Latest
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Breaking down the WordPress drama
A dispute has riven the WordPress community in half, how does this impact developers?
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Build an AI roadmap that actually delivers value
There are lots of things to consider before you dive into the world of AI. If you want to do it correctly, consider these core elements.
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How to craft a realistic technology roadmap
Technology roadmaps are difficult things to navigate. Having a realistic approach can save you a lot of time and energy.
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Content sponsored by ChainguardDoes ‘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).
Editor’s picks
November 4 & 5, 2025
The leadership conference for tech leads and engineering leaders.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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Executing and evaluating a technical strategy at scale
Driving a technical strategy across multiple teams
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How software engineering teams purchase solutions
From startups to enterprises, how do different tech companies purchase solutions?
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Learnings from ‘Carving a modern engineering org out of an enterprise’
Carving a modern engineering org out of an enterprise
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When planning long-term, favor accuracy over precision
Grounding your plans in the value of the work
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A terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day at Slack
What can we learn from outages when they happen?
Top Technical Direction videos
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.