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

  • Universal Apps: Architecture for the Modern Web

    “In today’s web environment, performance and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are important to successful apps. Universal architecture provides a hybrid approach to building web apps that combines server-side rendered applications and Single-Page Applications (SPA). This architectural approach improves the user experience and makes it easier for your site to serve content to search and social bots.

    This talk will explain the methodology and benefits of the universal approach. It will explore some of the tradeoffs and challenges that come with universal architecture. Finally, we will cover the various implementation options available today. At the end of this talk, you’ll be able to evaluate if universal architecture is a good choice for your projects.”

  • Traps on the Path to Microservices

    After Netflix helped popularize microservices, you probably heard the architectural pattern labelled a boon. However, if your team is tasked with implementing the pattern it is too easy to find yourself in a place where you’ve significantly increased your architectural complexity without deriving any of the benefits that microservices purport to bring, especially if implemented without proper organizational maturity or careful foresight and follow-through.

    ThoughtWorks has led many teams and organizations along the path from monoliths to microservices and this presentation covers three of the major traps that we’ve experienced (as well as how to avoid them). The traps covered are, underestimating the cost of a microservice, overcentralization, and neglecting the monolith

  • Traps on the Path to Microservices

    After Netflix helped popularize microservices, you probably heard the architectural pattern labelled a boon. However, if your team is tasked with implementing the pattern it is too easy to find yourself in a place where you’ve significantly increased your architectural complexity without deriving any of the benefits that microservices purport to bring, especially if implemented without proper organizational maturity or careful foresight and follow-through.

    ThoughtWorks has led many teams and organizations along the path from monoliths to microservices and this presentation covers three of the major traps that we’ve experienced (as well as how to avoid them). The traps covered are, underestimating the cost of a microservice, overcentralization, and neglecting the monolith

  • Avoiding “shiny object” syndrome when building software

    Technology is fast moving, and devops tools pop up like wildfire. Teams are desperate to solve their problems & often make implementation decisions based on word of mouth, “kick the tires” syndrome or superficial evaluations.

  • Avoiding the pitfalls of rebuilding software

    If you think back to the work you were doing last year, it probably feels miles away – and that’s great! As engineers, we’re continually building and creating great new stuff – it’s what we do.

  • An intro to Nativescript

    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.

  • Practical web security

    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.