October 6, 2020 by Nivedita Mittal and Joshua Keable

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:

Nivedita Mittal, Austin

Bio: Nivedita has been on the Reader Experience team for the past 2 years and has worked as a full stack engineer enhancing the business details page for Yelp. She has also recently started managing the team and is excited to take on the new role. Prior to joining Yelp, she pursued her Master’s in Computer Science from Northeastern University(Boston). She is passionate about mentorship and co-leads the Awesome Women in Engineering mentorship program across Yelp. She is also an avid foodie and likes to cook up a storm and share it with her instagram followers regularly.

Talk: Working From Home - Lessons Learned as a Software Engineer

Has the pandemic been your first experience working remotely? Then come along this journey with Nivi where she talks about tips and tricks that worked for her as a first-time remote software engineer. She will run through all the advice she tried and the ones that stuck. While this talk applies to software engineers and managers, a lot of the themes go beyond the tech domain. This talk will leave you with some new ideas on how to be more effective and less isolated when working remotely—especially in the tech industry.

Joshua Keable, Phoenix

Bio: I joined Yelp in 2013 and moved through IT roles to my current role as IT Operations Manager. Currently, I oversee the teams in PHX, PIT, and NYC. Yelp has been a great learning experience for me. I have grown in my technical, project management, and leadership skills with the opportunities given by my managers. I love working with my colleagues and am grateful for working in a company which has such a great culture, energy, and collaboration. I’ve never worked for a company that has this level of collaboration, it makes me strive to learn all I can daily from my peers.

Talk: Work From Home - Best Practices

Since I joined Yelp, we have been very focused on in-office work and systems. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we had a rapid change to Work from Home (WFH) focus and no time to prepare. This dialog will focus on the changes and challenges the Yelp IT Team faced moving the company to a fully WFH environment. I’ll discuss my experiences adjusting to working remotely, the technical difficulties we faced, some of the wins we celebrated along the way, and best practices for setting up your home office.

Moderator:

Nadine Fong, San Francisco

Bio: Nadine is one of our Recruiting Operations Specialists on our Technical Recruiting team. Having been with Yelp for the past 5 years, she's held various roles which saw the logistics end of recruiting including coordination and working with Engineering and Product interns. She now works with and maintains Yelp's Tech Recruiting teams data. The Yelp community has been so great for the past few years that she's also taken up organizing some traditional office socialization (like internal trivia nights and weekly team workouts) to our remote world!