Our first-ever Duolingo Engineering Summit was a huge success 🎉 We filled the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh and had a full day of team bonding and learning. We kicked it off with a keynote that went through the “eras” of Duolingo Engineering, and then Duos could choose a “track” to follow for the day, including: iOS, Android, AI, Backend, Platform, and Career Development. Each track consisted of talks from fellow Duos and training on relevant topics (i.e., on the Android track, you might attend “Building & Scaling Android Math” and on the Platform track, you might attend a talk on Kubernetes). I got to attend several sessions, including: “How to Debug Anything,” “Career Development for Senior+”, “Allyship for Managers,” and “How teaching Math is different than language.” I had a lot of FOMO for the sessions I didn’t attend! It wasn’t all work: we had a happy hour, game time, and our in-house design team helped us commemorate the event with some exclusive swag 👟 We’ve grown so much in the last decade, from nine engineers to a team of nearly 400, and this offered the opportunity for almost the entire team to come together, share knowledge, and build connection. Thanks especially to Brian Dewey, who first pitched the idea to me and Severin Hacker, and Cara Silverman for helping bring this idea to life! In many ways, it was the best conference I’ve ever been to 😎 #engineering #engineeringleadership #teambonding
This sounds so useful and fun! Going to try to make this happen where I work. Have you ever done a Cleanathon at Duolingo? It’s like an inverse hackathon where you clean up your codebase and docs. I didn’t write this but it explains it: https://zaidesanton.substack.com/p/organizing-the-best-cleanathon-your I want to make one of those happen too
The shoes though 💚😍
I’m not usually a fan of corporate/conference swag (a lot of tat that ends up in thrift stores or landfills) but those shoes are dope
THESE SHOES ARE SO COOL. The summit also sounds fun, but the shoes!!! Sorry they weren't a fit Duolingo
Also “How teaching Math is different than language.” sounds like such a good talk
Looks like an absolutely awesome event!!! 👏 👏 👏 Love the sneakers so much!!! ✨ Hope this will finally puts us all in the owl’s good graces. 🙏
Sounds like an awesome gathering Natalie! Congratulations to the team and to the presenters, internal programming takes a village! 🪁
Best schwag!
why do penguins get an arena and owls don't