Latest videos
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Making better build vs buy decisions
Master a decision-making framework for build-vs-buy choices in engineering, with real-world examples, collaboration strategies, and tips for avoiding integration pitfalls.
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Training machines to see scenic beauty
Join me as we uncover the methodology behind this research and discuss how we plan to use it to help people connect with beauty around them, wherever they are in the world.
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Uncover the invisible ceiling
This talk will put the spotlight on one of those biases which is the assumption that software engineering around making mobile apps is less complicated or has a smaller scale in comparison to backend or infra engineering.
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Start with an exit in mind: How to be effective by being selfish as a staff engineer
Staff engineers often get overwhelmed by long-term ownership of critical projects. This talk explores how to avoid burnout by starting every project with an exit strategy—whether transferring ownership, pausing or bootstrapping a team.
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Explosive overflow: Lessons from rocket science
Thirty-nine seconds after launch, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded—caused by software design errors. In this talk, Mark analyzes these historical flaws to explore key lessons in resilience and product security. We’ll discuss testing, validation, legacy code, design assumptions, and the challenge of proving when things don’t go wrong.
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Navigators: Connecting execs with StaffPlus engineers to shape strategy
As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain alignment among individual contributors (ICs), managers, and executives.
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Finding opportunities and maximizing Impact: A staff engineer’s framework
This talk introduces the Listen-Act-Share framework, guiding you to find, evaluate, and scale high-impact projects. Using real examples, like transforming Datadog’s analytics infrastructure, you’ll learn to spot valuable opportunities, invest your time wisely, and iterate after validation. Discover what sets great opportunities apart and how to apply this framework for maximum impact.
Highlights from our conferences
Measure for Change
Picking metrics is one thing. But the harder decisions lie in what to do with them afterward.
View all videos from LeadDev London
Drive product gaps as an engineering leader
Discover practical strategies for engineering leaders to influence product development effectively, even in the absence of strong product management and a clear company vision.
view all videos from LeadDev NEW YORK
Growth in a downturn
In this talk, Smruti Patel asks, if hyper-growth is marked by spending more to make more, what does building for enduring growth look like?
view all videos from LeadDev berlin
Idea to Innovation
Join me as we embark on a journey to dissect the anatomy of innovation, uncover strategies to unlock the full potential of ideas, and transform them into impactful realities. Let’s build a strong culture of innovation, and make sure that it is not just a buzzword but a tangible outcome.
view all videos from staffplus london
Slack enterprise key management: Senior to staff lessons
Explore the key lessons and skills Audrei gained during their first Staff+ project, Slack Enterprise Key Management. This talk offers insights for anyone growing in their Staff+ career.
view all videos from staffplus NEW YORK
All videos
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Growing an engineering organization with effective DevOps
Most of us hope that our engineering organizations will grow and scale with the success of our businesses, but that growth is often easier said than done.
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Making developers on support work for everyone
Oftentimes, the choice for a smaller startup is between hiring no one for technical support and just letting the developers/founders field all questions or hiring a support person and expecting them to handle it all (while that poor support person sits alone, feeling dreadfully concerned about “bothering the developers”).
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Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?
On March 28, 1979, at exactly 4 o’clock in the morning, control rods slammed into the reactor core of Three Mile Island Unit #2, halting the nuclear reaction because of a fault in the reactor cooling system.
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Dealing with deprecated codebases
No one tells developers and project managers to throw things away. We assume that because it’s cheap to keep it around, the emotional comfort is worth the tradeoff.
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Leadership Through the Underground Railroad
Software development has regularly borrowed processes and terminology from outside technology to improve how code gets to customers.
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Intro to test-driven development
Does your team deal with bugs that could have been caught earlier in the development cycle?
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How 1:1s can affect your engineering team’s culture
1:1s, or intentional time set aside for managers and their direct reports, are magical: they’re where you learn what “sparks joy” for your staffer and where they’re secretly flagging.
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5 Ways You Can Hire Engineers Better
For most companies, hiring is a cargo-culted, cut-and-pasted affair, run by people not trained to perform the task.
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Case studies in building microservices
Building complex software projects is an iterative process. We rarely get to spend months designing and writing a complete project plan before releasing something to our users, and no feature is ever truly finished.
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Building Tech for the Non-Technical
Everyone has blindspots. For developers it is often taking for granted certain technical skill sets.
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Being a customer-focused engineering leader
Most software engineers don’t realize that an outage is more than keeping the TTR low (yes, TTR is very important); it’s also about managing the expectations of your customers.
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Vault and Security as a Service
Over the past ten years, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in the architecture of service-oriented systems.
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Tackling Big, Impossible Projects
Big, Impossible projects are exciting, transformative, and begin with an overwhelming number of unanswered questions.
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Reclaiming the Spirit of Agile
Do you follow Agile processes like Scrum, Kanban or XP… and yet struggling to deliver on time, under budget and without last-minute heroics? Why aren’t these supposedly best practices working for you?
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Transitioning to a lead dev
The transition from a developer to a Lead Developer can be a rocky one. Yesterday, you were working as a developer and today, suddenly, you find yourself in the role of the Lead Developer.
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Building Engineering Teams Under Pressure
Why do some teams ship features rapidly, support each other, and effectively communicate while others struggle?
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Do the Most Good
Mina shares reflections from the campaign trail and explores strategies to use your time and skills to affect social change.
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Eiffel’s tower
When Gustave Eiffel built his namesake tower, it was nearly twice as tall as the tallest structure on Earth.
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Storytelling patterns for engineering leaders
In most forms of entertainment, it all comes down to the story.
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Navigating engineering team friction
Friction is a common, and necessary, part of team growth—but when left unchecked, team friction is unhealthy for you, your coworkers, your company, and ultimately your end users.
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Is Kotlin right for you?
Kotlin sure has been receiving a lot of buzz lately, is there something to it?
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Crafting fun and productive Sprint retrospectives
What do Stairway to Heaven, air balloons, and the 3 Little Pigs have in common? They’re all fun formats for sprint retrospectives!
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Bootstrapping inclusion in engineering organisations
Diversity and Inclusion are hot topics right now. But, year after year, our industry fails to move the numbers significantly. It seems everyone is talking about it, but how do you actually bring about change?
