Mobile app development has always required learning each platform’s programming language and peculiarities. For developers coming from the web, where you write once and run anywhere, this is tough.
Computer security talks are too often filled with theoretical computer scientists telling us about how the end is nigh. Don’t get me wrong, I love knowing the nitty details of cryptographic algorithms, but a whole lot of web developers don’t.
Maintaining different software environments to run multiple web projects is a time-consuming task. Have you ever returned to an old project, only to find that you have to reinstall older versions of software before even starting any work?
A very brief introduction to Rust and why it should be on your radar. Rust is a “systems” programming language that is designed to be a modern replacement for C++. It has an impressive out-of-the box tool chain, an interesting approach to safe concurrency and easy integration with C and other languages. It’s certainly a powerful tool to have at your disposal.
A talk about Go showing mistakes to be avoided when coming from other languages, discussion about strengths, and perceived shortcomings like dependency management.
We all want to stay ahead of the curve – after all, that’s what you go to a conference for. But have you ever considered how being ahead of the curve might be dangerous?
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.
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.
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.