How to effectively “Spike” a complex technical project
Aditya Bansal explains what a spike is, how to successfully spike a project, and lessons learned from leading several technically complex projects across 3 different companies, and various different teams.
Managing at the threshold: Examining our principles in a moment of change
David Yee talks about managing at the threshold: Examining our principles in a moment of change
Riding the rollercoaster of emotions
Gabriel Michels covers key topics such as understanding and managing emotions, reflecting on them, developing emotional intelligence, and being in control of our thoughts.
Cultural post mortems: an approach to learning and recovering when your people systems fail
Winna Bridgewater will share how they planned and executed recovery work. Our aim is to inspire you to consider a systems approach when something with your team goes wrong, and we’ll provide a template for what we think worked well.
Feature flags unleashed
Roger Gros will show you how you can use feature flags to run complex data migrations, enable canary releases, easily build plans on top of your product, customize for specific clients, and much more.
What do you mean there’s no onboarding plan for engineering managers?
Daniel Korn shares his four-week onboarding process for engineering leads that emphasizes peopleware, tech leadership, and delivery management. He provides a behind-the-scenes look at this super adaptable process, which uses a framework of ‘sessions’ and ‘experiences’ - and shares everything from his mistakes to his insights.
Build a data-driven on-call workflow for your team with atomic habits
Bianca Costache will walk you through a data-driven on-call framework, clearly derived from first principles. You will get the WHY, our journey towards adoption, and the results after more than 2 years of implementation.
Red 2.0: Transforming a game company
Colin Walder takes a look at how the Tech Team at CD Projekt applied the Red 2.0 Manifesto as part of a company-wide transformation after the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
Keeping your team health after a layoff
Leandro Cesar Silva will discuss how we can support and care for the team and then move forward, based on what I experienced at Loggi, where it was possible to overcome in a healthy way.
Strategies for succeeding as a underrepresented engineering leader
Rafia Qutab Kilian will draw on her experience as a Lead Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and as a woman to provide strategies for how to succeed at work, alongside her own stories of how she put these into practice.
Parents who code: How to welcome your developers back after parental leave
Sinead Cummings is going to talk through how you, as Development Leaders, can provide visibility of key decisions to those who have been on leave, ensure they aren’t overlooked during their period of absence and how you can prevent cognitive overload when they return, guaranteeing your best and brightest return feeling empowered, valued, and ready to code.
Compassionate on-call
Lisa Karlin Curtis discusses how to build a compassionate on-call rota, and how that can help build sustainable and high performing teams.
Creating inclusive career ladders
Sally Lait will cover some common pitfalls, and will go through a practical set of prompts to help you make sure your career ladder can work well for everyone.
Making the move to manager: Common pitfalls for new engineering leaders
Jacqueline Pan and Marlena Lui focus on challenges involved with people leadership: - How to rebrand yourself as a new engineering leader - How to build trust with a new team without prior experience or credibility - How to delegate effectively - How to balance proactive leadership without micromanaging.
Building for the underserved, solving for all
Serah Njambi Kiburu will remind us about the levels and weight of responsibility we carry as builders and leads in tech, zero in on the need for prioritising people-centric approaches in the design and development decisions we make everyday and implore us to move beyond only employing best practices in our work.
Code is poetry
Niranjan Uma Shankar talks about how to write good readable code, ticket descriptions, bug patches, et al, in PHP and Javascript.
Driving positive change through performance improvement plans
Cristina Yenyxe Gonzalez Garcia describes an approach to PIPs in which the manager helps to set the employee up for success.
Where we’re going wrong with developer productivity
Cat Hicks proposes a different, science-backed approach to productivity using research evidence from a study with 1200+ developers: developer thriving.
The awful agony of the app store: When software delivery goes wrong
Clare Sudbery shares a dramatic tale of ups and downs, tears and triumph, and the very sharp end of the sunk cost fallacy. Via the rollercoaster ride of a failed iOS app, Clare uses the experience to highlight several key components that contribute to successful software development… and offer understanding to those facing obstacles beyond their control.
"I'm happy where I am" - Supporting team members that aren't seeking progression
Ryan MacGillivray talks about how realistically not everyone can or wants to be a Lead Engineer/Engineering Manager/Staff Engineer and nor should we be pushing people into roles they either have no interest in or have done before and not enjoyed.
Why onboarding to a company's legacy codebase sucks, and how to make it work for your team
Shanea Leven discusses the history and context of the problems that plague codebase onboarding. And with problems come solutions such as tips and tools that make it easier for engineers to onboard a legacy codebase.
How to drive pace in your team 🏃🏽♀️
Alicia Collymore delivers actionable advice that'll help you to improve your teams' delivery and pace without a data-first approach.
Orchestrating thousands of bots from the cloud
James Donkin talks about how we now provide an end-to-end platform for smart online grocery to some of the world’s largest grocery retailers. At the heart of our model are automated warehouses which are the most advanced of their kind. Thousands of bots collaborate seamlessly on 3D grids to fulfil customer orders.
How we support making architectural decisions
Olena Sovyn takes a deep dive from the principles based on which this group operates to the specific how-to that made its work beneficial for the company and shares what we've learned from this whole experience so far.
Building bridges: The art of crafting seamless partnerships between engineering, product, and design
James Stanier, Winter Wei, and Janet Balneaves join us for a panel discussion on the art of crafting seamless partnerships between engineering, product, and design.
Exit plans and how to talk about them
David Kiger covers why the answer to that question is important, how to set up the culture to enable the conversation, how to actually have the conversations once the foundation is laid, and the benefits that both employees and the company get out of it.
Platform engineering is all about product
Gal Bashan wants to make sure you leave this talk with an understanding of platform engineering and how it relates to DevOps; what makes an IDP and a platform team successful; and finally, practices you can use to build a successful platform, and pitfalls to avoid.
Engineering a more equitable hiring process
Jason Wodicka lays out some of the places where bias enters our hiring process, and shares concrete actions you can take to make your own hiring more efficient, equitable, and effective.
The 9.1 magnitude meltdown at Fukushima
Nick Means takes us to mid-afternoon on Friday, March 11, 2011 when the ground in Tōhoku began to shake. To the operators at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it seemed like the shaking would never stop. The way their team operated during that fateful week has a lot to teach us about helping our own teams be at their best, both in crisis and out.