Speaker announcement: Emily Bache

About Emily

Emily Bache is an independent consultant, YouTuber, and Technical Coach. She works with developers, training and coaching effective agile practices like Refactoring and Test-Driven Development. Emily has worked with software development for 25 years and teaches courses on platforms including Pluralsight and O'Reilly. She’s also written two books: "Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman Method" and "The Coding Dojo Handbook".

A frequent conference speaker, Emily has been invited to keynote at prestigious developer events including EuroPython, Craft, and ACCU. Emily founded the Samman Technical Coaching Society to promote technical excellence and support coaches everywhere.

Get to know Emily even more at bacheconsulting.com, on her YouTube channel, or her LinkedIn page.

The talk: Real Team Building for Software Development: Technical Coaching

Software today is built by teams. There may be brilliant individuals and genius coders but in my experience, the best designs come from a process of collaboration, iteration and feedback. Across an organization of many teams working on the same codebase, you need some consistency in approach and a common language for talking about design and improvements. Team building is an important consideration for technical leaders which often receives too little attention.

Building teams is about enabling everyone to contribute their best in pursuit of a shared goal. Experienced software developers often work well with peers but they also need to be able to share what they know and help junior people to advance. Of course, it’s always been part of a Scrum Master’s role to encourage better teamwork and collaboration, but often that’s not enough. Technical coaching is different from what a Scrum Master does. The focus is not so much on the process and ceremonies of an agile method, but more on how the code is getting written. It’s about raising code quality, learning faster, and better handling the complexity of modern software development.

I’m technical and I coach teams of developers, generally in larger organizations. I work to influence coding decisions, spread skills, and help people gain a better vocabulary for discussing design decisions. In this talk, I’d like to explain what a technical coach actually does and how this can help an organization build a strong engineering culture and promote technical excellence.

Why I look forward to this talk

Things like "ugly Scrum" and SAFe have reduced agile to mean nothing. Martin Fowler made the term more specific by calling it technical agile, thereby making it useful again. And Emily is a stronghold for technical agile. That was the case when I first encountered her in 2007, and it’s definitely still the case today!

I may have found myself whining a few times about the reluctance of developers to embrace practices like TDD, despite its usefulness and all the benefits. Emily however, doesn’t whine. She takes constructive action by offering guidance, coaching, and support in a masterly fashion.

I’m convinced her latest book, “Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman Method”, could inspire improved collaboration in teams both in and outside of software development.

Thanks for joining Emily, I’m so happy to have you onboard. Wanting to promote technical excellence definitely hits a chord with me! myConf 2024 just got better

/Jimmy Nilsson, CEO and Consultant at factor10