Talk I gave in DevCon September 2012 about the ingredients of an awesome engineering culture. http://devcon-september.events.co.il/tracks

1. Building an
Engineering Culture
Uri Nativ
Head of Engineering, Klarna Israel

2. Uri Nativ
Head of Engineering
Klarna Israel
@unativ

3. a Story…

4. Java / J2EE
Startup Oracle
2005
IT Enterprise
Application

5. Feature Request
New Report
on a reporting mechanism we
already hate at that time

6. 10 million rows
date as primary key
Group By month

7. 10 million rows + Group By
Helper Table
Data

8. 2010

9. a Bug
reported by a customer

10. Y2K + 10
bug

11. Ouch!

13. StarCraft – High Quality Game
• Patrick Wyatt (former VP R&D @ Blizzard)
– “The game was as buggy as a termite nest”
– “every programmer was coding like mad to
meet goals, with no time for reviews, code-
audits, or training”
– “the programming team continually worked
towards shipping in only two months for the
next fourteen months!”

14. Successful companies
have
talented
engineers
that code like crap

15. Successful companies
have
passionate talented
engineers
that code like crap

16. Awesome Engineering Culture
Outweigh
Bad Technical Decisions

17. Buy now, Pay later
25% of Sweden online commerce
Ruby-on-Rails/Erlang
€ 150,000,000 in revenue
Tel Aviv & Stockholm
6 European Countries
700 employees

18. Building Klarna Israeli
Engineering Center in
Tel Aviv

19. The 3 Ingredients
of great
Engineering Culture
The secret sauce

21. Short Sprints
Continuous
Delivery
Short Feedback Loop
Fail Fast
Fast Test Suites

23. Software
Craftsmanship
TDD
Automatic
tests BDD
Quality State-of-Mind
Zero-defect
Pair
policy
Programming
Code Review

25. Teach Hackathons
20% precent
Meetups
Continuous
Improvement
Learn from
Adopt new Mistakes
technologies Retrospectives

27. Passionate Team players
Engineers Humble
Respect Trust
Peopleware
Hiring
Code Review Learn from
Shared Code Mistakes
Pair Programming

28. Ingredients of great Engineering Culture
1. Short feedback loop
2. Quality state-of-mind
3. Continuous Improvement
4. Peopleware
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9439733@N02/2043786951/

29. Building great culture is
on the top of our
priority list

30. YOU can influence!

31. THANK YOU!