Berlin

November 4 & 5, 2024

New York

September 4 & 5, 2024

London

June 16 & 17, 2025

Technical Direction

Making better technical and architectural decisions

  • Content sponsored by Chainguard

    Does ‘shifting security left’ really work?

    “Shifting security left” is a term in modern DevOps that refers to the practice of integrating security measures earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

On our Technical Direction playlist

Lutz Hühnken

Managing architecture

Lutz Hühnken talks about the importance of a strategic approach to software architecture, that prevents teams from becoming architecture firefighters, who spent an excessive amount of energy applying short-term fixes to architectural problems.

Jonathan Maltz

Technical Vision vs. Technical Strategy: The difference and why it matters

Jonathan Maltz digs into the nuts and bolts of setting a successful technical strategy. Startin by talking about the difference between technical vision and technical strategy.

Content sponsored by CoderPad

Writing your technical strategy

Bruce Wang talks about Writing your technical strategy (psst, it doesn’t have to feel like a Squid Game) at LeadDev Together in February 2022.

Jon Thornton

Good technical debt

Jon Thornton discusses how this framework was used to rapidly build and ship Squarespace’s Email Campaigns product in less than 15 months. Along the way, you’ll get several practical guidelines for how tech debt can supercharge your technical investments.

Creating, defining, and refining an effective tech strategy

Having a defined tech strategy creates alignment and keeps everyone on the same page. So how can you ensure yours is most effective? Panelists Anna Shipman, Randy Shoup, Papanii Nene Okai, Nimisha Asthagiri and Anand Mariappan share their tips.

November 4 & 5, 2025

The leadership conference for tech leads and engineering leaders.

More about Technical Direction

Top Technical Direction videos

  • Constantinos Svendinoglou

    Strategies for cloud migration

    Constantinos Svendinoglou talks about the Data Group at Squarespace which has been on a transformational journey to migrate our systems to the cloud. At the beginning of 2022, we were running entirely on our own hardware; but by the end of 2023 we expect to be 100% cloud native. This talk will cover the strategy, tactics and execution that went into effect to make the migration to being cloud native over possible. 

  • Maude Lemaire

    Building koi pond: simulating millions of slack clients

    Join Maude Lemaire for a roller coaster ride of a story and a thrilling live demo of what Slack’s load testing systems can do!

  • Erica Stanley LeadingEng San Francisco

    Technical Strategy as a Superpower

    ​​​​​​​This talk will give you an understanding of what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ strategy, how to craft one, how to articulate and communicate it, and how to adapt it as times change.

  • Josh Goldberg Berlin 2022

    Lessons learned from refactors and rearchitectures

    This talk will walk you through the best -and worst- practices Josh has seen over the years from both successful and unsuccessful efforts in development velocity.

  • Michele Riva Berlin 2022

    Explaining distributed systems like I’m five

    In this talk, Michele will look at many easy examples of how a distributed architecture could virtually scale infinitely, always explaining this… like he is five!

  • George Hantzaras Berlin 2022

    Do you really need a platform team?

    In this talk, George discusses the right time to build a platform team to then explore a team’s organisational structure to be able to support this team and what type of engineers you will need to do this.

  • Peter Zaitsev Berlin 2022

    The database trends that are transforming your database infrastructure forever

    Let’s talk about the trends in open source software and tell you what you need to know about how to manage the new multi-verse of data.

  • Boyan Angelov Berlin 2022

    Decision making in black box scenarios

    In this talk, Boyan will go through common black box scenarios and provide advice on how to deal with them.