CTO School – Fall 2010

What is it?

CTO School is a seminar series to help techies who find themselves in a technical leadership role at a startup learn some of the skills needed to excel and share experiences .  It is organized by the New York Tech Community and NextNY, Charlie O’Donnell & Jean Barmash.  

When:  The series will run in the Fall of 2010, dates are below next to sessions.  All sessions are 6:30PM - 8:30PM.

Where: AOL Ventures has generously donated space for CTO School. 

770 Broadway, 6th Floor

New York, NY

Who Is This For? This course is meant for somebody who has development experience, and possibly even some team leadership experience who is now working for a web startup in leadership capacity.  You are the technology guy responsible for the product, whether your title is Lead Developer, CTO, or VP Engineering, or "The technical guy".

Your role is to support the business strategy of your business by formulating and executing technical strategy.

Video Stream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cto-school-fall-2010

How Do I Sign Up?  

Next Event:

11/22 (Mon) S4 - Deployment Infrastructure & Operations - Brian Adams, CTO, AdMeld

• Talk 1: Infrastructure decisions:

• Picking hosting environment

• Server technologies - app servers, load balancers, proxies, caches, storage, etc. 

• Disaster Recovery and Backups

• Running Production Systems

• Scaling Infrastructure

Full Curriculum

9/27 (Mon) S1 -  What does CTO do?

• Talk #1: Role of CTO - Jean Barmash, CTO, EnergyScorecards & Pete Miron, CTO, Knewton

• Presentation http://www.slideshare.net/jbarmash/cto-school-s1-t1-what-is-cto

• Introduction to the role of CTO / VP Engineering / Tech Lead

• Progression of CTO Role as the company matures

• Working with Business Stakeholders

• Working with other members of the product team (and what to do if you don't have them)

• Being An Effective Part of the Executive Team

• Talk #2: Tips & TriX of the Trade
  

• Presentation http://www.slideshare.net/jbarmash/cto-school-s1-t2-cto-tips-and-trix

 10/11 (Mon) S2 -  Key Technical Decisions

• Talk #1: Creating a technology environment for building a startup
  

• Prototyping

• Development Tools Overview

• Key Technical Building Blocks You Should Know About

• Talk #2: Key Technology Decisions

• Languages & Platforms

• Persistence

• Web Layer

• Speakers:   Peter Bell, Jean Barmash
• Bio:  Peter Bell, CTO, SystemsForge
  - have been CTO (and often CEO) for over 10 years
  - raised $625k as CEO/CTO for my .com back in 2000 (wrote the prototype, hired a team and went 5-25 employees in 3 months)
  - did due diligence on acquisitions of start ups after my company was acquired in 2000
  - specialize in domain specific modeling, software product lines, RAD on the JVM and Agile/lean process mentoring - all designed to build apps quickly but professionally
  - am on program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA)
  - write regularly for GroovyMag
  - present at 15-25 conferences a year on DSLs and requirements and estimating - including the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour
  - ran an ad agency for 10 years so I have a background in mar-comm as well as coding
  - comfortable in a wide range of languages and platforms.

10/27 (Wed) S3 - Getting Technical Stuff Done (and Well)

• Panel Discussion - (Peter Miron, CTO, Knewton, Oliver Hurst-Hiller (CTO, Donors Choose),

Luke Melia (VP. Engineering, WePlay).

• Talk #1: Development Process

• Project Management for CTOs

• Quality Assurance

• Estimation

• Security
• Availability
• Talk #2: Creating a successful culture on your tech team

12/07 (Tues) S5 - Hiring & Scaling Your Team

Panel Members: 

       Zubin Wadia, CEO & Co-Founder at CiviGuard

       Harry H, Engineering Lead, FourSquare

       Gerald MacKenzie, Director of Engineering, Etsy

       Kiran Keshav, CTO, Betterment

       Nathan Hurst, Founder, Hirelite

       Hagos Mehretea, Director of Engineering, AppNexus 

• Recruiting
• Organizational Planning
• Hiring (Comp, onboarding)