StaffPlus London video hub
All the videos from our London events
StaffPlus London 2024 videos
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Training machines to see scenic beauty
Join me as we uncover the methodology behind this research and discuss how we plan to use it to help people connect with beauty around them, wherever they are in the world.
That’s a wrap for LeadDev Berlin 2024!
Watch all of the talk videos from an incredible two days with a digital pass.
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Uncover the invisible ceiling
This talk will put the spotlight on one of those biases which is the assumption that software engineering around making mobile apps is less complicated or has a smaller scale in comparison to backend or infra engineering.
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Chromosomes in the Cloud: Building a scalable genomic matching algorithm
In this case study, I will walk you through the technical journey of building Atlas – the first open-source, cloud-hosted, genetic matching algorithm – comparing the genetics of patients and donors, and returning a list of donors who could be a match for transplantation.
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Effective delegation without authority
In my talk, I will explore this common challenge and share some of the tips I find useful in my day-to-day to help influence and inspire fellow engineers to get stuff done together.
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IPv6 – did we just win
Look, ok, I’m burnt out too. After years of pushing IPv6, we are where we are. But – where is that?
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Idea to Innovation
Join me as we embark on a journey to dissect the anatomy of innovation, uncover strategies to unlock the full potential of ideas, and transform them into impactful realities. Let’s build a strong culture of innovation, and make sure that it is not just a buzzword but a tangible outcome.
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Scaling yourself by helping your colleagues grow
In this talk, I will share different techniques that help you grow your colleagues to a level where they can do a part of your job. I will explain the difference between delegating, mentoring, and teaching, and demonstrate with examples how little effort it takes to turn your everyday tasks into teaching moments, improving your understanding of your own skills in the process.
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Mastering Visual Communication for Software Development
In this session, learn from a hands-on solution architect – and thought leader in communication design and documentation – how to tailor your visuals to your audience, choose the most appropriate standards (or not) and level of detail, and apply patterns to improve accessibility for all audiences.
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Scaling leadership: Insights from the first Staff Technical Program Manager in the room
This talk offers the perspective of a Staff Technical Program manager as the first one hired in a company, deconstructing the evolutionary journey that paved the way for hiring more of them.
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Tips on scaling your leadership outside of your comfort zone
In this talk Michael will talk through lessons and tips he’s learnt when working on a project that pushed him outside of his comfort zone, and how you can effectively utilise the skills and knowledge of those around you to build alignment when leading across a broad set of teams who are often using very different technologies.
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Debug Like a Scientist
This talk will enhance your programming toolbox for the hardest bugs. Not only this – but you’ll see how to scale effective debugging to the entire team. Last but not least – you’ll leave with a set of habits to share with your fellow engineers to help them step up their debugging game.
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Tactical tech: Short-term solutions for long-term strategy
Waterloo International station was opened in 1994 serving Eurostar trains through the channel tunnel to France. The station cost £130 million to build and won the EU prize for contemporary architecture but closed just 13 years later in 2007.
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Fitness Functions: Creating Consistency across Hundreds of Services
In this talk, I will show the different ways we employ fitness functions at Jimdo to keep track of the state of our over 200 services.
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Is Staff Engineering valuable at a small company?
I’ll save you from Betteridge’s law of headlines right off the bat, my answer is “It Depends”.
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Have AI Got News for You
This talk ventures beyond the surface to offer you a compelling deep dive into the nuances of working with large language models (LLMs).
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Modeling complex systems
This talk will look at some examples of these dashboards that represent the scopes of the system. Highlight how navigating between related scopes, or components, can be more powerful than standard documentation. Finally, will end with some discussion on challenges particular to multi-tenant systems.
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Navigating complex projects: Finding the right mode of operation
In this talk, I share my journey of deciding on an effective mode of operation when engaging with complex projects.
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Sunsetting legacy: Navigating the Shop merchant eligibility data pipeline migration
In this talk, I’ll share the strategies used to disassemble our legacy data pipelines responsible for managing merchant eligibility on the Shop apps. Join me on a journey through our successes, challenges, and invaluable learnings in the meticulous orchestration of terminating our legacy data pipelines.
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Letting the Best Ideas Win
In my talk I will explain that this is generally a pretty bad idea; it won’t surface the best ideas and it doesn’t let more junior engineers develop their skills. Instead, I introduce some steps you can take to make sure that the idea adopted to solve a problem is the best idea available, even if you aren’t the one who came up with it. Perhaps counter-intuitively I will show how this increases your influence in your organisation and sets everyone up for success.
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Doing “the most important thing” is a trap.
This talk is little about why you need to say No to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough.
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Filling the Void: Operating as a Staff Engineer in a Leaderless Scope
In this talk, we will detail our experiences as Staff Engineers functioning as Tech Leads, Glues and Facilitators in a leaderless role. We’ll discuss the real-world problems we faced, our solutions, and the lessons learned that allowed us to grow as leaders and as an organisation.
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Deming’s Wisdom for Staff+ Engineers: A Modern Take on Timeless Principles
In this talk, we’ll delve into how Staff+ Engineers can embody Deming’s timeless wisdom to enhance quality, productivity, and both employee and customer satisfaction within the modern engineering landscape.
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Architecting for scale: Revisiting fundamentals for sustainable growth
In this talk, Viktor challenges this approach by advocating for adaptability and a return to basics in system design.
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Influencing Through Getting Your Carrots In a Row
In this talk, I will go through some of the common incentives and motivators as well as real examples that I’ve encountered.
That’s a wrap Berlin!
Catch-up on all the Lead Berlin 2024 talks with a digital pass.
Videos from previous years of StaffPlus London
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How not to lose friends and alienate yourself: Learnings from a journey to Staff Engineer
Waheed El Miladi reflects on his journey to Staff Engineer and discusses some of the personal pitfalls and unexpected challenges he encountered while moving through roles and the personal skills and strategies I’ve developed to address them.
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Running large scale migrations continuously
Suhail Patel goes over strategies and principles to make large scale migrations less daunting, both from a technical and organisational point of view.
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Unmasking Imposters by debugging doubts
Bobby D takes inspiration from the popular game “Among Us” to address the challenges engineers face in understanding their value and the importance of developing team awareness to support one another, and shares practical strategies for embracing individual strengths, fostering team collaboration, and building bridges through empathy and inclusivity.
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Working on software that is older than you
Sally Wahba shares her views on working on an older codebase. She will share her experience watching the codebase evolve from incorporating acquired startups, to consolidating code branches. She will share pain points that she found to be repeated after joining a younger company.
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Filling the jar of impact and trust as a Principal Engineer
Nayana Shetty shares some tips and tricks to identify rocks, pebbles and sand you can fill your jar with, ways they enable you to create impact and build trust across the organization and some common challenges you will face when you prioritize your work using this technique and ways to overcome those.
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Cloud infrastructure architecture for Nubank’s global expansion
Lais Oliveira discusses Nubank, one of the world’s largest digital financial services platforms, serving over 70 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Our products and systems weren’t built to be multi-country. Rapid growth and scaling challenges drove rethinking cloud infrastructure and building a technical strategy.
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Delivering a digital first BBC – an architects perspective
Hannes Ricklefs shares why realising big visions and missions is an exciting yet daunting task. Having worked at the intersection between Product, Delivery, Architecture and Engineering, this talk will explore what is key to continuously evolve the stack, the org, and ways of working.
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Homebrew’s great migration: Moving to GitHub packages with zero downtime
Mike McQuaid discusses the following: the key factors we evaluated to decide between the options available, how compromises were made within and between Homebrew and GitHub (my employer), what techniques we used to implement the migration by the hard deadline with zero downtime, and how to use “soft power” to affect change in your organisation without “hard power” to decide what any individual works on.
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The journey of a byline
Alice Bartlett explores the journey our content takes through the many, many applications in our microservices architecture.
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How to progress as an engineer while doing what you love
Blanca Rojo Martin shares how a large organisation like UBS has created a three-level strategy for Engineers technical career progression.
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Putting down line management; returning to an individual contributor role
Caroline Handley will help you crystallise what options there are. It will clarify what actions can be taken to find out more. Whether you decide to ‘put down line management’ or not, you can make that decision in a more informed way and be more confident in your choices.
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The dark side of standardization
Samantha Schaevitz wants you to leave this talk better equipped to decide whether embarking on a standardization project is right for your stack or organization, and how to do it in a way that avoids common pitfalls along the way.
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Maximizing your impact when context-switching
Maude Lemaire spent the last few years trialing a few different ways to sustainably maximize this time by balancing productivity with a bit of mindfulness. Come learn from her (many) mistakes, and hopefully we can all feel a bit less like a Dalí painting.
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Engineering transparency
In this talk, I explain why it’s valuable to show our work as Staff engineers. I offer concrete ways to behave transparently and give examples of how each has helped me and my colleagues.
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Maps to medicines: One map to an atlas
Shweta Bhandare discusses how Recursion scientists perform CRISPR-Cas9 mediated knockout to understand the activity level of every gene in a specific disease model, which allows new discoveries to be made. These maps are specific to a cell-type.
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Defining a technical vision
Eamon Scullion discusses the role of a technical vision in creating a roadmap for your organisation’s technology evolution. We will cover how to assess your current technology architecture, defining your target state and identify next best steps for getting closer to your goal.
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The dark side of lessons learned
Dianing Yudono explains how you can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your software development processes by unlocking the power of lessons learned and making them accessible to everyone. Let’s elevate our collective wisdom and drive success together!
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Defining expectations of Staff Engineers
This presentation is mainly targeted for Staff Engineers who work on defining their own roles and responsibilities. Writing a Staff Engineer Guide, and agreeing on the expectations between the engineering and the management, is a great way to learn about your organization.
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Scaling your influence when you can only be in one place at once
Michael Tweed will cover a case study of the problem “how do we ensure all our teams are meeting code quality standards”, looking at approaches that are likely to (and have!) failed, vs. those which are much more likely to lead to results and long-lasting buy-in.
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Setting goals as a staff+ engineer
Sabrina Leandro shares how to define your development journey as a staff+ engineer, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and how to you define your backlog of work. You’ll also learn how to track your progress so you can keep growing as an engineering leader in the individual contributor track.
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Working sideways
Aish Raj Dahal touches upon this slightly less talked about aspect of the job as a technical IC leader, which is creating peer relationships and working with other Staff engineers in shaping an organization’s technical roadmap.
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Scaling your influence through documentation
James Ford reflects on his two year journey as a Staff Engineer and how a mix of documentation and working groups has been a surprisingly effective strategy for influencing the opinions of the individual engineers as well as the non-technical stakeholders.
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Building a shared vision: Creating alignment across autonomous teams
Maria Neumayer’s talk will explore how to overcome these challenges, get buy-in from engineers to promote cross-team collaboration and alignment, all while establishing and refining shared standards and working towards a shared vision.
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Building a diverse and inclusive guild from the ground up
Liem Pham’s story, a France-born developer with Asian heritage, finding his space in the London tech scene. You will hear about his journey, from being the first frontend engineer at Accurx, to building a diverse and inclusive guild of 20+ members in two years.
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Librarian’s guide to documentation
Kaitlyn Tierney wants you to learn how to leverage librarian skills to create and maintain internal documentation that works for you. Improve technical decision making by fostering a culture of documentation excellence and inspiring clear, effective written communication with a few simple practices.