Day: August 22, 2023

I have been in your shoes: it is very intimidating to get in front of strangers and speak about your passion: technical topics where others are stronger; opinions that are the anthesis of commonly-held beliefs; real-life solutions which you don’t believe are that unique. Or perhaps the most scary: people get bored and walk out on you.

Yet, how many conference sessions have you attended or watched webinars where you thought I knew this, I know more than the speaker, or even I totally disagree, and here’s why. The speakers you enjoy listening to — the David Belvins, Holly Cummings, Trisha Gee, Josh Long, Reza Rahman, Venkat Subramaniam of the world, and many others — started simply: likely pushed, goaded, and mentored into speaking. Practice and experience — and likely multiple failures — help novice speakers into rock stars.

On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, co-host Conor Bronsdon and Ben Lloyd Pearson, LinearB’s Director of Developer Relations, detail the evolution of Continuous Merge and the tool behind it, gitStream. Joining the conversation is Nik LeBlanc, VP of Engineering at DevCycle. 

Nik shares the ways his team is using gitStream to streamline code reviews and offers practical advice for anyone looking to implement the tool on their own team. He also explores the somewhat controversial practice of splitting up and reshuffling engineering teams, a strategy that DevCycle has used to great effect. Nik finds that this practice helps balance teams, manage diverse knowledge bases, and de-risk the organization.