Dr. Sasha Göbbels (she/her)
Engineering Management Squirrel
Speaker and Consultant
Intro
What I am all about.
Dr. Sasha Göbbels started her professional life with a PhD in Chemistry at RWTH Aachen and writes biographies for herself in the third person because it looks way more professional. But let me switch to first person because it is just better readable. Starting as an individual contributor in software development. I'm a management professional with more than twenty years experience in software development, team management and data science. I have a proven ability to manage cross-functional and cross-cultural teams and communicate to technical and application domain stakeholders. I also have a track record in delivering talks and papers on technology and management at conferences and magazines, for customers and user groups. I also offer consulting on management topics mainly on diversity, remote teams and empathy in tech.
When not torturing my colleagues with new ideas or war stories 'from the days back when FORTRAN was a thing', I enjoy reading about nearly any topic (including neuroscience, philosophy or theory of fashion) or throwing myself in my free time into clothes that make you argue if they suit me. I also have a questionable taste for music, which means that most of the time I have to listen to it all by myself. From time to time I also try to learn a new instrument (I originally learned electronic organ). And sometimes I shamelessly exaggerate to be more entertaining.
And if you didn't already guess so: I am trans femme.
Expertise
Batman would be jealous.
01
Team management
Caring for and growing the knowledge and career of her coworkers is an important constant in Sasha's professional life. In particular she is well experienced with managing remote or mixed teams.
02
Technology Scouting
Sasha also is pretty successful in finding new solutions for existing or upcoming problems and business opportunities. Being payed to toy with new technology and solutions is something many engineers dream of, but still having an eye on practical day-to-day business should not be neglected.
03
Agile software development
Modern software projects, especially in web development, have a fast pace of development with constantly changing requirements in an ever changing environment. For this reason some very proficient software engineering people came up with the idea of agile software development. Although there are several practical implementations of this way to think about software development, Scrum has secured its place as one of the leading frameworks. From time to time Sasha loves to challenge the attitude of protagonists of the commercial Scrum scene.
04
Software Configuration Management
One of Sasha's first freelancing jobs was to manage the versioning of the source code of a large telecom billing system with IBM Rational ClearCase. Later on she suffered from the pain of managing a software base in Subversion and later started using Mercurial and especially Git with great fun (and success). She is also an ardent supporter of GitLab and GitHub.
05
PHP
A lot of her professional projects where realized in PHP, being used on around 79% of all web sites in 2019. Sasha used modern PHP frameworks like Symfony or Laravel and also built (or managed teams building) PHP applications from scratch, for example to manage a named shares register. Also most modern ecommerce systems are written in PHP (if not in Java, for the very large ones).
06
Python
Before even starting with PHP, Sasha used Python a lot. And currently Python is gaining a lot more speed both for web development and data science. For web development she mainly uses Django and many data science tasks can be carried out with Jupyter. Did you know the name came from JUlia, PYThon and R being the main languages for Jupyter?
07
Containerization
The advent of Docker made software development and deployment as easy as it has never been before. Sasha introduced Docker into several projects for the benefit of speed, productivity and reproducibility.
08
eCommerce
The opportunity for everyone to sell goods or services on the internet to the whole world is a powerful driver behind a lot of her work. So she gained quite some experience with several larger and smaller ecommerce systems like OXID eSales, Spryker, Magento or PrestaShop.
Experience
Yes. I've been around.
So I left out the older positions.
So I left out the older positions.
Since October 2022
Overleaf
Engineering Manager
London, UK and Aachen, Germany
Working with a team of engineers on all parts of the system. Overleaf provides an easy to use, online, collaborative LaTeX editor. Member of the company's new founded LGBTQIA+ ERG (employee resource group).
August 2020 to September 2022
Badger Systems GmbH
Senior Tech Lead
Cologne, Germany
Managing development teams for and contributing to several customer projects. Providing GMP regulation guidance to a medical device project. Building a tool in Python to generate C++ code according to a specification in JSON schema. Developing and maintaining an API repository server for the generated code with Laravel in PHP. Contribution and tech lead for a data science project built with Django in Python. Tech lead in a large PHP software refactoring project.
November 2019 to May 2020
Prym Consumer Europe GmbH
Head of Backend Development
Stolberg, Germany
Managing teams on architecture and development of a Spryker ecommerce system. Building and growth of a local team. Initiating a machine learning based approach to stock forecasting. Establishment of an independent project infrastructure as a strategical goal. Cooperation with other departments to make sure, all interests are met as much as possible.
May 2019 to November 2019
StreetScooter GmbH
Head of Department for Diagnostics Analytics & Connected
Aachen, Germany
Managing a department with four teams of developers, data engineers and software architects. Four direct reports and more than 20 people in general. Developing and implementing monitoring services and site reliability measures for automotive services and fleet management systems. Aggregate vehicle and maintenance data to enable predictive maintenance procedures. Close cooperation with other departments and stakeholders. Negotiating with stakeholders having competing interests (production, development, external suppliers, management).
January 2019 to April 2019
FEV Europe GmbH
Team Lead Data Science
Aachen, Germany
Building a team of data scientists and engineers. Build knowledge and enable team members to grow into new tasks. Design cloud based architectures for predictive maintenance and autonomous vehicles.
September 2017 to September 2018
Databay AG
Head of Individual Software Development
Würselen, Germany
Managed a team of software developers. Organization of company-wide trainings and brown bag sessions. Established the use of containerisation for easier development and deployment.
January 2017 to August 2017
Chegg Inc.
Manager of Software Engineering
Berlin, Germany
Managed several teams developing large scale web services for students on several heterogeneous platforms based on AWS. Responsible for planning and implementation of a large project to migrate several million user accounts to a new unified platform. Accountable for teams spread across Europe and the United States of America, working remotely and on-site. Communication and collaboration with a team of product managers and other stakeholders to ensure delivery and quality.
October 2012 to December 2016
Inform GmbH
Project Manager / Technology Scout
Aachen, Germany
Project management and systems architecture. Introduced agile methodologies to organise a cross-functional team. Learn and test new technological approaches for anomaly detection in risk and fraud to ensure product management can deliver. Design and prototyping of applications to analyse large amounts of data with graph based methods and machine learning (CC transactions, online banking, insurances, stock exchange).
Education
Lazy isn't in my vocabulary.
1994 – 1997
RWTH Aachen
Ph. D. in Chemistry
Aachen, Germany
Title: „Two-dimensional Magnetic Resonance in Porous
Media“
Topic: Development of quantum mechanic models and
imaging techniques (NMR tomography, MRI), incl.
evaluation of large data sets in Python and PV-Wave.
Visualization of complex multidimensional data.
1985 – 1994
RWTH Aachen
Diploma in Theoretical Chemistry
Aachen, Germany
Title: "Creation of a program to simulate
Topic: Porting of a program written in FORTRAN IV to
C++, creation of a mathemalical library in C++ for
matrix computation. Visualization of data.
Embracing Diversity in Remote Teams
Unconscious Bias, Microaggressions and Allyship
Unicorns In Tech Summit 2023 #UITS23, Berlin, Germany
Slide deck (TBA!) || Abstract on Conference page
Unicorns In Tech Summit 2023 #UITS23, Berlin, Germany
Slide deck (TBA!) || Abstract on Conference page
The Hidden Structures in Teams and Organizations (PDF)
The flat hierarchy myth
International PHP Conference 2023, Berlin, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
International PHP Conference 2023, Berlin, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
Remote Teams and Diversity (PDF)
We’re not all in the same boat
International PHP Conference 2023, Berlin, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
International PHP Conference 2023, Berlin, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
Diversity in Software Development
You need them all!
International PHP Conference 2021, Munich, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
International PHP Conference 2021, Munich, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
Software Development in Regulated Environments
How to survive the FDA
International PHP Conference 2021, Munich, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
International PHP Conference 2021, Munich, Germany
Slide deck || Abstract on Conference page
Let's talk about Einfühlung
Cats and Klingons
Fraud Detection
Nobody needs that
Building Web clients using XUL and SOAP
International PHP Conference 2004, Frankfurt, Germany
No slides available 🥺
No slides available 🥺