Latest videos
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Leading through scarcity: Building capacity in the team you have
Discover strategies to lead effectively through scarcity. Learn how to build capacity within existing teams, maximizing performance amid constraints and fostering sustainable growth.
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Making do: Scaling expertise on teams you can’t grow
Explore how flexible team models enable small teams to handle high-stakes challenges, maintain resilience, and sustain morale during periods of organizational change.
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Managing expectations: Lessons from making large-scale platform changes
Discover how Datadog managed the technical and human challenges of migrating 2000+ engineers to Kubernetes, emphasizing effective communication and understanding human behavior during change.
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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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Mobile development 10 years on: native vs. cross-platform
We’re 10 years into Android and iOS development and there are more ways to build an app than ever before.
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Building a culture of security for your infrastructure teams
Security is an increasingly important aspect of software development, especially for services that process and store sensitive data.
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Shor’s algorithm and how to avoid oncoming catastrophes
Quantum computers are real and are starting to be used for some interesting applications. As well as many applications in finance, organic chemistry and complex dynamical systems there is an ugly elephant in the room. That elephant is Shor’s algorithm.
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Navigating front-end architecture like a Neopian
Over the past few years, I’ve gained expertise in front-end web architecture. I’ve done this work at Indiegogo, Headspace, for my open source mental health project if-me.org, and in my current role at Mailchimp.
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How synergy between product and engineering can solve the problem of software estimation
We’ve probably all been asked to come up with a set of software estimates for a project with very little detail, very little time to do it and plenty of quizzical looks when it’s given.
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Creating positive cultures distributed engineering teams through communication
When your team is wholly distributed it can be tough to develop a team spirit, strong culture and shared approach. This talk will highlight the difficulties we’ve seen and suggest tips and tricks that we have experimented with to improve this.
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Effectively leading your engineering team through rapid growth
Team leadership and technical leadership come with variety of challenges and require various skills. One of them is an insightful future outlook and being ready for what’s yet to come.
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Travel through time and break free from rigid working cultures
How does time impact on your working day? Would you like to hack time and live outside the clock? The answer is likely to be yes.
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How to create a career ladder for your software engineering teams
When hiring, have you noticed the shift in candidates asking less about your tech, and more about how they can progress in your business?
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How to scale yourself at the speed of Slack
Your organization is going through an unprecedented period of growth. How do you keep up?
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How to lead your engineering team through a period of change
An effective framework for leading your engineering team through change.
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Effective career conversations with your engineers
Career conversations are a necessary part of your direct report’s growth, but without care, these meetings can lack purpose, meaning, and impact.
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Engineering teams work better remote-first
Your team has communication problems. You just can’t see them because you all sit in the same room.
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Designing software to maximize developer productivity
Having worked extensively in the Shopify codebase, one of the largest rails apps in existence, I have experienced firsthand some of the downsides of working in monolithic codebases.
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Principles for managing product quality
Keeping an application stable starts off being simple since your codebase is small, there are few points of failure, and you can easily reason about the implications of code changes.
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Breaking down our understanding of system resilience
How confident are you in your prod servers staying up without your help?
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Optimizing the ‘glue work’ in your team
Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings.
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Being right is only half the battle: how to optimize your interpersonal connections
True or False. Zero or One. Computers are viciously black and white in their logic. Humans, on the other hand, are messy — Emotional, forgetful, biased and opinionated.
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Managing the burnout burndown
As engineering managers, we’re used to managing the Sprint Burndown chart. Even in non-agile projects, the idea still applies. Over time, the amount of work that remains to be done should go down, and good engineering managers carefully guide the team towards this goal.
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The future of cross-platform is native
The quest for the perfect cross-platform solution has been like the quest for the Holy Grail. It’s been going on a long time, there are a myriad of perceived benefits, and every time someone claims to have found it, it’s never the right one.
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Documenting and communicating architectural decisions
As technologists and technology leaders, we live in an interesting and chaotic time. The days of ivory-tower enterprise architects doling out treatises on approved technologies are over, instead, we have agile, two-pizza teams building using emerging architecture techniques and the latest languages.
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Using observability to detangle and understand production
When using tens or hundreds of microservices to provide an application’s critical functionality, diagnosing what interaction between components is causing an outage can be challenging.