#131 - Lei Yang - VP of Engineering at Quora

Today we are talking to Lei the VP of Engineering at Quora. And we discuss ways to evaluate and track developer velocity, why there's no substitute for experience when it comes to learning, and the benefits of quarterly hack weeks to drive collaboration and innovation.

All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!

Lei Yang is VP and head of Engineering at Quora. Before joining Quora, Lei grew and managed several engineering teams at Google. She has over ten years of experience in machine learning and is passionate about its application across different fields, such as data mining, personalization, content recommendation, and spam detection. Lei holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University.

ABOUT Quora:

Quora is a Q&A platform that empowers people to share and grow the world’s knowledge.

The vast majority of human knowledge is still not on the internet. Most of it is trapped in the form of experience in people’s heads, or buried in books and papers that only experts can access. More than a billion people use the internet yet only a tiny fraction contribute their knowledge to it. We want to democratize access to knowledge of all kinds—from politics to painting, cooking to coding, etymology to experiences—so if someone out there knows something, anyone else can learn it. Our mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge, and we're building a world-class team to help us achieve this mission.