Tech Con '18

21 Sep 2018 by Keith Elder

My Highlights

Responsible for speaker selection
Responsible for call for papers
Responsible for speaker recruiting
Responsible for conference schedule planning
Responsible for speaker coaching / mentoring

A Special Moment

Lee Eason, Director of DevOps at IPreo, shared a message with the audience as to how impressed he was as to what we have at created at QL along with a message about being #Grateful. I met Lee in San Diego at a conference I keynoted at the year before and knew I wanted him to speak at TechCon '18.

About TechCon '18

On Thursday, Sept. 20, Cobo Center will welcome more than a thousand technology team members from the Rock Family of Companies for Tech Con ’18, a day of learning and finding inspiration through sessions covering dozens of topics from emerging technologies and DevOps to Agile and project management. Remote team members and Rock Family of Companies team members will also be able to experience Tech Con sessions through live streams.

Tech Con will bring in 16 external speakers, from the technology industry and beyond, and will give more than 20 speakers from Quicken Loans and the Rock Family of Companies the opportunity to share their expertise through individual presentations and panel discussions.

This year, Tech Con has expanded into a full week of festivities, dubbed “Tech Fest '18,” which will include a host of hype-up events Monday through Wednesday and IT Family Gathering on Friday, Sept. 21.

“Tech Con is an opportunity for all Quicken Loans Technology team members to communicate, collaborate and learn from each other,” said Chief Technology Officer Brian Woodring, who’s looking forward to attending the conference for the first time and hosting the opening talk alongside Chief Information Officer Linglong He.

While many team members attend various technology industry conferences throughout the year, Quicken Loans sees a huge benefit in hosting an internal conference.

“It’s a time for everybody to learn the same stuff, to raise the whole organization up a notch, instead of little pockets of knowledge here and there,” said Technology Evangelist Keith Elder, emphasizing how important it is for every Technology team member to make an effort to be there. Whatever you’re working on, it can wait for the next day.

“Think about two people cutting wood – one who stops every 50 minutes and one who just chops wood all day long. Which one would cut more wood? The one who stopped to sharpen their ax. It’s important that everybody hits pause once in a while to sharpen their ax. We can work harder, longer hours, but if we don’t add new knowledge to our base, take time to learn, we’re not going to cut as much wood as the companies that stop to sharpen.”

This year, Tech Con will focus on the theme “Master your craft,” one of the six Technology Philosophies introduced at Tech Con ’17. This philosophy is the key to continuous improvement and a culture of excellence, Woodring said.

“Mastering your craft not only moves our business forward, but it allows our people to get that fulfillment that they’re the best they can be, and they can provide the best value to the company and to themselves,” said Vice President of Emerging Technology Pat Hartford.

Keynote speaker John Foley (pictured), a former lead solo pilot of the Blue Angels, the United States Navy’s flight demonstration squadron, will speak about how he mastered his craft and the extraordinary experiences he had with the Blue Angels.

“We wanted to find somebody who could speak to the theme of mastering your craft, but not necessarily in the technology space,” Hartford said. “We thought, 'How can we take something that we don’t normally have contact with outside of our walls and bring that in?' It’s about learning from his life experiences and how he mastered his craft.”

On his website, Foley shares how the lessons from the Blue Angels can apply to any craft, and how high performance is a mindset, a process and a state of being that accelerates everyday achievement.

“What I learned most from being with the Blue Angels had nothing to do with flying itself,” he says. “I learned that the process of engaging at this high level, when my very life depended on successful communication, accurate information, trust and follow-through, is the same process leaders and successful individuals use to achieve excellence.”

With more than 200 speaker submissions this year, the planning team had its work cut out for it in narrowing the field to fit within the 20 sessions team members will attend during five time slots.

The range of industry experts brought in to speak includes John Willis, co-author of “Beyond the Phoenix Project" and Vice President of DevOps and Digital Practices at SJ Technologies. Willis will be presenting “Next Generation Infrastructure,” an overview of the latest platform architectures with a focus on the container ecosystem.

With DevOps at the center of the Quicken Loans Technology team’s plans to develop a continuous delivery pipeline, Willis is an ideal speaker to share his expertise, Elder said.

“It just made sense to bring a leading expert, someone who’s leading the way on these topics, and give all of Technology access to him,” he said. “What we really wanted to do was give our technologists access to divergent thinkers and experts in these topics.”

Quicken Loans Technology team members Adam Solomon, Leah Foreman and Derik Whittaker will also share their expertise in individual presentations.

Solomon, an Information Security Penetration Tester, will lead the talk, “Don’t Leave the Window Open,” demonstrating how hackers use security vulnerabilities to compromise company data.

“My goal is for everyone to go back to their teams and look at their technology to see what they can fix and try to patch the holes,”he said.

Foreman, a Team Leader in Information Security and former Googler will present “OKRs: How Everyone Can Set Goals like Google, Even if You’re Not,” explaining how to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to create greater impact faster. The audience will walk away with tips on how anyone can make OKRs work for them and how to get started, Foreman said.

Whittaker, a member of the App Core team, a driving force behind Quicken Loans Technology’s move to the cloud, will present “Cultivating your Infrastructure with Terraform,” providing insight into the infrastructure as code software.

“This is something we need to educate team members on,” Whittaker said. “If I can help others get up to speed quicker, I’m doing my job.”

Quicken Loans team members will also join team members from technology teams throughout the Rock Family of Companies and industry experts to participate in three panel discussions covering Agile methodology, DevOps and data.

Kiran Nair, a Team Leader at Rocket Homes, is excited to engage in the conversation about how data is transforming and disrupting the way the Rock Family of Companies does business. He will bring a unique perspective on how to handle data from a variety of sources in the real estate world, he said, and he’s looking forward to learning a lot, too.

“We’re a small company compared to Quicken Loans, and there’s a lot of knowledge that we can use for building our infrastructure, our data integration platform,” he said.

With a variety of topics, the 20 sessions throughout the conference will provide every team member with an opportunity to learn and level up their skillset. This is the result of a heavy balancing act on the part of the planning team, which wanted to ensure that even with a wide variety of roles in Technology, there is something for everyone.

Planning for the event started as early as January, and really took off in early spring, said Elyse Oberland, leader of the IT Communicators team and a member of the Tech Con planning team, which consists of about 10 key team members from Technology and the Event Management team.

While the Technology team members focused on speaker content, vendors and registration, the Event Management team handled logistics, including event layout, decor and the event app, along with a host of other things, Oberland said.

“It really takes an army to put this event on,” Elder said. “There are many facets to hosting a conference of this magnitude.”

Attendees at Tech Con '17 explore the dozens of IT Community and vendor booths at Cobo Center, which will return for Tech Con '18. KASSIE DYMENT | TECH BLENDER
Along with the sessions and keynote talk, the conference will feature dozens of booths where team members can learn about all of the IT Communities; several teams including Technology Transformation 2.0, Tech U and Talent Insiders; as well as more than 10 external vendors.

In addition to the conference on Thursday, this year the entire week of Tech Con will be a time to celebrate the Technology team and focus on big ideas, innovation and the theme of “Master your craft.”

Tech Fest will start on Monday, with team members hosting hype-up talks where they’ll share innovative ideas, expert advice and lessons learned. Monday through Wednesday, team members can visit 12 Monroe in One Campus Martius to experience the innovation installations, which will show off some of the Technology team’s innovations such as the Amazon Alexa Skill, Technology Photo Booth and the Operation Heart Kiosk.

“This is going to let team members get hands-on with what others are building during their innovation time,” said Jordan LaFramboise, Team Leader of the Future Labs team. “We’re trying to create an environment that gets people thinking of Tech Con for the whole week, to celebrate and recognize what we’re doing in Technology.”

The week will wrap up with the Technology Family Gathering on Friday at Cobo Center, hosted by Dave Polidori, Vice President of the Backbone team and Mel Findley, Vice President of the Application Operations team. The celebratory event will include team member lightning talks about lessons learned and a fireside chat with guests from the business.

“Family Gathering is a celebration of the past year and a chance to hype up what’s to come,” Oberland said. “It’s a nice balance with the day before, which will be more about soaking in knowledge.”

For more information about Tech Con, visit QLTechCon.com, where you can find the day’s agenda and read more about the sessions. Don’t forget to follow @QLTechCon on social media and download the Tech Con app where you can build your own agenda.