Session: 2 for 1: One for Auth and Auth for One / How to Optimize Non-Coding Time

One for Auth and Auth for One – Kim Maida

In the era of the modern app, robust open standards govern authentication and authorization for the protection of users and organizations — but they’re hard to grok! Millions of apps need user and API security, but the specs are incredibly dense and the stakes are higher than ever. Learn about authorization and authentication (what’s the difference?), open standards like OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, what problems they solve, and how to get started applying them in this 15 minute crash course — no previous knowledge required!

How to Optimize Non-Coding Time – Yishai Beeri

Github Copilot and tools that help us code better are cool. But I’m lucky if I spend 90 minutes a day writing code. We really need to optimize the hours we spend reviewing code, updating tickets and tracing where our code is deployed. Learn how I save an hour a day streamlining non-coding tasks.

This talk is unique because 99% of developer productivity tools and hacks are about coding faster, better, smarter. And yet the vast majority of our time is spent doing all of this other stuff. After I started focusing on optimizing the 10 hours I spend every day on non-coding tasks, I found I my productivity went up and my frustration at annoying stuff went way down.

I cover how to save time by reducing cognitive load and by cutting menial, non-coding tasks that we have to perform 10-50 times every day. For example:

Bug or hotfix comes through and you want to start working on it right away so you create a branch and start fixing. What you don’t do is create a Jira ticket but then later your boss/PM/CSM yells at your due to lack of visibility. I share how I automated ticket creation in Slack by correlating Github to Jira.

You have 20 minutes until your next meeting and you open a pull request and start a review. But you get pulled away half way through and when you come back the next day you forgot everything and have to start over. Huge waste of time. I share an ML job I wrote that tells me how long the review will take so I can pick PRs that fit the amount of time I have.

You build. You ship it. You own it. Great. But after I merge my code I never know where it actually is. Did the CI job fail? Is it release under feature flag? Did it just go GA to everyone? I share a bot I wrote that personally tells me where my code is in the pipeline after it leaves my hands so I can actually take full ownership without spending tons of time figuring out what code is in what release.