The 2022 Chicago CTO Summit

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Thursday, May 12, 2022 | 08:00 AM - 06:00 PM CDT

333 North Green Street, Chicago, IL

The 2022 Chicago CTO Summit

Connect with, and learn from your peers at the Chicago CTO Summit

The 2022 Chicago CTO Summit

Connect with, and learn from your peers at the Chicago CTO Summit

ABOUT THE CHICAGO CTO SUMMIT

If you are technical and manage engineers, share problems and get answers at The 2022 Chicago CTO Summit. Whether you want to figure out how to return to the office in a sustainable way, avoid the "great resignation", think through the practicalities of hiring and managing international teams or just learn how to improve your engineering effectiveness using approaches such as DORA metrics, the CTO Summits are designed to help you to learn from top practitioners and to share experiences with your peers. The summit is a single day (8:00 AM -> 6:00 PM), single track summit with 15 presentations along with plenty of breaks for networking!

WHY ATTEND?

Keep up to date with trends

Identify best practice

Strengthen your network

Get inspired and motivated

FEATURED SPEAKERS

THE SPEAKERS

Fulfilling the promise of continuous delivery

Charity Majors

CTO, Honeycomb

Build vs buy at scale

Ann Lewis

CTO, Next Street

Criminal background = kickass developer

Jonathan Moore

Founder & CEO, RowdyOrb.it

Beyond the four most common devOps metrics

Michael Stahnke

VP Platform, CircleCI

The secret to CEO and CTO alignment

Bryan Helmkamp

Founder and CEO, Code Climate

Why reorgs fail

Aaron Erickson

Co-Founder and CEO, Orgspace

Security from zero

Eleanor Saitta

Principal Consultant, Systems Structure

You succeeded as a senior tech leader. Now what?

Joseph de Castelnau

Chief Data Officer & Founder, Syncresia

How to make product and engineering work together

David Subar

Managing Director, Interna

Giving engineering teams superpowers with serverless

Jay Zeschin

VP of Technology, Highwing

Micro-services: don’t forget to plan for the imperfect

Bjorn Freeman-benson

CTO, Ambassador Labs

Trust at scale: intentional communication for engineering leaders

Mercedes Bernard

Principal Software Engineer, Cloud City Development

Synthesizing failure: simplicity in modeling

Aaron Bedra

Global Head of Engineering, Cumberland DRW

How to science the product

Emad Khazraee

Senior Director of Product Data Science, Turing.com

The API of your team

Trace Wax

VP of Product, Artium

COVID PROTOCOLS

After surveying potential attendees, we have decided to require proof of vaccination for all upcoming in-person events. We shall also be following all local health authority guidance and working with the venues so that we can have an enjoyable experience while also protecting the health of our attendees and those they interact with. We will provide detailed covid protocols to all registrants for each event.

MEET ENGINEERING LEADERS FROM

What CTO’s say about CTO Summits

The CTO Summit gave me a great opportunity to step back from the daily challenges and think about broader opportunities to help my team evolve and accelerate.

Ann Funai

SVP Engineering, Under Armour

The CTO Summit series produces some of the highest-quality content, available for engineering leaders. The speaker lineup is always diverse and passionate about their areas of expertise. I'm not aware of any other event which packs this much talent and high-quality content into a single day!

Johnny Austin

CTO Till

The summits bring together industry leaders who are passionate about sharing high-quality, practical knowledge in an environment that fosters valuable networking, learning, and growth.

Nick Cardwell

Chief Product Officer, Looker

Johnny Austin

CTO Till

The CTO Summit gave me a great opportunity to step back from the daily challenges and think about broader opportunities to help my team evolve and accelerate." should be replaced by: "The CTO Summit was the rare event where every talk felt applicable to me as an engineering leader. The topics ranged from managing remote teams (pre-Covid!) to methods of coordinating a technical re-platforming. Talks were high quality, succinct, and always had useful takeaways.

Cat Miller

VP Engineering Flatiron Health

Almost by definition, most senior engineering leaders don't have peers at their company that they can share with and learn from. I always look forward to participating in the CTO Summit events because they offer one of those rare opportunities to learn from peers, as well as to make and renew connections with colleagues. They are well-run, collegial, and always worthwhile. I recommend them highly to any senior engineering leader.

Randy Shoup

VP Engineering eBay

The CTO Summit gave me a great opportunity to step back from the daily challenges and think about broader opportunities to help my team evolve and accelerate.

Ann Funai

SVP Engineering, Under Armour

The summits bring together industry leaders who are passionate about sharing high-quality, practical knowledge in an environment that fosters valuable networking, learning, and growth.

Nick Cardwell

Chief Product Officer, Looker

Randy Shoup

VP Engineering eBay

The CTO Summit was the rare event where every talk felt applicable to me as an engineering leader. The topics ranged from managing remote teams (pre-Covid!) to methods of coordinating a technical re-platforming. Talks were high quality, succinct, and always had useful takeaways.

Cat Miller

VP Engineering Flatiron Health

Agenda

The summit is a single track, full day (8am -> 6pm) summit with. 14 presentations along with plenty of breaks for networking.

08:00 AM

Registration opens

08:45 AM

Opening remarks

08:50 AM

“One question” - what do you want to learn?

09:00 AM

The secret to CEO and CTO alignment

Bryan Helmkamp, Founder and CEO, Code Climate

The secret to CEO and CTO alignment

Bryan Helmkamp, Founder and CEO, Code Climate

09:20 AM

How to make product and engineering work together

David Subar, Managing Director, Interna

How to make product and engineering work together

David Subar, Managing Director, Interna

09:40 AM

Micro-services: don’t forget to plan for the imperfect

Bjorn Freeman-benson, CTO, Ambassador Labs

Micro-services: don’t forget to plan for the imperfect

Bjorn Freeman-benson, CTO, Ambassador Labs

10:00 AM

Attracting & retaining talent - being bold

10:20 AM

break (30 mins)

10:50 AM

Fulfilling the promise of continuous delivery

Charity Majors, CTO, Honeycomb

Fulfilling the promise of continuous delivery

Charity Majors, CTO, Honeycomb

11:10 AM

How to science the product

Emad Khazraee, Senior Director of Product Data Science, Turing.com

How to science the product

Emad Khazraee, Senior Director of Product Data Science, Turing.com

11:30 AM

Security from zero

Eleanor Saitta, Principal Consultant, Systems Structure

Security from zero

Eleanor Saitta, Principal Consultant, Systems Structure

11:50 AM

DevSecOps - A fireside chat/AMA

12:10 PM

lunch

01:00 PM

Synthesizing failure: simplicity in modeling

Aaron Bedra, Global Head of Engineering, Cumberland DRW

Synthesizing failure: simplicity in modeling

Aaron Bedra, Global Head of Engineering, Cumberland DRW

01:20 PM

Build vs buy at scale

Ann Lewis, CTO, Next Street

Build vs buy at scale

Ann Lewis, CTO, Next Street

01:40 PM

Giving engineering teams superpowers with serverless

Jay Zeschin, VP of Technology, Highwing

Giving engineering teams superpowers with serverless

Jay Zeschin, VP of Technology, Highwing

02:00 PM

break (30 mins)

02:30 PM

Trust at scale: intentional communication for engineering leaders

Mercedes Bernard, Principal Software Engineer, Cloud City Development

Trust at scale: intentional communication for engineering leaders

Mercedes Bernard, Principal Software Engineer, Cloud City Development

02:50 PM

Criminal background = kickass developer

Jonathan Moore, Founder & CEO, RowdyOrb.it

Criminal background = kickass developer

Jonathan Moore, Founder & CEO, RowdyOrb.it

03:10 PM

Why reorgs fail

Aaron Erickson, Co-Founder and CEO, Orgspace

Why reorgs fail

Aaron Erickson, Co-Founder and CEO, Orgspace

03:30 PM

break (30 mins)

04:00 PM

The API of your team

Trace Wax, VP of Product, Artium

The API of your team

Trace Wax, VP of Product, Artium

04:20 PM

You succeeded as a senior tech leader. Now what?

Joseph de Castelnau, Chief Data Officer & Founder, Syncresia

You succeeded as a senior tech leader. Now what?

Joseph de Castelnau, Chief Data Officer & Founder, Syncresia

04:40 PM

Beyond the four most common devOps metrics

Michael Stahnke, VP Platform, CircleCI

Beyond the four most common devOps metrics

Michael Stahnke, VP Platform, CircleCI

05:00 PM

Closing remarks

05:10 PM

Evening reception

06:00 PM

End of event

It's just so rare to get such a distinguished group of software engineering leaders together to talk about the issues common to us all. It's a must attend for anyone in technical leadership.

Robert Conrad CTO Crunchbase

The sessions were high caliber and had a lasting impact on my work this year. As a single-day event in my hometown, it was easy to work into my schedule.

Jenny Farver Co-CEO 8th Light

For the second year in a row this conference delivers so many great talks in a tiny package. A great return on investment and so many great connections all in one day.

RC Johnson Senior Director of Engineering Indeed.com

OUR PARTNERS

DIAMOND PARTNERS

diamond PARTNER

Turing

Free Two Week Trial with Turing. Designed by engineering leaders from Facebook, Google, Uber and Stanford, Turing uses machine learning to actively vet developers to a Silicon Valley hiring standard. This allows vetting based upon actual skills vs. self-reported experience from traditional resumes or job interviews. Over 200 companies in a wide variety of verticals are using the Turing Intelligent Cloud to spin up their engineering teams, including Johnson & Johnson, Coinbase and more. Visit www.Turing.com.

diamond PARTNER

CTO.ai

CTO.ai helps development teams put the Dev back into their DevOps by empowering their workflows with intuitive, measurable and event driven CI/CD tools and accelerating developer productivity with our Developer Control Plane to enable them workflow smarter, not harder. Our platform was built with feedback from innovative startups who depend on agility in their software delivery practices as their competitive market advantage. We at CTO.ai seek to deeply understand developer productivity in terms that software development leaders and their teams can stand behind and objectively present to stakeholders.

PLATINUM PARTNERS

platinum PARTNER

iTechArt

Since 2002, iTechArt has been an industry-leading software development partner to 500+ disruptive startups and fast-growing companies worldwide, working on cutting-edge technology across industries. Equipping companies with dedicated engineering teams, iTechArt helps scale from Series A to unicorn status — contributing to $13B+ in acquisitions and 20+ IPOs. An engineering powerhouse headquartered in New York with 20+ offices and 3,500+ developers worldwide, iTechArt is a recognized partner to companies like AWS, Google, and Microsoft. Our developers bring extensive experience in AI/ML, application development, cloud, data analytics, DevOps, IoT, mobile, web, and more to deliver high ROI and performing products. iTechArt has been ranked consecutively as a fast-growing company by the Inc. 5000 since 2018, Financial Times since 2021, and more.

platinum PARTNER

CircleCI

CircleCI is the leading continuous integration and delivery platform for teams looking to shorten the distance between idea and delivery. CircleCI offers support for Linux, macOS, Docker, and Windows, in the cloud or behind your firewall.

GOLD PARTNERS

gold PARTNER

Optimizely

Creating digital experiences that transform your company takes data-driven decisions, continued experimentation and constant invention. Optimizely Digital Experience Platform helps you unlock your digital potential.

gold PARTNER

LaunchDarkly

Never worry about another software launch. Unleash developer productivity for the software-powered world by fundamentally changing how you deliver software to your customers. With LaunchDarkly’s feature management platform, empowered developers can empower the business to release new features faster and more efficiently than ever. Visit https://launchdarkly.com/ to learn more.

gold PARTNER

Honeycomb

Honeycomb is the observability tool that helps modern development teams understand the systems they build and operate in production. Develop better instrumentation as you write code to reduce toil and delight your users. With Honeycomb, guess less and know more.

gold PARTNER

Orgspace

Conway’s law states your architecture will resemble your org structure. If this is true, it follows that it’s critical to get it right! Orgspace helps you plan org structure, hiring plans, headcount allocation, cost projection, career ladders, and more. Visit orgspace.io and sign up for the beta!

gold PARTNER

StackHawk

Automate Application Security in Your CI/CD Pipeline. StackHawk makes application and API security testing part of software delivery. Click on our logo to read our guide to learn how automated security testing in CI/CD can drive efficiency across your team.

SILVER PARTNERS

silver PARTNER

Cloudbees

CloudBees provides the leading software delivery platform for enterprises, enabling them to continuously innovate, compete, and win in a world powered by the digital experience. Designed for large organizations with complex requirements, CloudBees connects with other best-of-breed tools and enables software development organizations to deliver scalable, compliant, governed, and secure software from the code a developer writes to the people who use it.

GLOBAL PARTNER

Code Climate

High-performance engineering teams power business success. Code Climate Velocity empowers CTOs, VPEs, and Directors at companies like Slack, Gusto, and Pizza Hut to achieve excellence through data. Velocity transforms information from DevOps and project management tools into insights that help engineering leaders align initiatives with strategic priorities, accelerate software delivery, and drive continuous improvement. Reach out to find out how Velocity's objective engineering metrics can help you do the same in your org. Mention CTO Connection, and you can get one month free.

SUSTAINING PARTNERS

sustaining PARTNER

Karat

Karat is the world's largest interviewing company. Engineering leaders using Karat spend team time interviewing, create flexible scheduling options for candidates, and reduce bias in the hiring process with consistent interviews and unlimited bandwidth. Organizations like Robinhood, Coinbase, Indeed, and Wayfair all use Karat to hire the right software engineers faster. Learn more at https://hubs.la/Q017nFsL0 or download the white paper, Interview and Innovate in the Interviewing Cloud, here - https://hubs.la/Q017nFnz0

sustaining PARTNER

Amazon Web Services

AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested in learning more about their offerings.

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