DeveloperWeek NYC 2018

It is 7:30 AM on a Monday morning in late October. I am waiting in line at Cafe Donuts to bring my team breakfast for our mandated ‘no work for one hour’. We just wrapped up a strenuous week of implementing a major upgrade to our Elastic logging cluster. Many Digital teams are relying on this upgrade to position themselves to confidently monitor their application health during the most important day in retail - Black Friday. It was a successful, much anticipated upgrade that resulted in many hours of overtime, late night calls, and cross-team performance tests. Morale is high, but it hasn’t always been. It has been over three months since the team disassembled to work on new initiatives. I have since had a chance to reflect on the qualities of the team that made it so unique. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but the accomplishments we made over six months are my proudest achievements in my six-year tenure at Target. This presentation will highlight the unique characteristics that enabled this team to thrive.