I’m excited to announce that tickets are officially on sale for the first annual Austin CTO Summit. Take advantage of our super early bird pricing and grab your tickets today! If you know of any potential sponsors, please have them email me at douglas@voltagecontrol.co.

After two months of planning and recruiting speakers, Peter and I feel like the wind is at our backs. With over 80 speaker submissions it was no easy task to select the speakers as we had to reject talks we both personally wanted to see! We are announcing 15 speakers today, and more will follow in the coming days so check the ticketing site for more details soon.

Buy Your Tickets Now!

Whether you’re an engineering manager, VPE or CTO, at this full day, single track summit you’ll learn the latest tricks other companies are using to successfully build and run engineering teams. It’s not hard to find a gathering of technologists debating front-end frameworks, containerization or the relative benefits of Scala, Clojure and Go. Finding a group of geeks talking about the hard parts of building a successful engineering team is more challenging. Whether you want to hire smarter, refine your culture, improve your processes, manage more effectively or adopt better engineering practices or architectures, the CTO Summits are designed to help you to learn from top practitioners and to share experiences with your peers.

Attendance to the event is strictly limited to engineering leaders. No recruiters, non-technical co-founders or other business stakeholders will be allowed (we enforce this policy strictly and will refund tickets of anyone we can’t admit). That said, we’re not hung up on job titles. Some of our best attendees have titles like CEO or VP Product. As long as you can perform a technical code review, know how to submit a pull request and are interested in more effectively hiring, managing and organizing developers, we can’t wait to meet you!

This year, our fifteen presenters include the CTOs/VPE’s Reddit, Amazon, data.world & IBM. Tickets will sell out quickly, so get yours now!

Refund policy: Unfortunately we are unable to offer refunds for tickets. We are, however happy to transfer them up to one week before the event to another engineering leader.

The post Austin CTO Summit 2018 appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’m happy to announce that I am hosting the first ever Austin CTO Summit on April, 10th at Capital Factory. I am partnering with CTO Connection and 7CTOs to bring the CTO Summit Series to Austin. I’ve been working closely with Peter Bell, president of CTO Connections and host of the NYC Nasdaq CTO Summit, to help coordinate all the logistics to ensure that the conference is a success. Peter has done a fantastic job of packing up the critical components for a successful conference, and I appreciate all he has done to help.

While Peter has essentially assembled a conference in a box, I’m coloring outside the lines and adding a unique Voltage Control spin to the event. I don’t want to ruin all the surprise, but the main idea is that I will create legitimate and meaningful networking opportunities and encourage thoughtful dialog through the conference.

The conference is for CTOs, VPs of Engineering, aspiring technical leaders, product manager, or anybody that wants to hang out with CTOs or better understand the CTO role. Most, if not all, of the speakers will be CTOs of recognizable companies. We will allow a few CEOs and other roles if the content is superb.

Mark your calendars for April 10 8AM-6PM and stay tuned for more updates!

The Official Announcement

Voltage Control has partnered with the popular CTO Connection summit series to bring this great event to Austin. This will mark the fifth year for CTO Connection’s CTO Summits, with summits in Austin on Tuesday April 10th and in San Francisco on Tuesday May 22nd. CTO Connection is also launching an online summit series with monthly presentations and a weekly email with articles and interviews with top engineering leaders.

The Summits

Whether you’re a team lead, engineering manager, VPE or CTO, at these full day, single track summits, you’ll learn the latest tricks other companies are using to successfully build and run engineering teams. It’s not hard to find a gathering of technologists debating front end frameworks, containerization or the relative benefits of Scala, Clojure and Go. Finding a group of geeks talking about the hard parts of building a successful engineering team is more challenging. Whether you want to hire smarter, refine your culture, improve your processes, manage more effectively or adopt better engineering practices or architectures, the CTO Summits are designed to help you to learn from top practitioners and to share experiences with your peers.

Over the last four years we sold out the summit series and presented over 200 amazing talks from senior engineering leaders representing companies including Twitter, Stripe, Snapchat, Coinbase, Chef, GitHub, Atlassian, MongoDB, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Groupon, Blue Apron, Tough Mudder, CustomInk, Spotify, Amazon, Condé Nast, Computech, comScore, Australia Post, Cisco and Oracle amongst many others.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for experienced engineering leaders willing to tell a 20 minute tale based on their recent experiences in building or running engineering teams. A great talk is:

1. Novel
   We’ve read the books and most of the blog posts. We get the benefits of Kanban, know the basics of orchestrating Docker using Kubernetes and understand the importance of building an engineering brand. Tell us a story that will provide new information to experienced engineering leaders who have the basics down cold.
2. Anecdotal
   If you’re got data, that’’s even better, but the best talks are based on hard won experience building and managing your own engineering team. If you can abstract a theoretical framework to make sense of your experience that’s great, but we’re looking for stories based on experience, not untested theories.
3. Relevant
   Is this relevant to or at least interesting to most engineering leaders. We love monads, but a talk on Haskell probably won’t be broadly appealing enough (unless it’s showing how to take the principles behind QuickCheck and apply them to other types of languages!)
4. Actionable
   What will the attendees be able to do better by the end of the talk? There should be specific, actionable takeaways to help the attendees better build and run their teams.
5. Concise 
   Twenty minutes — back to back, including setup, tear down, and any Q&A. It’s a tight format but one that the attendees love as you have to get straight to the meat of the content.
6. Diverse
   We’re committed to continuing to improve the diversity of our presenters and attendees. At our last summit over 40% of the selected speakers didn’t identify as male and 25% identified with ethnicities that are traditionally underrepresented in technology in the US. We are committed to a speaker lineup representing the diversity of gender, race and thought that we should expect in our community and are doing our very best to improve the diversity of our attendees as well. If you know anyone who might make a good speaker and would bring valuable diversity to the event, please feel free to email me — douglas@voltagecontrol.co I’m happy to connect personally and help them to plan and submit a presentation.

If you have multiple ideas for presentations, please feel free to make as many submissions as you’d like. If you’d like to get some inspiration for what kinds of talks are popular, check out our two most recent summits:

Submit your presentation now!

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