulate its teachings ever since. Passionate about maintaining a positive culture and a sense of community, she has mentored several interns and full-time hires and runs the intern-mentor sync-up meetings in the company.

Talk: 5 Things We Wish We Knew When We Started Working as SWEs — Did you recently start your first job as a software engineer? Then come learn from two engineers at Adobe and Yelp about the top five things they wish they knew when they were in your shoes. They'll be giving step-by-step answers to important, common, hand-wavy questions like when (and who) to ask for help, how to get the most out of one-on-ones with your manager, and more.

Vanessa Gutierrez (Special Guest)

Bio: Vanessa works on Adobe's latest drawing and painting mobile application, Adobe Fresco. She primarily works on the iOS app and uses Objective-C and C++ in her day-to-day. Prior to joining Adobe in 2018, she studied computer science at Fordham University in New York City and the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and had completed internships at Mozilla and Jopwell.

Banafsheh Derayat

Bio: Banafsheh has been on the Restaurant team for the last 1.5 years. Prior to that she did an internship with the same team while finishing up her computer science degree in University of British Columbia. Banafsheh is passionate about mentorship and has been part of multiple mentorship programs within Yelp. Banafsheh and Vaness share the same hobby of aerial circus.

Moderator:

Tenzin Kunsal

Bio: As a part of the Tech Events team, Tenzin executes events and partnerships for Yelp engineering—everything from evening Meetups to Hackathons to conferences. Before joining Yelp in '17, Tenzin was in the nonprofit sector and has worked with education and community building nonprofits in San Francisco and Minneapolis. She is passionate about cultivating diversity and co-leads the Yelp ERG ColorCoded.