Julia: Indiegogo is most known as a crowdfunding website. After joining the company, I’ve learned that it’s a lot more than that. Indiegogo is an entrepreneur platform. Anyone in the world can become an entrepreneur and reach millions of people. We have resources to help entrepreneurs throughout all the stages needed to fulfill a product. In the past year, we’ve launched a immensely successful product marketplace.

Julia: Several months ago, I was the engineering lead for adding Apple Pay support to perks with itemization. Prior to that, two separate had worked on adding itemization to perks and Apple Pay support to perks. I was part of the latter team. Both teams were working in the same area of the codebase, but were on tight schedules to deliver -- so as a result, a lot of technical debt was accrued. I had to deal with cleaning up this debt in order to deliver a new feature that combined both projects. Consolidating the front-end APIs for accessing a perk was main refactoring work that had to be done.

Technical debt is an ugly word and it’s not a fun thing to talk about, so my talk tells the story of my project through the lens (gifs) of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Hopefully it’s an entertaining and also enlightening experience!