
Latest
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How Jit overcame developer resistance to shift to Cursor
Israeli startup Jit overcame engineer pushback and boosted productivity by transitioning from JetBrains to the AI-powered coding assistant Cursor.
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Is AI-assisted coding an incident magnet?
Now that AI-assisted code is making its way into systems, should we be worried about how it affects SRE?
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AI, platform engineering, or DX? How to choose where to invest
With so many opportunities on offer in the market right now, how can leaders make sure they’re investing in the right thing?
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In partnership with Harness
How better developer experience drives results
Why the path to faster releases and innovation starts with putting developers first.
Editor’s picks

London • June 16 & 17, 2025
Speakers Gergely Orosz, Camille Fournier
and Lara Hogan confirmed
Essential reading

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.

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.

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.

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
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12 things to consider when assessing open source software
Open source has been gathering more and more traction. But consider some of the risks before taking a leap.
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Leading open-source teams in large organizations
You can nurture and grow a highly impactful open-source project in your organization by systematically building an excellent team, technology, and product.
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Whatever happened to Big Data?
In the world of AI, cloud services, and automation, the tools and expertise engineering managers need to mine large-scale data sets are changing, fast.
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What you need to know about Biden’s AI executive order
US President Joe Biden has announced a sweeping executive order covering artificial intelligence. Here’s everything you need to know about how the US government is looking to regulate the technology.
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How OpenAI fought off security threats and GPU shortages to scale ChatGPT
The rapid rise of ChatGPT exposed OpenAI to a myriad of scaling issues and security threats, leading to some unique mitigation approaches.
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Balancing build vs buy decisions in a post-boom world
The question of whether to build software in-house or rely on third-party vendors is more fraught than ever, as budgets come under scrutiny and internal teams get stretched after waves of layoffs.
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Building a cloud architecture that can scale to any challenge
By building a cloud architecture that could meet the complex needs of international expansion, Nubank has established a more robust and flexible cloud infrastructure.
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OpenAI explains how they scaled ChatGPT
Ahead of his talk at LeadDev West Coast in October, OpenAI’s Evan Morikawa goes behind-the-scenes on the challenges they faced scaling ChatGPT, the constant need to reset as a leader, and how GPUs don’t in fact grow on trees.
Top Technical Direction videos
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Simplify streaming application development: A declarative approach at Airbnb
This talk discusses the growing importance of streaming applications in today’s tech landscape and the engineering challenges involved, such as handling multiple data sources and complex transformations.
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The (big) picture of debt
What is the true cost of a choice to e.g. share a database, and what does it take to change it? When is the right time to tackle something like this, and how can we tell? Tali shares experiences with these questions that will set you up for success with your own enormous debt payment.
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When to know you’ve outgrown your monolith and what to do about it
This talk will dive into the most ambitious tech debt paydown project that was ever undertaken at Stripe.
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Reducing infrastructure cost during development and in production
Sally shares lessons learned from her experience at different companies to reduce costs from the product development stage to running a service in production.
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Building products is a team sport: Cultivating effective engineering-product partnerships
With new AI developments happening almost every day, team roadmaps evolve fast to adapt to the product and business needs; this requires a close partnership between engineering and product leaders.
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In partnership with Harness
Does your org need platform engineering?
The panel digs into what the approach looks like in practice, and ask whether platform engineering really holds the key to unlocking happy and productive teams. You will leave this session with a better understanding of what platform engineering really is, how it relates to developer happiness, and whether it’s the right route to go down for your org.
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In partnership with Chronosphere
Making cloud native work for your org
How can enterprises make the leap to cloud native? What do they need to know?