LeadDev Berlin 2019
Skills for first-time Lead Developers
The transition from a developer to a Lead Developer can be a rocky one.
Applying software engineering practices to improve people management
As a new manager, your changed responsibility is not to build features, but to build systems to support the people building the features. It can be a challenge to figure out how to prioritise problems alongside the day to day pastoral care of your team.
Lessons for frontend development at scale
Powered by technologies such as React and GraphQL, we see frontend applications reach a level of scale and complexity that was traditionally associated with backend engineering and service architectures.
Learning from incidents: from 'what went wrong?' to 'what went right?'
When things go wrong, we tend to focus on mistakes, miscalculations, and deficiencies in design. By limiting our investigations to the details of what went wrong, we ignore a far richer and more interesting source of learning: how things went right.
Scaling performance at the scale of Slack
One of the major challenges faced by teams working on high growth product is of performance. Systems that are built for a given scale of users often fail to deliver the necessary throughput when run with orders of magnitude of load more than what they are built for. Software teams have historically resorted to a myriad set of ways in scaling performance.
Distributed teams: how to hone connection, communication, and collaboration
Psychological safety is one of the leading indicators of a high performing team. Yet, forging deep human relationships and building trust can be difficult when your team is distributed or largely interacts on screens.
Building blocks for architecture governance with autonomous teams
Many organizations today strive to establish autonomous development teams who can move as independently of each other as possible.
Strategies for making impossible decisions
Being faced with an important choice that feels impossible to know the answer to is stressful! This comes up a lot when making business decisions, but also applies to technical choices (e.g. "should my company run 100% on AWS" or "is serverless a fad or a great idea?").
Breaking down silos for better collaboration
Technology at Spotify is filled to the brim with talented, driven and passionate engineers, who together work to solve the challenges we face to reach our north star goals.
Writing effective technical documentation
Documentation can make a big difference. Internal documentation can speed your team up and makes it easier for new engineers to get up and running. External documentation reduces time spent on support questions, and makes your product more usable.