Growth Through Experimentation & Innovation

Experimentation is a powerful tool in tech — whether you are looking for creative architecture to refine your technical processes or unique experiences to transition and grow your career. Testing, refining and iterating on what works is key to unlocking growth.

In this session, four AWeber experts will share how they successfully manifested growth through experimentation and innovation within their areas of expertise:

• Career: Three AWeber team members will detail their experiences in coding bootcamps, their experiences finding new jobs, and how AWeber has helped them in their transitions, growth, and career trajectories.
• Engineering: Learn about the systems the AWeber engineering team has established across the department and how the team has grown as a result. Plus, this talk will describe some of the technologies the AWeber engineering team is using and some lessons we've learned along the way.

Agenda

3:00-3:45: Life After Bootcamp: Personal Growth in Your New Career

This panel discussion details the experiences of a few AWeber employees that have successfully transitioned their careers after attending coding bootcamps. The following areas will be points of discussion during the panel:

• Why did we decide to transition careers?
• What kind of time commitments were required for your coding bootcamp?
• What reasons could you give for attending a coding bootcamp?
• What reasons could you give for not attending coding bootcamps?
• At the beginning of your career, how prepared were you for transitioning into your new role?
• What were some resources that helped in growing as an engineer at AWeber?
• What were some pitfalls in your career at AWeber?
• What role (if any) did mentorship play in your current position as an engineer?
• Audience questions

3:45-3:50: Break

3:50-4:30: AWeber’s Engineering Journey

Led by Interim CTO, Gavin Roy, this discussion explains how AWeber’s Engineering team supports team members and company growth. You’ll hear about how the product team is structured, and how the team implements and uses creative new frontend and backend technologies. This talk will describe some of the technologies we're using, some lessons we've learned along the way, and where we’re going in the future.

The speakers

Shamique Thompson is a front end software engineer at AWeber. Endlessly curious and relentlessly motivated, she has dedicated herself to being a master of all things software. A graduate of Brown University, Shamique decided to embark upon her journey to master the art of Software Engineering after receiving her certification from Penn's Coding Bootcamp.

Stephanie Harris is a back end software engineer at AWeber, where she builds software that enables customers to easily create awesome content for their emails. After earning her undergraduate and graduate degrees in music, Stephanie transitioned into tech by joining the Fall 2015 cohort of the Rutgers Coding Bootcamp in New Brunswick, NJ. She was able to land an internship shortly after graduating, and eventually a fullstack engineering job before moving to AWeber in 2018.

Alex Campbell is a full-stack software engineer at AWeber, working on everything from legacy PHP sites to automated Slack bots in Python. After getting his undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science with a focus on artificial intelligence at Vassar College, he self-taught programming and was awarded the Developer Scholarship from Google to study Android app development at Udacity. Never a moment not in thought, you can find him pondering self-describing function names during the day, and pondering counters to mind-bending swing manipulations in the slasher game Mordhau at night.

Gavin Roy is currently the Interim CTO at AWeber. With over 25 years of experience in the Internet industry, Gavin is responsible for the technical architecture and operational stability of several large-scale web properties. He is the author of “RabbitMQ in Depth,” and actively contributes to several open source projects and communities, including Erlang, Python, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ. Gavin is a member of several professional organizations, including the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation (EEF), Python Software Foundation (PSF), and the IEEE.