Putting the “Fun” in Functional with Frank Chen
from Screaming in the Cloud Hosted by Corey Quinn
About Frank Frank Chen is a maker. He develops products and leads software engineering teams with a background in behavior design, engineering leadership, systems reliability engineering, and resiliency research. At Slack, Frank focuses on making engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, in the Developer Productivity group. At Palantir, Frank has worked with customers in healthcare, finance, government, energy and consumer packaged goods to solve their hardest problems by transforming how they use data. At Amazon, Frank led a front-end team and infrastructure team to launch AWS WorkDocs, the first secure multi-platform service of its kind for enterprise customers. At Sandia National Labs, Frank researched resiliency and complexity analysis tooling with the Grid Resiliency group. He received a M.S. in Computer Science focused in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford. Frank's thesis studied how the design / psychology of exergaming interventions might produce efficacious health outcomes. With the Stanford Prevention Research Center, Frank developed health interventions rooted in behavioral theory to create new behaviors through mobile phones. He prototyped early builds of Tiny Habits with BJ Fogg and worked in the Persuasive Technology Lab. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA. Frank researched networked systems and image processing with the Center for embedded Networked Systems. With the Rand Corporation, he built research systems to support group decision-making. Links: Slack: https://slack.com “Infrastructure Observability for Changing the Spend Curve”: https://slack.engineering/infrastructure-observability-for-changing-the-spend-curve/ “Right Sizing Your Instances Is Nonsense”: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/right-sizing-your-instances-is-nonsense/ Personal webpage: https://frankc.net Twitter: @frankc
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What this episode covers
Almost everyone is using Slack, and a lot of that is because of the work of those like Frank Chen, Slack’s Senior Staff Software Engineer. Frank is here to tell us how Slack keeps us all angrily typing. But equally as important is his own trajectory which is multifaceted to say the least. Frank discusses the common thread with the many places where he has worked, which for Frank is fun and exciting people. Frank offers up some cat centric anecdotes that helped lead him to his work at Slack, and reflects on how Slack has shifted how we work. Frank also shows a determination to work through failures and how to build on that, and the best way to make those connections with the human component of our work. Frank offers up a lot of insight on constantly learning, and his perspective is quite worthwhile.
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