Amber Conville is an agile coach and software developer with over a decade of coaching and leadership experience. Amber has a passion for empowering people and helping them find joy in their work through action, communication, and experimentation. She believes it’s not only possible but necessary to drive progress and accountability through servant leadership and support. She is driven by fostering environments of transparency and healthy communication that support development techniques such as pairing, test-driven design, continuous refactoring, mobbing, and continuous integration and deployment.
Amber’s experience ranges from web and backend developing work to growth and transformation of startups to large enterprise clients. As a player coach for a large textbook publisher, she contributed to their large-scale agile transformation and electronic learning products supporting maintainable coding practices and processes. She coached a team coordinating a large automotive company’s vehicle inventory across dealerships by modeling hands-on TDD practices and collaborative team communication. Amber has also successfully created and implemented support frameworks, including training, feedback, reviews, recruiting, and compensation as the Director of Engineering for two prominent consulting firms.
Although she believes that productivity is not syntax-bound, Amber’s development toolkit includes Java, Javascript, Ruby, Elm, and Elixir. She created an iOS mobile app for the fans of a national basketball team using Objective-C with a robust functional and unit testing suite. Amber was also able to create a dynamic way to translate HTML directly into native view layouts dynamically for this app, of which she is incredibly proud. She has contributed to and developed similar apps, including one for administering dynamic power grid orchestration and a pharmaceutical app to centralize communication between doctors, pharmacists, and insurance providers.
Amber’s extracurricular passions are mentoring and making the tech industry more accessible to underrepresented groups. She loves being a part of her local tech community and thinks she learns the most when teaching and helping others. To this end, she volunteers and organizes user groups, conferences, and nerd gatherings whenever possible. She has spoken at Agile & Beyond and Detroit Dev Day and five years in a row at Codemash. In 2014 she founded Self.conference (selfconference.org) and recently started Selfdot (selfdot.org), a non-profit that provides accessible learning and gathering spaces for basic tech and programming literacy in Detroit.
Amber loves board and video games, reading and watching sci-fi and horror, and building mechanical wooden puzzles. She lives in Detroit, MI with her family and two sneaky chihuahuas.
