Best Practices for Software Engineers: Agility, Scalability, and Process Improvement

Kyle Patton is a distinguished Vice President of Engineering at Salesforce, dedicated to elevating the efficiency and quality of Tableau product development and releases. In this influential role, Kyle orchestrates multifaceted teams across the software development lifecycle, encompassing a spectrum of skills and talents, all aligned towards the common objective of optimizing product delivery.

Prior to his tenure at Salesforce, Kyle was at the helm of Engineering at Health Fidelity, a pioneering healthcare enterprise specializing in harnessing machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of patients' medical histories and needs. During his tenure, Kyle spearheaded a pivotal transformation, rearchitecting the solution to meet the highest standards of security, compliance, and reliability. His ability to lead such transformative initiatives was honed at Devicescape, a virtual Wi-Fi solution provider, where he guided the evolution from a Wi-Fi connectivity solution to a real-time hyperlocal marketing platform powered by their curated database of Wi-Fi enabled locations.

Kyle's journey began with a 12-year stint at Microsoft, where he started at the grassroots level, initially swapping hard drives, and later emerged as a key figure in the launch of SQL Azure as the DevOps manager, at the outset of the Cloud Platform revolution. His career is a testament to his unwavering commitment to innovation and transformative leadership.

Shelby Heinecke leads a team of researchers at Salesforce AI Research. Her team focuses on fundamental research and product applications of LLM-powered autonomous agents, conversational AI, recommendation systems, entity resolution, and beyond. She earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in machine learning theory. She also holds an M.S. in Mathematics from Northwestern, and B.S. in Mathematics from MIT. Website: https://www.shelbyh.ai

Prianna is a Software Architect at Salesforce who works in the MuleSoft organization. Today, Prianna primarily focuses on developer productivity and solving hard problems in infrastructure, but she has worked in various domains throughout her career: she has developed machine learning models and data transformation pipelines alongside data scientists, built products to enable data science workloads, and operated a managed Kubernetes service for a large public cloud provider with multitudes of users. When she's not at work, Prianna enjoys hiking, rock climbing, aerial and circus arts, sewing and garment design, and hanging out with her 8 month old.

Charlie Curtis has been working as a software engineer for Salesforce for the past 8 years. He has a masters degree from Georgia Tech and a bachelor's degree from the University of Georgia. At Salesforce, he and his team work to scale Salesforce's orchestration and automation engines. His feature is responsible for ensuring more than 500M prospects-per-day receive personalized and timely marketing content.Outside of work, Charlie enjoys coding competitions, jigsaw puzzles, his year 9 old doggie, Disney Cruises and watching way too much CourtTV.