New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

Technical direction

Technical direction

Making better technical and architectural decisions

  • In partnership with Harness

    Escaping your DIY Feature Flags

    Feature flags, how difficult can it be? But now it’s day two, and suddenly you’re in the feature flag business.

How to build an effective technical strategy

Building a tech strategy requires a lot of moving parts. Learn about what routes to take and whether decisions should be top-down.

On our Technical Direction playlist

Modernizing legacy systems: A technical strategy for evolving monoliths into modern architectures at HelloFresh

Gain insights into transforming legacy systems into scalable architectures, with practical strategies for balancing stability, managing technical debt, and enabling growth opportunities at HelloFresh.

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.

In partnership with Apollo

How to implement platform engineering at scale

In this webinar, we’ll hear from enterprise engineering leaders who’ve overcome cultural barriers and team silos, and successfully adopted platform engineering practices in their orgs.

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.

The festival of engineering leadership

London • June 16 & 17, 2025

More about Technical Direction

Top Technical Direction videos

  • Vic Vijayakumar

    From zero to “Brands that Matter” – improving scientific discovery during a pandemic

    Vic Vijayakumar tells the story of building a world-class platform starting from zero, and how technical decision-making isn’t always glamorous.

  • David Fowler

    Engineering without borders

    Building a large scale project is never easy, but it becomes even more challenging when you’re working with a brand new team scattered across different time zones. Throw in a global pandemic, and you have a recipe for potential disaster.

  • Bruce Wang

    Realizing a technical strategy during turbulent times

    In this talk, Bruce shares the lessons he learned from his multi-year journey to define a technical strategy, from the excitement of a new job and team, to facing the harsh realities, exploding complexities and now embarking on the next phase of the strategy.

  • Polina Giralt

    Do the hard stuff

    Polina Giralt talks about how some of the most impactful technical work is about unwinding a humungous mess. This talk is about lessons learned over my career about executing challenging projects. The types of projects with politics, drama, tech debt, or past failed attempts. How do we know if the project is worth doing? Why has it failed before? Who’s blocking it? How do we know when to cut our losses and pause or cancel the project?

  • Jason Blanchard

    Everything is a migration: Putting evolutionary architecture into practice

    Jason Blanchard explores the idea that we can model and de-risk change by thinking of everything as a migration from a current state to a desired state and what that means for our architecture and teams

  • Hila Fish

    Terraform practices to enable infrastructure scaling

    Hila Fish covers useful best practices, pitfalls to avoid and major obstacles to anticipate so that you can scale them across many teams, avoid refactoring, and get a flying start now — AND optimize for the future.

  • 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.

  • Matthias Grüter

    The (updated) story of why we migrate to gRPC and how we go about it

    Matthias Grüter addresses technical discussions of advanced gRPC concepts such as interceptors, load balancing, and traffic management and how they are essential in large distributed systems.