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Navigating the challenges of being a tech lead
When you were just a developer, things seemed so simple. Sometimes it was a choice between using several libraries, or working out the right algorithm to solve a problem. Making decisions seemed really easy. When you are playing the Lead Developer role, decisions no longer seem black and white and you have several competing priorities.
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Characteristics of a modern tech lead
Over the last decade or so we have seen a shift towards “generalising specialists”, programmers who, as well as designing and building great software, can understand a business domain, design a user interface, participate in and automate some of the testing and deployment activities, and who are sometimes even responsible for the health and wellbeing of their own systems in production.
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Empathetic communication as an engineering leader
The Internet is full of articles about how to build & lead tech teams, however reading these will only get you so far. In order to become a successful tech lead you must also know how to manage people, including: clients, project teams, other colleagues and your bosses.
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12 steps to becoming a better engineering interviewer
An email in your inbox. A conversation with your boss. The company is hiring and you’re to be part of it – you’re going to be an interviewer.
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How performance is everyone’s job
As builders of the web, performance is our most important job, as it dictates a users happiness and willingness to use a product.
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Adapting testing for engineers
Keeping up with a team of developers who release every day is a tough job, but someone’s got to do it! Gone are the long, relaxing days of manual testing for weeks on end. Here is how we are keeping the acceptance testing process at JUST EAT as lean as possible.
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The technical journey to microservices
Microservices offer an architectural style that is flexible enough to become the de-facto approach for future enterprise software systems, but the individual journeys, and pitfalls vary dramatically from context to context.
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Building happier engineering teams
We all know how difficult (and expensive!) it is to convince brilliant engineers to join our team. The real challenge starts on Day 1 – What can we do to keep them happy and engaged?
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Cloning yourself isn’t an option
We’re all drawn to the fable of the 10X engineer, but engineers most commonly increase their effectiveness 10X by amplifying the effectiveness of those around them. In this talk we’ll explore ways to make your value multiplicative, no cloning required.
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Dealing with overheads as an engineering leader
There are many super-important roles in software teams that are also financial overhead, e.g. QA, Support and Bugfix. They’re necessary, but they require people that would otherwise be working directly on business goals.