Lesley Cordero

Staff Software Engineer, The New York Times

@clesleycode

Lesley Cordero is currently a Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead at The New York Times. She has spent the majority of her career on edtech teams as an engineer, including Google for Education and other edtech startups.

In her current role, she is focused on observability, shared platforms, and building excellent teams by setting reliability vision and strategy across The Times, improving our observability footprint, and cultivating culture that builds with the most vulnerable employees in mind first. She shows care for others by holding them accountable to the best versions of themselves – and by buying them the occasional bubble tea.

Talk Session

Organizational Sustainability with Platform Engineering

Engineering organizations often face the consequences of building software in a way that prioritizes short-term gains over long-term ones. This has a lot of sociotechnical consequences, including tech debt, retention issues, and, ultimately, business risk. This talk focuses on how Platform Engineering can drive sustainability through its DevOps based principles, strong support system, and standardized shared architecture.

We’ll begin by reviewing what organizational sustainability is and how Platform Engineering can facilitate it. The rest of the talk will be split into three primary sections:

• The sociotechnical principles provided by DevOps.
• The robust support structures that enable platform adoption and faster delivery.
• The Platform architecture, its principles, common tensions, and a framework for how to build platform architectures that enable product engineers to do their best work.

By the end, these principles and practices will tie together to form a concrete case study on how organizations can benefit from Platform Engineering teams.